ledge is not attainable at this time, and with such means as are accessible to American, and, generally, English scholars; and an attempt to present to you anything more than an approximate estimate of their peculiarities would be but a piece of charlatanism, alike discreditable to the speaker and unprofitable to the audience.

The Anglo-Saxon and the

But there is a further difficulty. Norman-French, from the union of which the English is chiefly derived, were inflected languages, and had the syntactical peculiarities common to most grammars with inflections; but in the friction between the two, the variable and more loosely attached growths of both were rubbed off, and the speech of England, in becoming stamped as distinctively English, dropped so many native, and supplied their place with so few borrowed, verbal and nominal endings, that it ceased to belong to the inflected class of tongues, and adopted a grammar, founded in a considerable degree upon principles which characterise that of neither of the parent stocks from which it is derived. It is altogether a new philological individual, distinct in linguistic character from all other European speeches, and not theoretically to be assimilated to them.

But the difference between English and the Continental languages does not consist in the greater or less amount of inflection alone. The Danish, with the remarkable exceptions of the passive verb and the coalescent definite form of the noun, is almost as simple as English in this respect, but it is descended from an inflected tongue, with little mixture except from the German, which belongs also to the Gothic stock, and has most of the same syntactical peculiarities as the OldNorthern, a local dialect of which is the more immediate parent of the Danish. Danish, then, is the product of two cognate languages, minus a certain number of inflections, not, indeed, strictly common to both, but represented in both. But English stands in no such relation to its Gothic and Romance sources. The Danish is an intimate mixture of substances much alike in

their elementary character, and it is often impossible to say from which of its two constituents particular linguistic features have been derived. English is a patchwork of two, or rather, three tissues, dissimilar in material as well as in form, and to a distant observer has a prevailing hue very different from that of either of them, though, upon a nearer approach, the special colour and texture of each web is discernible.*

The general and obvious distinction between the grammar of the English and that of the Continental tongues is, that whereas in the latter the relations of words are determined by their form, or by a traditional structure of period handed down from a more strictly inflectional phase of those languages, in English, on the other hand, those relations do not indicate, but are deduced from, the logical categories of the words which compose the period, and hence they must be demonstrated by a very different process from that which is appropriate for syntaxes depending on other principles.† A truly philosophical system of English syntax cannot, then, be built up by means of the Latin scaffolding, which has served for the construction of all the Continental theories of grammar, and with which alone the literary public is familiar, but must be conceived and executed on a wholly new and original plan.

The Continental method of grammatical demonstration is unsuited to the philosophy of the English speech, because it subordinates syntax to inflection, the logical to the formal. We may regard syntax, the analysis of the period or the synthesis of its elements, in two different aspects: as an assemblage of rules for determining the agreement and government of words by correspondence of form, or as a theory of the structure of sentences founded upon the logical relations of words, without special consideration of their forms. The first, or more material and mechanical view belongs especially to highly inflected languages, as to the Latin, for example, and in a less degree to the German; the latter, * See, on French and Latin constructions in English, Lecture II. See First Series, Lecture XVI., p. 347.

or more intellectual, to those whose words are invariable, or nearly so, as the English. English grammar is not to be taught by tables of paradigms and rules of concord and regimen, and we must either, as we do with young children, treat syntax as a collection of arbitrary models for the arrangement of words in periods, which are to be learned by rote, and followed afterwards as unreflectingly as the processes of a handicraft, or we must consider the construction of the sentence a logical problem, to be solved by an almost purely intellectual calculus, and with very few of the mechanical facilities which simplify, if they do not lighten, grammatical study in most other tongues.

The French presents the curious phenomenon of a language inflected in its written forms, but for the most part uninflected in actual speech, and hence its syntax is mixed; but still the word has been mightier than the letter, in so far that it has imposed upon even the written dialect a structure of period in some degree approximating to that of languages whose words are unchangeable in form.* But grammarians think in the language of books, and all oral departures from that dialect are, with them, anomalies or corruptions not entitled to a place in a philosophical view of speech.

