would be so much more conspicuous than theirs. Its spread began with the extension of Roman dominion, and was the plainest and most unequivocal sign of the thorough and penetrating nature of that dominion. Not content with the loose and nominal sway which the Persian sovereign exercised over the heterogeneous parts of his vast empire, or the yet laxer authority of the modern Mongol rulers over their wider conquests, the Romans infused, as it were, a new organic life into the vast body corporate of which they were the head, and made their influence felt through its every nerve and fibre. Italy they first subjected and Romanized. The yoke they imposed, and riveted by their military colonies, their laws and institutions, their culture, and their all-penetrating administration, was a bond of community against which no other proved able to maintain itself; all the languages of the peninsula, from the Gaulish of the north to the Greek of the extreme south, gave way by degrees before the tongue of the conquering city, and Italy became a country of one uniform speech. And yet not wholly uniform: relics of the ancient languages maintained themselves for a long time in certain more inaccessible districts, and their influence was doubtless to be distinctly seen in the varying local dialects of the different parts of the peninsula—as, indeed, traces of it are even now discoverable there. The common speech of Italy, too, setting aside these dialectic distinctions, was not the pure polished Latin of Cicero and Virgil, but a ruder idiom, containing already the germs of many of the changes exhibited by the modern Italian and the other Romanic tongues. The same process of conquest and incorporation into the Roman community was carried farther, upon a grand and surprising scale, into the other countries of Europe. The Celts of Gaul, the Celts and Iberians of Spain, gave up their own languages and adopted that of their rulers and civilizers, not less completely than have the Celts of Ireland, within the last few centuries, exchanged their Irish speech for English: of Celtic words ‘ and usages only scanty and unimportant traces are to be found in the modern French and Spanish. The same fate threatened Germany, had not her brave and hardy tribes
