prevail in the various parts of our own country, and even the more noteworthy dialects found among the classes of the population of Britain, form together only one language, is to assert a truism: no man in his sober senses would presume to doubt it. Let any one, however ignorant of history he may be, go about the globe, finding on each side of the Atlantic, and scattered from island to island, communities who speak English, though tinged with local colouring, and it will not enter into his mind to doubt that they were scattered thither from some common centre, that they all have their accordant speech by community of linguistic tradition. A like conclusion is reached almost as directly, if we follow back to the continent of Europe the traces of those adventurous tribes which, as history distinctly informs us, colonized at no very remote date the British isles, and note what languages are still spoken upon the shores whence they set forth on their career of conquest. The larger and more indispensable part of English, as has been already pointed out, finds its kindred in Germany, whence came the Saxon and Anglian portion of our ancestry. The community of tradition between the English and the German, Netherlandish, Swedish, Danish, and so on, is so pervading, and its evidences are so patent to view, that no one, probably, who has ever added a knowledge of either of the languages named to that of his English mother-tongue has failed to be struck by it, and to be convinced that, in their main structure and material, the two were one speech. But his experience has also taught him that the difference between them is far from being inconsiderable, and that, unfortunately for him, he is by no means able to speak and write German or Swedish, because English, like them, is Germanic. If an American, he will talk readily with an educated Englishman; he will even make shift to understand a Yorkshireman, a broad Scotchman, or an Irishman fresh from his native bogs; but put him and a German together, and the two are well-nigh as deaf and dumb to each other as if the one of them were a Greek or a Hindu. Plainly enough, the explanation of their difficulty is simply this: these two Germanic dialects, originally one language and belonging to a single community,
