precisely the same; on the contrary, it is undergoing all the time a slow process of modification, which is capable of rendering it at length another language, unintelligible to those who now employ it. In order to be convinced of this, we have only to cast an eye backward over its past history, during the period for which we have its progress recorded in contemporary documents. How much is there in our present familiar speech which would be strange and meaningless to one of Elizabeth's court! How much, again, do we find in any of the writers of that period—in Shakspeare, for instance—which is no longer good current English! phrases and forms of construction which never fall from our lips now save as we quote them; scores of words which we have lost out of memory, or do not employ in the sense which they then bore. Go back yet farther, from half-century to half-century, and the case grows rapidly worse; and when we arrive at Chaucer and Gower, who are separated from us by a paltry interval of five hundred years, only fifteen or twenty descents from father to son, we meet with a dialect which has a half-foreign look, and can only be read by careful study, with the aid of a glossary. Another like interval of five hundred years brings us to the Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred, which is absolutely a strange tongue to us, not less unintelligible than the German of the present day, and nearly as hard to learn. And yet, we have no reason to believe that any one of those thirty or forty generations of Englishmen through whom we are descended from the contemporaries of King Alfred was less simply and single-mindedly engaged to transmit to its children the same language which it had received from its ancestors than is the generation of which we ourselves form a part. It may well be that circumstances were less favourable to some of them than to us, and that our common speech stands in no danger of suffering in the next thousand years a tithe of the change which it has suffered in the past thousand. But the forces which are at work in it are the same now that they have always been, and the effects they are producing are of the same essential character: both are inherent in the nature of lan-
