131 
possibility. But Norman French, following the like influ- 
ence of Danish, accelerated the complete disuse of almost all 
the Anglo-Saxon inflections — in fact changed the inflectional 
Anglo-Saxon for the prepositional English, and Norman 
words were transplanted and took root. The first English 
writer of commanding genius, Chaucer, established in our 
language a host of Norman French words, which enriched the 
poverty-stricken vocabulary of the AnglO' Saxon, and made 
(with the Celtic words) the English oi his day a composite 
tongue. Of how heterogeneous a nature is our dictionary 
of to-day I need not say. 
The historical and literary meanings of the words Anglo- 
Saxon and English which I have thus sketched are in the 
main those which have been established by the profoundest 
authorities. And for the sake of clearing up an historical 
misapprehension which does not exist, we are to obscure 
the work of Sharon, Turner and Kemble, of Palgrave and 
Lappenberg, of Bosworth and of Latham^ and to proclaim 
that all the great English historians who have ever written 
must now be re-issued with explanatory notes correcting 
their common blunder. Is there any disease demanding 
such a remedy? We are oi mixed race, speaking a mixed 
language. We call both race and language English. It 
will introduce far greater confusion to extend this term to a 
time before the mingling of blood and vocabulary had well 
begun than ever the old distinctions have caused. I must 
ask pardon for having had to go over so much elementary 
ground to prove this, but we have popular writers now-a- 
days who write as though the great students and authorities 
of the past had never existed, and there is perhaps no harm 
