616 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON 



rich variety, ready to be formed into a new ordered garden of vocal expression, as soon as 

 the God-sent gardener shall appear. This was the case of Latin from the fall of the West 

 Roman Empire under Romulus Augustulus in 475, to the apparition of Dante at the start 

 of the 14th century, who, by the magic of genius, elevated the lower platform of the 

 Roman speech into the dignity of a classical dialect. Italian thus took the place of Latin, 

 commonly talked of as a new language, but more accurately a native graceful modification 

 of the old. 



IV. Here the victory of the transforming force was decidedly on the side of the lower 

 platform, and quite naturally, of course, as within the native bounds of the speech of 

 Romulus and Julius Caesar ; but outside these bounds, the action was different ; and where, 

 as in Gaul, the native Celtic element was weak, and the foreign element, the Latin, strong 

 in the triple range of political, military, and ecclesiastical superiority, there an entirely new 

 language was formed, not indeed altogether of pure Latin elements, but of a preponderance 

 of Latin, which partly from the Celtic blood, it may be, partly from the distance of Gaul 

 from the centre of formative linguistic force, south of the Appenines, became so daintily 

 corrupted, and neatly transformed, as to present the type of a language which, whatever 

 might be its virtues, certainly was altogether shaken loose both from the manly majesty 

 of the parent Latin and the musical sweetness of the sistered Italian. 



V. But the fates of Latin, as modifying or re-creating our modern European languages, 

 were not to end here. With the Normans, about 600 years after the departure of the 

 Romans from Britain, in its French dress it invaded England and conquered both 

 England and Scotland, and stamped a Roman type on our Teutonic speech in a very 

 notable fashion. The product, however, was of a very different character ; for the 

 Saxons and Danes, who had formed the stamina of the British nation for 500 years 

 before the Normans appeared, had a culture of their own, far superior to anything that 

 Gaul with its Druids could boast : with this the Norman was obliged to make a compro- 

 mise, and a mixed language, half and half alike, so to speak, was the result. But, though 

 the compromise looked fair enough when counted on the fingers, the result could not but 

 bear the striking features of a foreign conquest. Court and culture and fashion all acted 

 with their usual potency over the unlabelled rustic speech of the subordinate multitude ; 

 and the English language came into view not as a pure Teutonic language, like Dutch or 

 Danish, or Swedish or German, but a mixed language of scraps and patches, like a motley 

 carpet pieced together, of two patterns, by two adverse fingers that had no common 

 counsel to control them ; or, with a different figure, we may say, like a sign-post on one 

 road with two faces, one face looking backward to rude Saxon ancestors, and the other 

 forward to the gentlemanly French of the Norman conquerors in the 11th century, and 

 the scholarly Latin of Oxford, Paris, and St Andrews in the 16th. 



VI. On these precedents and analogies we are now prepared to deal discriminately 



