25 
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 philosophy, and in fact of the narrow arcana of 
the sciences studied during mediseval times; it remained 
the learned language in which cultured people could and 
did communicate. At the Reformation this began to alter ; 
culture ceased to be the peculiar heritage of the Romance 
peoples, and the so-called barbarians beyond the Rhine 
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 compositioDs ; 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. T 0 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 
