chowder probably came to us from the island of Jersey through our Marblehead fishermen-corrupted from the French chaudiere, while our intercourse with the Dutch settlers of the New Netherlands is recorded in the phrase span of horses. From the Germans we got the word loaf and loafer. From the Spanish Mexicans vamose. Such examples might be multiplied without number.

The Saxon does not seem to have ever been very good at acquiring languages. The number of words derived from the Celtic which are preserved in English is perhaps not greater than those which (like hominy, quahaug, pogie, tauttog, and a few others) our American English has caught from the Indians. Compared with the great mass of our language, the number of words of Norman introduction is also very small. Chaucer shows the tendency of the two dialects of court and country to coalesce and form a new language. The almost contemporary poem of Piers Ploughman, written for popular effect, is Anglo-Saxon in the form of its metre, and shows but slight traces of French in its diction. The vision opens thus:

In a somer seson / When softe was the sonne

I shoop me into shroudis / As I a sheep were,

In habite as an hermite / Unholy of werkes,

Wente wide in this world / Wonders to heare.

Ac on a May morwenynge / On Malverne hilles

Me bifel a ferly / Of fairy methought,

I was weary forwandred / And wente me to rest

Under a brood bank / By a burnie's side

And as I lay and lived / And looked on the waters

I slumbered into sleeping / It sweyed so merry.

Chaucer's language has more French in it than this, and yet much less than is commonly taken for granted, and I think that one great reason for it is to be found in his different system of versification. His measures and rhymes and the greater nicety of ear demanded by them would lead him naturally to a choice of words which would give him a greater number of vowel-sounds and a greater variety of endings. Yet, if we take the beginning of the Romance of the Rose, which, being a translation from the French, would be as likely as anything he wrote to be colored by that language, we shall find that the proportion of French words in it, though much greater than in Piers Ploughman, is relatively very small. But if we take a piece of Chaucer's prose-from the Parson's Tale, for example,- we are astonished to find how modern it is.

Two things, I think, are clear: that it is impossible to put our finger upon the exact point of time when the speech of England became what we understand under the name English, and that a language existed as early as three centuries and a half after the Norman conquest which is perfectly comprehensible to us and which differs from our own only in being archaic.

For a great part of the Latin in our language we can account without recourse to the help of Norman-French. That our philosophical and metaphysical terms should be Latin and Greek is perfectly natural, when we consider that Latin continued to be the language of philosophy to the time of Bacon, and that Aristotle and his commentators were for many centuries the chief intellectual food of Christendom. At the time when our literature had its first great development, all the books which scholars read were Latin books, and it was inevitable that they should show in their language the effect of the medium through which all their thinking passed. You will find that Charles Lamb, whose reading was chiefly of the writers of the sixteenth century, has the most Latin style of any of our modern authors.

For the purposes of poetry our language has gained by the infusion of Latin. It has become a kind of Corinthian metal richer than any one of its compounds taken by itself or all of them together before they have been fused into the glowing amalgam. In the experiments made for casting Big Ben, the great bell for the Westminster tower, it has been found that the superstition that it was the presence of silver in larger proportion which gave the remarkable sweetness of tone to certain of the old bells had no foundation in fact. It was the skilful proportions with which the ordinary metals were balanced one against the other, and the perfection of form and the nice gradations of thickness that wrought the miracle. And it is precisely so with the language of poetry. The instinct of the poet will tell him whether to use a Latin or an English word, and then, unless the form be all that art require or the most sensitive taste finds entire satisfaction in, he will have failed to make a poem that shall vibrate in all its parts with a silvery unison.