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ligible, without a glossary; and this, with all the power of types and of the press, to hold fast the eπeа πтЄpóevta of modern speech. The Latin was brought under the power of grammatical and critical culture, at a much later period than the Greek. In the progress of its development, it absorbed, in the south of Italy, some Greek idioms, and in the north, some Celtic, resolving them into the elements of its own greater enlargement. The triumph of the Roman arms was followed, always, with the march of the Roman language, literature, ideas, and institutions. Like a stream of lava, the flood of living influences pressed with irresistible force, sweeping everything before it, into France and Spain, and even into the fastnesses of Germany, and as far as to the distant shores of England and Scandinavia on the north, and the wilds of Sarmatia on the east, dissolving everything in its way, or, at least, leaving the signs of its fiery force, on the crisped and altered forms of things, wherever it went. And yet the receptive, susceptible, or passive side of Roman development was almost as remarkable, as its aggressive. The hard and stern elements of its character and language were slow to receive impressions from without, but they were also equally slow, when having received, to relinquish them. The Latin accordingly degenerated, at an early period, in the provinces, from its pure form, and erelong settled down everywhere, even as the language of the learned, in matters of state, science, and the church, into what is called the Middle Latin. This degenerate form of the Latin never became popularized, on the one hand, nor was it ever wrought into artistic shape, on the other, by scholars, but remained a heterogeneous compound of Roman, German, Celtic and Byzantine-Greek elements. In schools and especially in cloisters, classical Latin was still cherished, as a dear favorite of the past, whose voice seemed to them like that of a sweet bird, flying down through the ages and singing as it flew. It found, like the sparrow, a nest for itself among the altars of God's house.

But when, from the chaos of the Middle Ages, the upheaval of Modern Society began, and the present nations of

Europe exhibited, in growing outline, the general proportions, which they have since so distinctively assumed, the different Romanic languages, under the combined action of various local influences with the ever-present influence of Rome, came to be severally enucleated. These afterwards grew up under the same influences, in which they germinated, into separate, well-defined forms, each beautiful in its kind, to cover with their different degrees of upward and outward expansion, as with a friendly shadow, the ruined greatness of their parent Latin stock, when it fell, to lie forever prostrate, under the hand of Time. Each of the three Romanic languages, the Italian, French, and Spanish, presents a different resemblance to its mother language, according to the quantity and quality of the alloy with which the Latin element in each is mingled. Each of them has specially preserved some separate cardinal characteristic, of the old native stock, which it has kept with jealous care, as a precious proof of its original parentage. The Italian has still in possession, its fulness of form and sweetness of tone; the Spanish has appropriated to itself its majesty and dignity, while the French best exhibits its elements of vivacity, and its practical business qualities, and therefore, like it, abounds in abbreviations and contractions, and is full of martial fire and energy. Each of these different languages has its different spoken dialects, although only the standard one in each ever shows its front, in the sacred precincts of literature.

(1.) As for the Italian, nine-tenths of all its words are Latin. Of the Greek words, which constitute a considerable portion of its remaining vocabulary, most have doubtless come into it through the Latin. In the Sicilian and Sardinian dialects, where words of this nature most abound, it would seem probable, that many of them must be the remains of that early contact with Greece, that grew out of their original colonial relations to that land.

The Italian, since the second half of the 12th century, when it first became enthroned in a literature of its own, has changed but little, far less indeed than any of its sister-languages. And yet the Lombard, the Genoese, the Florentine,

whose dialect constitutes the standard of taste, the Neapol itan, the Sicilian and the Sardinian or Corsican carries, each, a distinct badge of his nativity upon him, in the different tone or form or spirit of his speech. Language is too im pressible to all the influences of every kind, which separate men, not only into different nations, but also on every extended area, into different sections of the same nation, and which mark off the historic development of the same community, into successive periods of growth, maturity, and decline, to preserve, for any great length of time or space, one unaltered, petrified, Egyptian style of form or features. It can no more be cribbed and confined, in any one condition, however free and full, than humanity itself, whose utterance it is, and which is ever swelling with vital forces, struggling for a newer and larger development.

(2.) The Spanish is also one of the Romanic languages. In the north of Spain, there still lives, like a wild bird that has wandered away from the rest of its species, undisturbed among the recesses of the mountains, a strange languagethe Basque that has come down from an elder age, and remained unmixed with the dialects that surround it. Among the sisterhood of the Spanish dialects, the Castilian sits queen, and has its local habitation in the very centre of Spain. The Catalonian and Galician dialects, which are next in value, are intermixed largely with elements serving to alloy their purity: the former with those of the dialect of Provence in France, and the latter with the neighboring Portuguese.

