in tract of time they exchanged for dishonour, and the dishonour for honour-all which in my last lecture I contemplated mainly from an ethical point of view-is in a merely historic aspect scarcely less remarkable. Very curious. is it to watch the varying fortune of words—the extent to which it has fared with them, as with persons and families; some having improved their position in the world, and attained to far higher dignity than seemed destined for them at the beginning, while others in a manner quite as notable have lost caste, have descended from their high estate to common and even ignoble uses. Titles of dignity and honour have naturally a peculiar liability to be some lifted up, and some cast down. Of words which have risen in the world, the French 'maréchal' affords us an excellent example. Maréchal,' as Howell has said, 'at first was the name of a smith-farrier, or one that dressed horses'—which indeed it is `still-'but it climbed by degrees to that height that the chiefest commanders of the gendarmery are come to be called marshals.' But if this has risen, our 'alderman' has fallen. Whatever the civic dignity of an alderman may now be, still it must be owned that the word has lost much since the time that the alderman' was only second in rank and position to the king. Sometimes a word will keep or even improve its place in one language, while at the same time it declines from it in another. Thus 'demoiselle' (dominicella) cannot be said to have lost ground in

French, however 'donzelle' may; while 'damhele,' being the same word, designates in Walloon the farm-girl who minds the cows.* 'Pope' is the highest ecclesiastical dignitary in the Latin Church; every parish priest is a 'pope' in the Greek. Queen,' a cognate of yuvn, has had a double fortune. Spelt as above it has more than kept the dignity with which it started, being the title given to the lady of the kingdom; while spelt as 'quean' it is a designation not untinged with contempt.† Squatter' remains for us in England very much where it always was ; in Australia it is now the name by which the landed aristocracy are willing to be known.‡

After all that has thus been adduced, you will scarcely deny that we have a right to speak of a history in words. Now suppose that the pieces of money which in the intercourse and traffic of daily life are passing through our hands continually, had each one something of its own that made it more or less worthy of note; if on one was stamped some striking maxim, on another some important fact, on the third a memorable date; if others were works of finest

* See Littré, Études et Glanures, p. 16; compare p. 30. Elsewhere he says: Les mots ont leurs déchéances comme les familles.

† [Queen and quean are not merely different spellings of the same Old English word; for queen represents Anglo-Saxon cwen, Gothic qēns, whereas quean is the phonetic equivalent of Anglo-Saxon cwěne, Gothic gino.] Dilke, Greater Britain, vol. ii. p. 40.

art, graven with rare and beautiful devices, or bearing the head of some ancient sage or hero king; while others, again, were the sole surviving monuments of mighty nations that once filled the world with their fame; what a careless indifference to our own improvement-to all that men hitherto had felt or wrought-would it argue in us, if we were content that these should come and go, should stay by us or pass from us, without our vouchsafing to them so much as one scrious regard. Such a currency there is, a currency intellectual and spiritual of no meaner worth, and one with which we have to transact so much of the higher business of our lives. Let us take care that we come not in this matter under the condemnation of any such incurious indifference as that which I have imagined.

IF

LECTURE V.

ON THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.

F I do not much mistake, you will find it not a little interesting to follow great and significant words to the time and place of their birth. And not these alone. The same interest, though perhaps not in so high a degree, will cleave to the upcoming of words not a few that have never played a part so important in the world's story. A volume might be written such as few would rival in curious interest, which should do no more than indicate the occasion upon which new words, or old words employed in a new sense-being such words as the world subsequently heard much of—first appeared; with quotation, where advisable, of the passages in proof. A great English poet, Keats, too early lost, the Marcellus of our tongue' (to use the words of Dryden on Mr. Oldham), has very grandly described the emotion of

'some watcher of the skies,

When a new planet swims into his ken.'

Not very different will be our feeling, as we watch, at the moment of its rising above the

horizon, some word destined, it may be, to play its part in the world's story, to take its place for ever among the luminaries in the moral and intellectual firmament above us.

But a caution is necessary here. We must not regard as certain in every case, or indeed in most cases, that the first rise of a word will have exactly consented in time with its first appearance within the range of our vision. Such identity will sometimes exist; and we may watch the actual birth of some word, and may affirm with confidence that at such a time and on such an occasion it first saw the light-in this book, or from the lips of that man. Of another we can only say, About this time and near about this spot it first came into being, for we first meet it in such an author and under such and such conditions. So mere a fragment of ancient literature has come down to us, that, while the earliest appearance there of a word is still most instructive to note, it cannot in all or in nearly all cases be affirmed to mark the exact moment of its nativity. And even in the modern world we must in most instances be content to fix a period, we may perhaps add a local habitation, within the limits of which the term must have been born, either in legitimate scientific travail, or the child of some flash of genius, or the product of some generatio æquivoca, the necessary result of exciting predisposing causes; at the same time secking by further research ever to narrow more