THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. 353 



despotism of Asia over Europe, Greece had full time to put forth her intellec- 

 tual strength in all departments, according to the law of a natural growth, before, 

 from internal dissensions, she was obliged to submit politically to the world-wide 

 influence of Rome. But here again the importance of an early and ripe culture 

 of the national language showed itself in the most brilliant style. The con- 

 queror, instead of crushing, stooped to adopt the language of the conquered; 

 and when the Western Empire fell to pieces by the incursion of northern 

 barbarians, Greek still flourished in the oldest half of the Christian Church 

 and the Eastern half of the Roman Empire. It thus obtained a lease of life 

 more than 1000 years beyond what might have been supposed to be the epoch 

 of its natural demise ; and when, by the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire in 

 1453, its complete collapse seemed almost certain, the repulsion between the 

 Turkish faith and the Christian preserved the language from the amalgamating 

 and absorbing force which, under the common circumstances of conquest, must 

 have worked its dissolution. It remains, therefore, at the present hour, a 

 wonder of linguistic longevity unique in the history of language, and bidding 

 fair, in spite of the artificial life in which Latin is preserved by the Roman 

 Church, to spread out the branches of a green old age over every part of the world 

 that is not too wise in its own conceit, or too isolated in its own narrowness, 

 to own the civilising influence of the moral culture which belongs to the present, 

 only when it bears with it the most valuable inheritance of the past. 



XV. The disturbing forces alluded to in the previous section either produce 

 what may be called a violent death, if the resisting forces, as in the case of Gaul 

 and Spain when conquered by Rome, are weak, or they produce a fusion more 

 or less complete between the superimposed and the underlying stratum, and 

 a mixed language of greater or less heterogeneousness of structure is produced. 

 Such is the character of our own English tongue. Now, though it is quite sure 

 that chance cannot make a language any more than a world, yet out of a chanceful 

 throwing together of two languages, a mixed product of very excellent character 

 may proceed ; just as when two good puddings are thrown together, the com- 

 pound result will at all events contain all the good that is in each of the constitu- 

 ents, a good resulting not from the chance fashion of the mixture, but from the 

 cunning preparation of the materials out of which the mixture was made. With 

 all this, however, it is quite certain that this blind way of throwing two good pud- 

 dings into one is not the way to make the best pudding ; there is no certainty 

 in such a process that the two puddings may harmonise and coalesce into a 

 congruous, classical unity of the pudding genus. And so the English language, 

 however excellent, and however worthy of the commendation of such a distin- 

 guished philologer as Jacob Grimm, and however glorified by its having been 

 made the organ of expression by the greatest dramatist the world ever saw, has 

 some very manifest defects, which, both from a philological and a practical point 