In its forms of declension, the Spanish is more like the Latin, than is the Italian-but less like it in the sound or sense of its derivatives. It was about the middle of the 12th century, that Spanish literature began its distinct career, and, with it, that the Spanish language assumed a fixed form. Its vocabulary is very largely interspersed with foreign elements, especially Arabic. By her very position, so near to northern Africa, where Phoenician Carthage dwelt of old, in the pride of her power, and delighted to make her a prey, and whence afterwards the Moor trampled, with furious

energy, upon all her growing greatness, Spain was, through all the formative part of her history, held in subjection to the influence of Shemitic arms, languages, and institutions, beyond any other nation in Europe. The two languages, with which it thus came into close mechanical, if not chemical, combination for centuries, were the Phoenician, or Hebrew, the noblest of the ancient tongues of that family, and the Arabic, the noblest of the new. Its technical terminology is especially rich, in words of Arabic origin. The Portuguese is, in many respects, greatly akin to the Spanish, and yet, in others, so unrelated to it and unlike it, as to deserve a distinct announcement. Such phonetic discordances occur, in the vowel and diphthongal combinations and derivations of the two languages, as quite place them, in respect to many points, at antipodes to each other. The Portuguese has adhered much more constantly, to its original antique modes and degrees of development, than the Spanish. It is accordingly an independent shoot of itself, from the roots of that vigorous old mother-tongue of Rome, which succeeded in spreading itself over all Western Europe and which, wherever it spread, was sure to exclude everything, that it could not assimilate to itself, from the soil.

(3.) The French language is, in many respects, the finest reproduction of the original Latin, that we find among the modern languages. The French character is not indeed as strongly representative, as is the language, of its Roman original. The French mind has naturally the love of martial activity and pomp, as well as the instinct for organization and centralization, that characterized the Roman; but

1 The stock of the present population of North Africa is well described by Barth, Vol. I. p. 195. "They all," he says, "appear to have been originally a race of the Semitic stock, but, by intermarriage with tribes which came from Egypt or by way of it, to have received a certain admixture. Hence came several distinct tribes, designated anciently as Libyans, Moors, Numidians, Libyphoenicians, Getulians, and others, and traced by the native historians to two different families, the Beranes and the Abtar, who. however, diverge from one common source, Mazigh or Madaghs. This native wide-spread African race, either from the name of their supposed ancestor, Ber, which we recognize in the name Afer, or in consequence of the Roman name barbari, has been generally called Berber, and, in some regions, Shawi and Shelluh.

it has, with these tendencies also, under its more favorable atmosphere, and surrounded by its more enchanting1 landscapes, an inclination to art and a sense of the beautiful, as well as an elastic, vivacious style of social development, that are rather Grecian than Roman, in their type. Gaul, originally settled by the Franks, a tribe of Germans, was continuously Romanized, from the times of Cæsar, who first conquered it, all along the track of the successive dynasties of Rome or for Rome, civil and spiritual, that held their sway over it. The southern part of it, occupied at first by the Basques, still retains its memorial of that fact, in the very name Gascony 2 applied to it, which means literally the land of the Basques. In this region and that of low Brittany, the influence of Rome was least felt upon the people and their language. The original dialects of the French were many. In those of Southern France, bordering on Italy, the old Latin vowel-sounds were preserved full and pure. In Northern France they were changed, like the consonants and rejected to such a degree, as to depart far from their first Latin type. The dialect of Provence, the language of the old Troubadours, occupied a sort of middle ground between the other dialects and was greatly modified and moulded by them all. Fortunately, its airy spirit supposed to have been forever exhaled from this world, has just been found,3 lingering spellbound, although unvisited and unknown for many long centuries, in the very words and

1 In the language of Ruskin: "Of all countries for educating an artist to the perception of grace, France bears the bell; in even those districts of which country that are regarded as most uninteresting, there is not a single valley but is full of the most lively pictures.—Modern Painters, Vol. I. p. 126.

2 The interchange of g, in both low and middle Latin and the French, with b, v and w in German and English, is worthy of notice, as in Latin Gulielmus, French Guillaume, German Wilhelm, English William. So compare also French garder and English guard and ward, guardian and warden; also Latin vastare, French gâter, English waste, vast and devastate, as also French guerre and English war.

It is announced by F. Dümmler of Berlin that he has just published 300 Troubadour poems, by Dr. C. A. F. Mahn, in the Provençal dialect, gathered most of them for the first time out of seven old manuscripts from the Royal Library at Paris, and four old English manuscripts, which, by a conjunction of fortunate circumstances, have just come to light, and into his hands.

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