which were identified with the degeneracy of the nations that spoke them. It was to become the voice of another form of national character, and of a different and deeper spirituality, than that which belonged to the sunny regions of the south. The contrast between what has been called the “classical mind" and the "romantic mind," is traceable in the respective languages, and has been beautifully illustrated by the names of "good omen," which the Greeks delighted in, and the names of "dark mystery," which were congenial to those who dwelt in the gloom of the North.

The path of ill, and localized

Terrific legends there;

Leaving a hoarse and pondrous name
To haunt the very air.

Not so the radiant-hearted Greeks,

Who hesitated still

To offend the blessed Presences
Which earth and ocean fill ;
Whose tongues, elsewhere so eloquent,
Stammered at words of ill.

All places, where their presence was
Upon the fruitful earth,

By kindly law were clasped within
The circle of their mirth,
And in their spirits had a new
And consecrated birth.

O bless them for it, traveller!

The fair-tongued ancients bless!
Who thus from land and sea trod out

All footmarks of distress;

Illuminating earth with their

Own inward cheerfulness.*

In other ways it might also be shown that the genius of the Northern character gave utterance to itself differently from the races of the South. The beginning of a just knowledge of the English language is an accurate sense of its Northern origin. The date of that origin cannot be fixed; but certainly the language is a growth out of the Anglo-Saxon speech, however important may be the additions it has received elsewhere. Of the 38,000 words, of which it is reckoned the English language consists, 23,000 are of Saxon origin-near five-eighths of it;

Faber's Styrian Lake and Other Poems, p. 318.

a proportion which must needs control, to a great extent, the grammatical laws of the language; that is, along with the multitude of Northern words, there must be much of Northern method, and in that method, baffling, as it often does, the technical systems of grammar, we are to look for the idioms. It is a remark of one of the most nervous authors of our day, Walter Savage Landor: "Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language; and none ever entertained a fear or apprehension that strength and sublimity were to be lowered and weakened by it. . . Nations in a state of decay lose their idiom, which loss is always precursory to that of freedom.”* And Coleridge exclaimed, "If men would only say what they have to say in plain terms, how much more eloquent would they be!" But it is the simple Saxon-English words, and the Saxon way of putting them together, that people will not be content with. There is forever a pushing away from the purest English, and from the genuine idioms; and, what is noticeable, it is the half-educated who are always most ambitious of long words and highsounding combinations of them. There is not pomp enough for them in our short, often one-syllable Saxon speech. Observe what a propensity there is to substitute the word "individual," (and unfitly too) for such a clear, simple, short word as "man." It seems to be employed as a sort of midway expression between "man" and 'gentleman,” between "woman" and "lady," as if there was not quite courtesy enough in the words "man" and "woman," and a little more than was wanted in the other

Imaginary Conversations, First Series. Conversation xiv., vol. i.

p. 244.

words. It is in this way that there may be a false refinement, a mistaken delicacy, that is fatal to the primitive simplicity and nervousness of language. From being too dainty in our choice of words, we come at last to forfeit the use of some of the best of them. Again, I do verily believe, that the good word "begin," is in danger of becoming obsolete, so that, after a while, it will sound quaint and antiquated; and yet it is both as old as the language, and as fresh as to-day's talk, known in all the eras of the language, sanctioned by all possible authority, grave and formal as well as familiar and homely, and expressive of all that is needed. Really some people seem to shun it as much as if it were indelicate, or, at the least, a vulgarism. Listen almost where you will, and now-adays nobody hardly is heard of as "beginning," for everything is "commenced." But what a shock would our instinct of language and some of our best associations receive, if this change could creep on to the pages of our English version of the Bible, instead of reading "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"-"the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom"-"In the beginning was the Word." Truly did Coleridge say, that "Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of style."* And an eloquent living divine has asked, "Who can estimate the grandeur, the depth, the expansive power, which our language and the German have derived from the national liturgical offices, as well as from the national translation. of the Scriptures ?" Let those who crave a statelier word than "begin," learn that even Milton, with all his

erudite diction, never, throughout all his poems, I believe, uses the words "commence" or "commencement;" and let them observe how Shakspeare perpetually makes his beautiful uses of the simple English word, and is even content to make it shorter and simpler yet, as in the touching line that tells so much of the guilt-wasted soul of Macbeth

"I'gin to grow a-weary of the sun."

Let me exemplify this tendency away from the native character of the language in the structure of sentences as well as in the choice of words. I refer to the frequent abandonment of that peculiarly characteristic arrangement which puts a preposition at the end of a sentence. This is eminently an English idiom, and nothing but prejudice arising from misapplied analogy with the Southern languages, and the propensity to make style more formal and less idiomatic, could ever have led any one to suppose this construction to be wrong. The false fastidiousness which shuns a short particle at the end of a sentence, is fatal often to a force which belongs to the language with its primal character. The superiority of the idiom I am referring to, could be proved beyond question by examples of the best writing in all the eras of the language. As the error is pretty wide spread, let me cite a few of these. Lord Bacon says, "Houses are built to live in, and not to look on ;" and again, "Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out." Any attempt to transpose these separable prepositions would destroy the strength and the terseness of the sentences. Even a stronger example occurs in a passage in one of the great English divines, a contemporary of Bacon's: "Hath God