Imagens das páginas
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THE a branch

HE English language is essentially a branch

spoken by the inhabitants of Central Europe before the dawn of history. The earliest inhabitants of the British Islands were a Celtic race, one of the most important of the Aryan family of nations, and the Celtic language is still spoken, divided into two sections. One of these is the Gaelic of Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, and the Isle of Man. The other is the Cymric of Wales and of the French province of Brittany, the ancient Armorica. A Celtic dialect lingered in Cornwall until past the middle of the last century. It has been calculated that, if the English language were divided into a hundred parts, sixty would be Saxon. Mr Sharon Turner, the historian of the Anglo-Saxons, and Archbishop Trench concur in this estimate, and it is said to be verified by the vocabulary of our English Bible and by the dramas of Shakspeare. But on the other hand, a high linguistic authority, F. Max-Müller, states that the Norman elements in English have a decided preponderance; and he cites M. Thommerel, who had counted every word in our dictionaries, and established the fact that the number of Teutonic or Saxon words in English amounts to 13,230, whereas there are 29,853 traceable to a Latin source. This disparity arises from the philologist looking at the words apart from the stem or grammar of the language. The great influx of Neo-Latin and other vocables in the course of the nation's progress is undoubted, but, as F. Max-Müller admits, languages, though mixed in their dictionary, can never be mixed in their grammar,' and in a scientific classification the English must be ranked as Saxon. The great bulk of our laws and social institutions, the grammatical structure of our language, our most familiar and habitual expressions in common life, are derived from our rude northern invaders; and now,

after faritus and distant sources, hus become the

after fourteen centuries, their language, enriched speech of fifty millions of people, to be found in all quarters of the globe. May we not assume that the national character, like the national language, has been moulded and enriched by this combination of races? The Celtic imagination and impulsive ardour, the Saxon solidity, the old Norse maritime spirit and love of adventure, the later Norman chivalry and keen sense of enjoyment; these have been the elements, slowly combined under northern skies, and interfused by a pure ennobling religion, that have gone forth in literature and in life, the moral pioneers and teachers of the world.

The Celts were not without a native literature. The Welsh had their Triads and their romantic fables of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. The real Arthur of history appears to have been the ruler of the ancient Britons in the beginning of the sixth century, and was slain by Modred in 542. He makes no great figure in history, where he has only a twilight sort of existence. His true realm is romance, and there he sits enthroned in poetic splendour surrounded by his circle of invincible knights. He could not subdue the Anglo-Saxons, but the Welsh bards invested him with all kinds of supernatural perfections. He forms, with his court, the subject of a whole library of heroic lays and legends. Centuries after his death, Arthur reappeared in the tales of the Norman and French minstrels as the ideal of a perfect knight and the mirror of chivalry. The great chiefs of English song-Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Gray-prolonged the legendary tales,' as related by Sir Walter Scott, himself an enthusiastic devotee; and in our own day they have been revived by a poet not unworthy of being named along with that illustrious band. It

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