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little to attract those persons whose whole idea of litera¬
ture is something which will interest. The Danes con¬
quered a portion of England afterwards, and many words
from their language are still to be found in the dialects
of the North. In 1066 William the Conqueror invaded
England and made it subject. French, as spoken in Nor¬
mandy, then became the language of law, politics and
high life, and Old English began to disintegrate. It
gradually lost its grammar, which much resembled that
of High German of the present day. There were four
cases and three genders, the latter not depending upon
nature, but being arbitrary. By 1100 the language was
somewhat simplified, by 1200 it was abandoned as a lit¬
erary tongue, and in 1300 the speech had assumed much
of its present form, writers again beginning its use.
Chaucer, Wyckliffe and Sir John Mandeville were the
earliest considerable writers. Many words were bor¬
rowed from the French, as later they came in from the
Latin, and still later from the Greek. The translations
of the Bible have had a great part in the settlement of
the tongue, and the high authority of Shakespeare, who
died in 1616, has preserved the usage of his age to a
great extent. Very little now read in English is older
than Shakespeare, and only one play of any early dra¬
matist, except the Bard of Avon, is now ever put on the
stage, the New Way to Pay Old Debts, by Massinger,
being the exception. Spenser and Chaucer are very lit¬
tle read, and the minor authors still less. English grew
more polished and more flexible under Pope and Dry¬
den, whose prose may be regarded as among the very
best in English. The elaborate sentences, with their
involutions, of Milton and Jeremy Taylor never took
root, and even the balanced phrases of Johnson left no
followers. Addison and Swift set the key for the Eng¬
lish of to-day. There is, however, to a well-trained ear
a slight difference between what was written in 1800 and
now, and more between 1750 and 1892. Some expres¬
sions have gone out of use and others have come in. In
the last century it was said that a house was a-building,
but most persons to-day would say it was being built.
Others who desired to speak grammatically would say
the house is building ; but that would imply an object,
and objectors might ask what particular thing the house
was building. Many new words have been brought in
and there are many added senses.

An enumeration of the words which would be under¬
stood by every fairly-educated man, excluding strange
ones, such as abacus, epidermal and mariput and the
like, but counting a word only once, no matter in hoAv
many forms it may occur, shows only about ten thou¬
sand. Allowing each variation to be a different word,
Johnson in his first edition had between thirty and forty
thousand ; but subsequent lexicographers have increased
the list until there are now enumerated over one hundred
and fifty thousand. It is probable the New English Dic¬
tionary will bring the list up to two hundred thousand.
Special vocabularies are rapidly increasing. Each calling
or science must have distinctive words. This Dictionary
has several hundred never before defined and several
thousand not in the first Webster. The first great part
of the language is the Old English or Anglo-Saxon. All
the most necessary words are derived from it, as water,
milk, bread, horse, sea and sun. So are the prepositions
and con j unctions and the irregular verbs. The words are
not so numerous as those from French and Latin, but are
much more frequently used. Thus in five verses of St.
John seventy words are Saxon and two are derived from
other sources ; of seventy-nine words in Addison twelve
are from other sources; and of eighty-nine in Milton
sixteen are foreign. Even Dr. Johnson, in one passage,
has sixty Saxon and twenty-one foreign words. Sharon
Turner gives two extracts, one to show how few foreign
words are necessary, and the other how many can be in¬
troduced, those from foreign sources being in Italic:

" And they made ready the present against Joseph
came at noon ; for they heard that they should eat bread
 

there. And when Joseph came home, they brought him
the presoht which was in their hand into the house, and
bowed themselves to him to the earth. And he asked
them of their welfare, and said, Is your father well, the
old man of whom ye spake ? Is he yet alive ? And
they answered. Thy servant our father is in good health,
he is yet alive. And they bowed down their heads, and
made oheisance. And he lifted up his eyes, and saw his
brother Benjamin, his mother's son, and said. Is this
your younger brother, of whom ye spake unto me ?
And he said, God be gracious unto thee, my son."—
Genesis, xliii, 25-29.

" Of genius, that potoer which constitutes a poet; that
quality without which judgment is cold and knowledge
is inert; that energy which collects, eomhines, amplifies,
and animates; the superiority must, with some hesita¬
tion, be alloioed to Dryden. It is not to be inferred that
of this poetical vigor Pope had only a little, because Dry¬
den had more ; for every other writer since Milton must
give place to Pope; and even of Dryden it must be said
that, if he has brighter paragraphs, he has not better
poems''—Johnson.

Next to the Saxon in frequency is the French. This
has been borrowed from the old Norman French, as well
as the more modern tongue of Racine and Voltaire.
French has Latin as a root, but took many words from
other sources. Long words from Latin were generally
cut down, so we often have these in both forms, as in
mere, derived from mater. This exists in English as
mare, a female horse, and maternal, motherly. Many
Latin words which come to us are not in literary French,
and the freedom with which Greek could be compounded
and then used to represent ideas has caused many thou¬
sand technical words to be added from this source. A
recent example is agnostic, where a privative is prefixed
to a word which signifies to know. Many Hebrew words
are used in theology, and nouns to describe particular
things have been borrowed from the whole world, as
algebra, assassin, potato and caviare. It is probable that
this tendency will increase.

English, while having a nice discrimination in the use
of words, is almost entirely without grammar. Ideas
are interpreted by position. Usually speaking, words
follow a certain order in the sentence, the writer or
speaker not attempting to invert the phrase in order to
give more prominence to a certain idea. In languages
with a complicated grammar the leading idea is often
shown by having the word which relates to it placed
first. It is thus emphasized. Formerly this grammar,
like the German, was difficult. The Lord's Prayer is
here given in the oldest form, with an interlinear trans¬
lation :

Faeder ure, thu the eart on heofenum, si thin nama
Father our, thou that art in heaven, be thy name
gehalgod; to-becume thin rice. Geweorthe thin
hallowed ; become (let come) thy kingdom. Happen thy
willa on eorthan, swa swa on heofenum. Urne
will      on      earth        so     so (as)   in        heaven.           Our

daeghwamlican hlaf syle us to-daeg. And forgyf lis lire
daily                   loaf give us   to-day.      And forgive us our

gyltas, swa swa we forgifath iirum gyltendum. And
guilts,      so      as    we    forgive       our        debtors.         And

ne gelaede thu  us on costnunge, ac    alys us of yfle :
not   lead    thou us into temptation, but deliver us from evil:
Sothlice.
So be it.

The tendency of to-day is to cast sentences in the
simplest and most direct forms, using only enough in¬
volution or modification to prevent monotony. In this
particular our language is like French. Words are used
by writers generally only in the senses made certain by
their employment by good authors. This is not neces¬
sary, as English has been modified in times past by au¬
thors and speakers, and must be still further in many
respects in the future.   Knowledge is becoming greater;

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