the words just named have to do with shades of thought which are to a great extent unfamiliar to us; for which, at any rate, we have not found a name, have hardly felt that they needed one. But fine and subtle as in many instances are the thoughts which these words embody, there are deeper thoughts struggling in the bosom of a people, who have devised for themselves such words as the following: 'gemüth,' 'heimweh,' 'innigkeit,' 'sehnsucht, 'tiefsinn,' 'sittsamkeit,' ' verhängniss,' 'weltschmerz,' 'zucht'; all these being German words which, in a similar manner, partially or wholly fail to find their equivalents in French.

The petty spite which unhappily so often reigns between nations dwelling side by side with one another, as it embodies itself in many shapes, so it finds vent in the words which they borrow from one another, and the use to which they put them. Thus the French, borrowing 'hablár' from the Spaniards, with whom it means simply to speak, give it in 'hâbler' the sense of to brag; the Spaniards paying them off in exactly their own coin, for of 'parler,' which in like manner in French is but to speak, they make 'parlár,' which means to prate, to chat.*

But it is time to bring this lecture to an end. These illustrations, to which it would be easy to

*

[See Darmesteter, The Life of Words, Eng. ed. p. 100.]

add more, justify all that has been asserted of a moral element existing in words; so that they do not hold themselves neutral in that great conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, which is dividing the world; that they are not satisfied to be passionless vehicles, now of the truth, and now of lies. We see, on the contrary, that they continually take their side, are some of them children of light, others children of this world, or even of darkness; they beat with the pulses of our life; they stir with our passions; we clothe them with light; we steep them in scorn; they receive from us the impressions of our good and of our evil, which again they are most active still further to propagate and diffuse.* Must we not own then that there is a wondrous and mysterious world, of which we may hitherto have taken too little account, around us and about us? Is

Two or three examples of what we have been affirming, drawn from the Latin, may fitly here find place. Thus Cicero (Tusc. iii. 7) laments of 'confidens' that it should have acquired an evil signification, and come to mean bold, over-confident in oneself, unduly pushing (compare Virgil, Georg. iv. 444), a meaning which little by little had been superinduced on the word, but etymologically was not inherent in it at all. In the same way' latro, having left two earlier meanings behind, one of these current so late as in Virgil (Æn. xii. 7), settles down at last in the meaning of robber. Not otherwise 'facinus' begins with being simply a fact or act, something done; but ends with being some act of outrageous wickedness. 'Pronuba' starts with meaning a bridesmaid; it ignobly ends with suggesting a procuress.

there not something very solemn and very awful in wielding such an instrument as this of language is, with such power to wound or to heal, to kill or to make alive? and may not a deeper meaning than hitherto we have attached to it, lie in that saying, 'By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned'?

LECTURE IV.

ON THE HISTORY IN WORDS.

ANGUAGE, being ever in flux and flow, and,

existing only for the ear and as a sound, we might beforehand expect would prove the least trustworthy of all vehicles whereby the knowledge of the past has reached our present; that one which would most certainly betray its charge. In actual fact it has not proved so at all. It is the main, oftentimes the only, connecting link between the two, an ark riding above the waterfloods that have swept away or submerged every other landmark and memorial of bygone ages and vanished generations of men. Far beyond all written records in a language, the language itself stretches back, and offers itself for our investigation-'the pedigree of nations,' as Johnson calls it *—itself in its own independent existence

*This statement of his must be taken with a certain amount of qualification. It is not always that races are true to the end to their language; external forces are sometimes too strong. Thus Celtic disappeared before Latin in Gaul and Spain. Slavonic became extinct in Prussia two centuries ago, German taking its room; the

a far older and at the same time a far more instructive document than any book, inscription, or other writing which employs it. The written records may have been falsified by carelessness, by vanity, by fraud, by a multitude of causes; but language never deceives, if only we know how to question it aright.

Such investigations as these, it is true, lie plainly out of your sphere. Not so, however, those humbler yet not less interesting inquiries, which by the aid of any tolerable dictionary you may carry on into the past history of your own land, as attested by the present language of its people. You know how the geologist is able from the different strata and deposits, primary, secondary, or tertiary, succeeding one another, which he meets, to arrive at a knowledge of the successive physical changes through which a region has passed; is, so to say, in a condition to preside at those past changes, to measure the forces that were at work to produce them, and almost to indicate their date. Now with such a language as the English before us, bearing as it does the marks and footprints of great revolutions profoundly impressed upon it, we may carry on moral and historical researches precisely analogous to his. Here too are strata and deposits,

negroes of Hayti speak French, and various American tribes have exchanged their own idioms for Spanish and Portuguese. See upon this matter Sayce's Principles of Comparative Philology, pp. 175-181.