12 HISTORY OF LANGUAGE 



so long as a healthy national life exists, never moves far away from 

 it. The great authors are read and studied everywhere and at all 

 times. They make familiar to the knowledge of their admirers the 

 words and constructions they employ; and these in turn are repro- 

 duced by their imitators. The operation of this influence has been 

 curiously illustrated in the history of our own tongue. To us the 

 language of the Elizabethan age is much nearer than it was to the 

 men of the eighteenth century, mainly because the authors of that 

 earlier age are now much more read. As a result their words and 

 usages have unconsciously become a part of our own intellectual 

 equipment. Very few would be the men found now who would take 

 the view, widely entertained at the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, that a great deal of Shakespeare's language was not merely 

 archaic but practically obsolete. The numerous imitators of Spenser 

 later in that same century furnished glossaries to their productions, 

 explaining the antiquated or unusual terms they had employed. In 

 some cases this was needed distinctly; for the words they used had 

 never any existence outside of their own pages. But they frequently 

 denned those about whose meaning no man of ordinary education 

 would now entertain a doubt. Even the necessity they seemed to 

 have felt themselves under of explaining the more purely poetic 

 words excites a certain surprise. What poet would think now of 

 apologizing, as did Prior in 1706, for using such obsolete words, as he 

 called them, as behest in the carefully defined sense of " command," 

 band in that of " army," / ween in that of " I think," prowess in that 

 of "strength," and whilom in that of "heretofore." Some of these 

 very definitions show too that in all cases he did not understand the 

 exact meaning of the word he employed. 



But far more than in the vocabulary is the conserving power of 

 literature especially of a great literature exhibited in the gram- 

 matical structure. The moment it has been in existence long enough 

 to make its influence felt, it at once proceeds to restrict change there 

 within the closest possible limits; or if it permits any to be made with 

 comparative ease, its action is directed in such instances to the selec- 

 tion of one out of two or more forms in common use. Let me illus- 

 trate its methods in this particular by a reference to the history of the 

 two conjugations of our tongue. After the Norman Conquest English 

 lost the literature she possessed which had attached to it any author- 

 ity. Though not entirely disused as a written speech, there existed 

 no standard to which any one felt bound to conform. In consequence 

 a general dissolution of the grammatical structure took place. One 

 of its results was that verbs of the strong conjugation went over to the 

 weak in great numbers. It seemed for a while as if it were merely a 

 question of time when every one of the former would disappear from 

 the language. Analogy was entirely against them. Any new verbs 



