308 Rev. A. D'Ors'ey [Feb. 1, 



longer useful in a practical age like ours. Wordsworth was right 

 when he said language was " not the dress, it was the very incarnation 

 of thought," a union as close as that of body and soul. lie felt this 

 preface necessary to vindicate the study of- words against those who 

 fancied it was opposed to the study of things ; but his business was 

 now with our own mother-tongue. The attention of the audience was 

 then called to a very large niap of Europe, coloured " glossographi- 

 cally," to show the fields occupied by the great families of languages. 

 Beside it was suspended a chart, headed " Indo-European Languages," 

 containing the great stems — Celtic, Germanic, Graeco-Roman, Scandi- 

 navian, and Sclavonic — at the heads of columns, under which were 

 ranged the languages and dialects. The speaker said that we were in 

 origin oriental, kindred in language even with the Hindoo. The clearest 

 idea of the subject might be formed by the conception of waves of 

 peoples and tongues rolling from the East, of which the Celtic was the 

 first, its localities being now the extreme western points of Europe. 

 The stems with which English had to do, were the Germanic and the 

 Grseco-Roman. He then pointed to another large map, similarly 

 coloured, of the British Islands, with an accompanying table of lan- 

 guages and dialects. Coloured diagrams were also exhibited, showing 

 the large proportion of Saxon in English. Out of 100,000 words, 

 60,000 were of Teutonic origin, 30,000 of Romanic, and 10,000 from 

 other sources. Our best authors used far more Saxon than Latin : 

 Shakspeare, 85 per cent, of Saxon ; even Johnson, 75 per cent. ; 

 and Gibbon, our most Latinized writer, 65. The English Bible 

 had 97 per cent, of Saxon words. The writers of our own day were 

 showing a much greater love for good, strong, home-bred words. 

 He now begged his hearers to look at the bare fact, that there were 

 twice as many Saxon words as Latin ones in our tongue, and then to 

 say whether our present school-craft was right, which utterly passed 

 by the one and unfairly fostered the other. It was too bad that we 

 should thus undervalue our own speech, of which Grimm had said, 

 " The English language possesses a veritable power of expression, such 

 as perhaps never stood at the command of any other language of man." 

 The speaker then asked, how was English taught? He quoted 

 Quintilian as to the choice of nurses with good pronunciation, and 

 censured the carelessness of English parents in allowing vulgar, un- 

 educated servants to surround their children. He next adverted to 

 the sad condition of English teaching in most of our National Schools, 

 proving his assertion from the reports of the Inspectors. He had 

 ascertained that in our great public schools, no direct attention was 

 paid to English ; no recognition of the dignity of our own language 

 and of its idiomatic structure, so different from that of the ancient 

 tongues ; no organized English department with an able Saxon 

 scholar at its head : most of the head-masters being of opinion that 

 sufficient provision was made by the ordinary practice of translation, 

 writing an occasional theme, or declaiming a passage from Shakspeare 

 on "Speech-day." Some exceptions existed, — the City of London 



