LATIN AND THE ROMAN CHARACTER.

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With the Roman empire its language also declined, marking from year to year the increasing degeneration. But even after the mistress of the world had been dethroned, her language still survived and rose once more, in new forms, but animated by the same spirit. The Romance languages became, in their turn, eloquent witnesses of the spiritual continuance of Rome, long after her political death, and of the extent to which the lofty tendencies of ancient Rome have survived the dissolution of the empire, giving new life to new kingdoms which rose from her ruins, and inspiring them with all the wisdom Rome had acquired, and bequeathed to future ages in Law, State, and Church.

The Latin thus appears to the historian a glorious monument of that power of the mind which, manifested in language, has survived more than twenty centuries, by the side of the perishable power of material force. The Latin language has since not only kept the empire of old Rome, but added to it lands to conquer which she would have lacked even the knowledge of their existence. Not only Spain, Italy, France, half of Holland, and Switzerland, and Dacoromanic Wallachia, still owe allegiance to the fallen empire, but even beyond the ocean vast territories, wherever the French, the Spaniard, and the Portuguese have established empires and colonized islands.

Judging by such results, language becomes, to a certain extent, a standard by which to measure the intellectual power of races, and often marks out a nation for the accomplishment of great deeds. By its intimate connection with all branches of intellectual effort, it is read by the observant student as a promise of future eminence; for he views it as an evidence of the vigor of the national mind, and as a powerful instrument of progress.

By its aid the difference in the fate of various conquered races may be explained; we may see why the German and the Celtic came forth from their struggle with the Roman in such different ways the German remaining German, the Celtic idiom becoming Romance. Their language teaches us that the Teutonic race, when brought in contact with Rome, possessed already a strong national mind, and a young, vigorous tongue. They had, therefore, sufficient strength to appropriate and incorporate into their own idiom a great number of Latin words, without giving up any essential features of their Teutonic grammar and mode of expression. The Celtic nations, on the contrary, a weak and already declining race, yielded to the overpowering influence of Roman civilization, and adopted, not only the substantial, but also the formative elements of the Latin, thus giving rise to new languages, not Celtic idioms, but branches of Latin, modified and influenced by Celtic elements.

THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES.

CHAPTER XV.

THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES.

91

Ex Oriente Lux-All Great Creeds from the East-All Great Impulses from the East-All Great Languages from the East.

THE fate of a nation may, therefore, be read in the language it speaks. No stronger proof of this can be offered, than the simple and well-established fact that those languages are the most complete in words, the most perfect in structure and the richest in literature, which were spoken by the nations that have, successively, swayed the destinies of the earth. During four thousand years we find that all great nations were great also in their idioms; for the same mind which produced these rich and highly-developed languages, made itself, afterwards, felt in history. The standard-bearers in every great onward movement, the representatives of the progress made, step by step, in the advance of the human species, these races exhibit their superiority in no feature more clearly and distinctly than in the nature and the perfection of the idiom they used. Thus a history of these so-called Indo-European languages, one of which has always ruled the world, would be a history of the civilization of mankind. Other languages may have, even now, an equal or greater extent than any of these. The Malay family in its two great divisions, the Malay proper in the East

and the Polynesian in the West, is spoken all over that immense world of islands from Madagascar to the Easter islands, and from the Philippines to New Zealand, spreading thus, in spite of the intervening ocean, over two-thirds of the inhabited globe. But what is its importance as a language? Where its literature? Spoken by races uncounted, and in oceans scarcely known, it has contributed nothing to the development of the human race, and given no earnest of future power.

In the Indo-European languages, on the contrary, we have learned to recognize the highest group of idioms, subordinate in physical conformation to no other group, and spoken by the eight great historical races which constitute the Asiatic-European stock, who from the days of Iranic Asia to our own times have ever and alone possessed the highest treasures of art and intellectual pursuits. They appear upon the page of history as holding the power of the world in their hand; they alone can claim, of all mankind, conscious speculation and philosophy, and to them alone have the mysteries of the Beautiful been revealed in Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting. The same marked distinction is seen in their languages. All of these nations, even the most remote, speak original tongues, more intimately connected with each other than with any third tongue or family of tongues upon earth; and as their strong hand rules the destinies of the earth, so their languages have ever held the sceptre of the higher empire of the mind.

Indo-European they are called, with reference to their origin in Eastern India, from which they have gradually been borne on the waves of immigration through the whole of Europe, finally crossing the Atlantic, to let the same speech be heard

WESTERN MOVEMENT OF LANGUAGES.

93

from the Himalaya in the far East to the Rocky Mountains of America. It is but natural that the languages of men also should have followed the great westward march of the nations of the earth. Accompanying them as their proudest attribute, their most characteristic mark, they appear, ever since history and tradition speak of them, to have been the very heralds of the light and greatness that first dawned in the Orient, and gradually diffused itself over Western worlds. As the motto of the London Translation Society, "Ex Oriente Lux," expresses it, we find that all that is truly great and permanently useful to the human race has come to us from Asia, where the nations of Europe lay as infants on their great mother's bosom, and first practised their physical and intellectual powers. History tells us of no greater empires than those that were founded in the East. The mind of man knows no religion, his soul no faith of true inspiration, but such as Asia has first known. All the wisdom and the jealous secrecy of Egyptian priests could not secure their sacred faith against almost entire oblivion. Made in Egypt and for Egypt only, it has vanished even from memory sooner than her mysterious monuments and sand-covered tombs. What remains of the far-famed Grecian mythology? What of Ronie's ancient gods? They are a fable, a dream, or, at best, a beautiful myth. Druid-worship and Scandinavian mythology still attract the curious and please our fancy, but who believes in them now?

Permanent, on the other hand, as the foundations of the earth are the religions that rose in the mind of Eastern nations, that Asia bore and cherished in their youth. Millions still follow the strange but profound doctrines of ancient teachers in