tongue of its own, to a large extent unintelligible to its 
neighbours. Latin had then ceased to exist except as a 
dead and artificial language. It was no longer the universal 
language. But it still remained the universal language of 
divinity, of philosophj^, and' in fact of the narrow arcana of 
the sciences studied during mediaeval times; it remained 
the learned language in which cultured people could and 
did communicate. At the Beformation this began to alter ; 
culture ceased to be the peculiar heritage of the Bomance 
peoples, and the so-called barbarians beyond the Bhine 
began to elbow their way into the arena of science, litera- 
ture, and art, and gradually to acquire a peculiar vantage in 
all three. These barbarians spoke a language whose pedi- 
gree was not rooted in Latin. Latin to them was a foreign 
tongue, not as it was to Frenchmen and Italians, their 
grandmother-language, if I may coin the phrase. For a 
while its difficulties were eagerly mastered by the most 
patient race of students that ever lived ; and like the rest 
of Europe for a while the Germans used Latin in their 
various learned compositions ; but it was gradually disused. 
More and more valuable matter was published in the verna- 
cular, and this was imitated rapidly elsewhere, so that the 
Latin language ceased to be a practical means of com- 
munication, and the Babel of tongues replaced the one 
uniform medium of intercourse. There can be no doubt 
that this was a serious loss. There are some people who 
value the mere knowledge of a language for its own sake, 
and acquire with equal delight and ease two or three lan- 
guages. To others the difficulty is as great as is the grievance, 
and among the latter class are numbered many who value a 
language not for itself, who look upon the knowledge of 
several languages as a mere feat of memory in which one 
knows several names for each idea instead of one, and only 
value the knowledge of a language in so far as it gives them 
a key to the knowledge which is buried under it. This class 