Hence there exists no grammar of spoken French, and the theorists of that nation persist in regarding what are really

*This distinction between oral and written French is important to be kept in mind in all inquiries into the influence of Norman-French on English syntax There is indeed much uncertainty as to the pronunciation of Norman-French at and for some centuries after the Conquest, but various circumstances render it probable that there was, at that period, almost as great a discrepancy between the language of books and that of the market, in all the dialects of Northern France, as there is at the present day. Written French had its special influence on English; but the spoken tongue of the Norman immigrants was undoubtedly a much more important agent in modifying the language of England. See First Series, Lecture XXI., and the works of Palsgrave and Génin there referred to. It must be remembered that Anglo-Saxon also had not only its local dialects, but its general colloquial forms, which, in all probability, differed very widely from the written tongue. Anglo-Saxon English is derived not wholly from the AngloSaxon of books, which alone is known to us, but in a great measure, no doubt, from a spoken tongue that has now utterly perished, except so far as it has lived on, first in the mouths and then in the literature, of the modern English people.

syntactical differences between their two dialects as mere questions of pronunciation. The French of the grammarians is an inflected, and properly a dead language, the German inflected but living, and the signification of the period is controlled by the inflections in both. It is natural, therefore, that the philologists of those nations should, in their grammatical inquiries, be specially attracted by the variable portion, the inflectional characteristics of words, and should less regard the logical relations which may, and in English do exist almost independently of form. However learned Continental scholars may be in the literature, the concrete philology of tongues foreign to their own, they have, in their grammatical speculations on those tongues, until recently, rather neglected syntax, except so far as it necessarily connects itself with correspondence of endings.†

The ultimate objects of the present course are philological, not linguistic. I shall therefore make the presentation of grammatical facts and theories always subordinate to the elucidation of the literary products and capacities of the English speech, and, so far as the grammar is concerned, I shall attempt little beyond a general view of the processes-loss and gain of inflections, and changes in the arrangement of words by which the AngloSaxon syntactical period has been converted into an English

one.

I have already urged what seem to me sufficient reasons for adopting this method, but were these grounds wanting, I should

*The theoretical supremacy of the alphabetical, written, over the oral tongue of France is remarkably exemplified in the laws of verse, for coupled endings in French poetry must, in general, rhyme to the eye as well as the ear. Thus, for example, the feminine possessive pronoun, or its homonym the first and third person singular present subjunctive, tienne, cannot be rhymed with the plural verb viennent, nor is mien a good rhyme to liens, though the consonance in both cases is unimpeachable.

Burguy's grammar of the Langue d'Oil, though exceedingly full upon the forms of individual words, is altogether silent upon syntax, except in the mere matter of concord. Rask's numerous grammars pursue much the same method, but Diez, Grammatik der Romanischen Sprachen, and other late German philoiogists, are much more complete on this point.

find others not less satisfactory in the opinion I entertain that the study of language is, in this country at least, taking too generally a wrong direction.

What is properly called philology, that is, the study of languages in connection with, and as a means to the knowledge of the literature, the history, the whole moral and intellectual action of different peoples, is much neglected by American scholars, and a professedly profound, but really most superficial research into linguistic analogies and ethnological relations is substituted instead. The modern science of linguistics, or comparative grammar and etymology, requires for its successful pursuit a command of facilities, and above all a previous discipline, which, in the United States, is within the reach of but a small proportion of men disposed to literary occupations, and hence for the present it must be the vocation of a few, not a part of the general education of the many. American scholars seldom possess the elementary grammatical training which is the first requisite to success in the study I am speaking of, and it is a very gross and a very prevalent error to suppose that this training can be acquired by the perusal of theoretical treatises, or, in other words, that it is possible to become a linguist without first being a philologist. The best, indeed the only means we at present possess of imbuing ourselves with the necessary preparatory attainment is, a thorough mastery both of the forms and of the practical synthesis of the words which compose the languages of Greece and Rome, and are organically combined in their literatures. This attainment at once involves a discipline fitting us for linguistic investigation, and provides us with a standard of comparison by which to measure and test the peculiarities of other tongues. Now, though forms may be taught by tables of stems and endings, yet combinations cannot, and the mastery we speak of is not to be attained by conning grammars and consulting dictionaries. It must be the product of two factors, a roteknowledge of paradigms and definitions, and a long and familiar converse with the intellect of classic antiquity as it still lives and