complacent self-sufficiency renders all but impossible. Philology, as they rate it, is a thing light enough to serve as their mere avocation and pastime. In their own opinion, and by their tacit profession, they have read all that one needs to read, they are infallible in point of memory, and their taste and their judgment are past gainsaying. Their attitude is, in short, exactly that which conciliates most speedily the adhesion of the multitude. Acting on the maxim, that modesty is not a note of inspiration, they believe unwaveringly in themselves, they are visited by no doubts, they cautiously avoid dealing in alternatives; and none, sooner than such, are welcome to the unthinking and the timid, and may assure themselves of a host of disciples. To the ordinary mind there is something irresistibly attractive, and something which invites unstinted confidence, in the pretensions of a man who, conforming to a familiar practice, declares, for instance, that a given word or sense of a word had no existence before a defined date, or is not to be met with in the pages of any reputable writer. Only arrant sciolists, certainly, will venture on sweeping assertions of this stamp. It is, however, precisely these that are wholly at one with the vulgar mob of readers, characterised as it is, what with impotence and indolence, by a repugnance to all enunciations which bewilder by being limited or qualified. On these worse than blind dictators argument would, of course, be wasted. Still, it is not altogether hopeless that suggestions of their incapacity, for cause shown, may penetrate, and with good effect, to some whose reliance on their false lessons, if it continued unshaken, would promote the propagation of foolish and mischievous fancies. In the case of a living language, not yet in its decline, interesting as its historical philology may be, its practical philology is of importance vastly greater. Of this the scope is, to discover and to record the best recent and present usage-in other terms, eligible precedents. Nor can a different view of its functions be accepted, unless one first postulates, consciously or unconsciously, principles which will bear no serious examination. The view specially alluded to is that of grammarians, lexicographers, and rhetoricians, of the autocratic type. Pronouncing, as they do, arbitrarily, or from a predilection for the obsolete, as to what is right and what is wrong, they ought, certainly, to produce credentials from heaven, or from some other exalted quarter, conclusive that their autocratism is authentic. In the meantime, all is not so smooth as it ought to be. If we are to believe themselves, they are virtually inspired; and, it being only injunctions that they have to do with, the hapless sceptic is constantly molested by doubts how to separate, therein, warrantable prescriptions from personal suggestions. But a language is never a finality, nor a fixture; and its course is beyond the staying or the controlling of speculators or theorists. Its prevailing features, at whatever period of its career, are impressed upon it, of necessity, by circumstances which constitute and distinguish that period. Depreciation of the former is, therefore, depreciation, inclusively, of the latter. For example, when modernisms are decried, as often happens, on the sole avowed ground of their being modernisms, it is silently taken for granted, that, in comparison with our forerunners, we have retrograded in good sense, or in good taste, or in having superfluous wants; for, if we have not, the expressions which satisfied them would satisfy us. It does not seem to occur to the rigid philological conservative, that every particular of what he idolises as classicism of phrase was once the very freshest of novelties, and so every word ever spoken, back to the primeval interjections or what not. If, as he contends, we do amiss when we innovate on what has been handed down to us, it behoves him to show what there is about us for which we should be denied a privilege enjoyed by all bygone generations. He is to show, also, and antecedently, that, after a certain course of development, a language need change no more, and that it differs from all things else, in not being relative, and subject to the law of mutation which reigns throughout nature. In fact, taken as a whole, speech, equally with the form of our coats and of our hats, is at no time otherwise than a precarious and fugitive fashion, a resultant of causes so inscrutable in their working that it looks much like the offspring of caprice; and, while we can but blindly appreciate its true antecedents, its future fortunes wholly transcend our divination. However, from the point of view of practice, all that imports most of us, respecting it, is, to ascertain what English is accredited by the best contemporary writers, and to govern ourselves accordingly. Adepts will, in exigency, go further than this; but let no one believe lightly that he belongs to their select brotherhood. That which we have here set forth being, on the face of it, barely in advance of the axiomatic, it is curious to observe the inconsiderateness in which even men usually