INTRODUCTION. 11 



took of the spirit of the Romantic School, felt the electrical 

 touch of Lord Byron's verse, listened to the great orators 

 of the third French Revolution, and could tell us of the 

 now forgotten spell which Napoleon I. exercised over 

 millions of reluctant admirers. Most of these fascinations 

 and interests live only in the narratives of contemporaries 

 and surviving witnesses, few of whom have succeeded in 

 perpetuating them with pen or brush, making them intel- 

 ligible to a future age ; most of them die with the genera- 

 tion itself. Not only have we listened to their words and 

 seen in their features the traces of the anxieties they lived 

 through, in their eyes the reflected enthusiasms and as- 

 pirations, in their glances and in the trembling of their 

 voices the last quiverings of bygone passion and joy, we 

 have received from them a still more eloquent testimonial, 

 a more living inheritance. But this we cannnot hand 

 down to our children in the form in which it was given 

 to us: it has not passed through our hands unaltered. 

 This inheritance is the language which our parents have 

 taught us. Unknowingly they have themselves altered is. 



the tongue, the words and sentences, which they received, which Lan- 

 guage under- 

 depositing in these altered words and modes of speech the g re n f t 



spirit, the ideas, the thought of their lifetime. These proof O a f the 

 words and modes of speech they handed to us in our nfe of ms 

 infancy, as the mould wherein to shape our minds, as the 

 shell wherein to envelop our slowly growing thoughts, as 

 the instrument with which to convey our ideas. In their 

 language, in the phrases and catchwords peculiar to them, 

 we learnt to distinguish what was important and interest- 

 ing from what was trivial or indifferent, the subjects which 