most circumspect are seen to allow themselves. Thus, Lord Macaulay1 speaks of Bunyan as affording a sample of 'the old unpolluted English language,' and tells us 'how rich that language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed.' Prudently enough, the thesis of what constitutes the unpollutedness of Bunyan's English is left unattempted. And is not that pleonastic property, its being 'rich in its own proper wealth," just as predicable of our present English as it is of Bunyan's? And has 'borrowed' English been a peculiarity of the last two or three centuries? On the assumption, as a starting-point, that the English of a certain age was a gift direct from the skies, and so pure and perfect as not to admit, save to its harm, of alteration or addition, Lord Macaulay's eulogy is reconcil 1 In his Essays, vol. i. pp. 423, 424, 7th ed. 2 Another pleonasm of Lord Macaulay's is such as an irresolute man would hardly hazard: 'He walked on foot, bareheaded,' &c. (History, Sc., vol. i. p. 557, 10th ed.) able with right reason. But it is not that he delivered himself ambiguously. His error is fundamental. If it had been said of Bunyan, that, looking to all his circumstances, he utilised a simple style of English with most unexpected felicity, quite enough would have been said. To Lord Macaulay the English of the Bible, as of those older writers who recall it to mind, was powerfully attractive. And we are not obliged to suppose that it was so adventitiously, that is to say, owing to those early associations whose bias few outgrow. Tried by the severest canons of taste, it is found to merit praise which cannot easily be exaggerated. For who can deny its exquisite concinnity with its subject-matters, or be insensible to the charm of its un-constrained and rhythmical fluency? Still, for the general purposes of us moderns, it would, indisputably, prove most meagre and insufficient. The history of English, from the days of those happy ventures whose fruits, no more than slightly modified, we see in the authorised version of the Bible, is the history of what Lord Macaulay would have called its pollution. Previously to the later years of Henry the Eighth, so inadequate was our tongue for most purposes other than social communication, that the more learned Englishmen who aspired to make a mark in literature were, with few reservations, fain to content themselves with Latin. Such quasi-vernacular phenomena as are associated with the names of Bishop Pecock, Lord Berners, and a few others, are noteworthy, over and above their unseasonableness, simply as having been too daringly tentative to induce imitation. While revolting, from their ungainly novelty, to the educated with whom their appearance was contemporaneous, probably they were wellnigh unintelligible to all except the educated. Our older poetry apart, from the works of Sir John Mandeville, Wicliffe, Sir John Fortescue, Sir Thomas Malory, Tyndale, and Sir Thomas More, with the Paston Letters, one may derive a very fair idea of the speech of our forefathers, as exhibited in what were its most acceptable forms, down to near the middle of the sixteenth century. But the outburst of intellectual vigour and activity which concurred with the Reformation and the introduction of printing could not but tell on our language advantageously. To Sir Thomas Elyot we are indebted for the first resolute attempt that proved successful, towards its enrichment and its improvement throughout. In contrast to his predecessors who had experimented to the same end, Elyot was a man of consummate tact. Besides this, he presented himself just when the public temper was attuned to the propounding of innovations. The authority which attached to his diction, in the eyes of the generation next succeeding his own, is exemplified by a rugged couplet of Richarde Eden, himself, at least in prose, and for his age, no indifferent literary practitioner. In deprecation of censure at the hands of purists, he says: I have not for every worde asked counsayle As to the good writers who, in uninterrupted series, connect his day with our own, it is enough here to glance at the nature of their services which have brought English to be what it is. The art was very soon discovered of framing sentences not unreasonably protracted; and, by degrees, involution and complexity-though most translators, and those who leaned to foreign modes, were slow in disusing them-came to be looked upon as questionable merits. But, from the first, the want of an ampler vocabulary was practically acknowledged, and steps were taken to supply it. Latin, French, and Italian are the chief sources which were deemed available for this object; and, as short words are better than long words of equivalent import, it is to be regretted that our dialects were not freely laid under contribution. The preference given to Latinistic importations increased steadily for something like a century, after it had set in with force, above all among ecclesiastics and those whose style they influenced. Though it never reached the exorbitant pitch which was gravely advocated by Henry Cockeram, it surely neared the limits of the conceivably endurable in Milton, Sir Thomas Browne, and Henry More. That, in the meanwhile, the tradition of English such as the run of men could follow understandingly did not disappear from books altogether, we have to thank, in a great measure, the humbler divines. With the Restoration, a new phase of our language was developed. Foremost among its representatives are, not to name others, Sir William Temple, Tillotson, Dryden, Jeremy Collier, Shaftesbury, Defoe, Addison, Steele, Swift, Bolingbroke, Pope, Berkeley, Middleton, Fielding, and Richardson. And then came Dr. Johnson, with his monotonously balanced periods and his superficial reminders of the Caroline divines. We say superficial; for, while classical polysyllables were, to them, often little more than aids to mere grandiloquence, they served, in his use, to mark genuine distinctions and refinements. Successful imitators he could, in the nature of things, have but few. His sonorousness and the structure of his cadences may easily be mimicked; but his style, in its distinctive essence, is a faithful reflex of his mental idiosyncrasy, and, until we shall see his second self, can be only counterfeited, not reproduced. The shortsighted idea was, in his day, rapidly gaining ground, and with injurious practical effect, that our language had attained a form from which to deviate must be to deteriorate. This, though not at all intentionally, he contributed directly to counteract. Yet, quite independently of his undesigned philological liberalisın, there were causes at work, even before his death, operating to break the uneasy shackles by which the expression of thought had so long been hampered among us, and promoting the advent of the more cosmopolitan English of the last seventy years, the English of Bentham, Southey, Coleridge, Landor, Mr. J. S. Mill, Bishop Thirlwall, Cardinal Newman, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. John Morley. As long ago as 1557, Sir John Cheke was persuaded that English could dispense perfectly well with further accessions from without. Not only so, but he deemed that such accessions, if realised, would entail something very portentous. He predicted, with reference to our language, that, if we take not heed bi tiim, ever borowing and never payeng, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt.' How the borrowing here could possibly be compensated by the paying, he can hardly have troubled himself to inquire. Just as little did antiquity warrant him from writing nonsense, as it warranted many a wiser man. Like Lord Macaulay, Cheke must have entertained the notion, that our language, at a certain point in time, shared the nature of a revelation, and that a self-sufficing revelation. Alternative to this absurd position is the superstition, equally absurd, which magnifies the wisdom of our ancestors into inerrancy, and supposes that they foresaw what must be good for us better than we ourselves see it. To the one or to the other we must, perforce, trace the long-lived lament for it comes to this-so worthy of its fatuous origin, that our speech has grown, grows, and bids fair to go on growing. The unreason which we have thus stripped to its nakedness is, of course, ordinarily so disguised, that, until closely scrutinised, it looks more or less plausible. A dogmatiser in the province of philology is almost certain to be a good deal in the clouds. Instead of intelligent and intelligible convictions, he has scarcely more than tenacious partialities. These he would justify, if he could; and, in his inability to establish them on grounds of plain sense, the device, alike most obvious and most imposing, to which he is wont to resort as a preliminary, is a vague appeal, with magisterial air, to something beyond average apprehension. Having thus thrown dust into the eyes of the unwary, he ventures whatever first occurs to him that seems to subserve the argument from analogy. This done, he retires with a metaphorical bow; the silent salute being designed to signify that your submission is anticipated, at the peril of your being accounted no more sagacious than you should be. The procedure here sketched shall be illustrated by an extract from the Edinburgh Review: 3--- 3 We cannot admit the authority of usage, when it is clearly opposed to the very principles of language. There is, we fear, ample authority, amongst writers of the present day, for the use of the word supplement, not as a noun substantive, which is its proper meaning, but as a verb active, in the sense of ' to supply what is deficient,'' to complete.' We have seen it used, of late years, by prelates and judges, who ought to have abhorred such a solecism; nay, we will even confess, so infectious has it become, that it has, once or twice, crept, notwithstanding our utmost vigilance, into these pages. Supplement is, by its form, the thing added or supplied,' not the act of supplying' it. You might just as well say, that, instead of appending another page to your book, you intend to appendix it. From a writer who openly denies the authority of usage we ought not to be astonished at any shallowness or at any sophistry. And, when * Vol. 120, p. 42 (1864). |