ous change in language, it is not in the power of man either to produce or to prevent it: we might think as well of changing the laws which control the circulation of our blood, or of adding an inch to our height, as of altering the laws of speech, or inventing new words according to our own pleasure." Then, in order to establish the truth of this opinion, he goes on to cite a couple of historical instances, in which two famous emperors, Tiberius of Rome and Sigismund of Germany, committed blunders in their Latin, and were taken to task and corrected by humble grammarians, who informed their imperial majesties that, however great and absolute their power might be, it was not competent to make an alteration in the Latin language. The argument and conclusion we may take to be of this character: If so high and mighty a personage as an emperor could not do so small a thing as alter the gender and termination of a single word—not even, as Sigismund attempted, in a language which was dead, and might therefore be supposed incapable of making resistance to the indignity—much less can any one of inferior consideration hope to accomplish such a change, or any other of the changes, of greater or less account, which make up the history of speech: therefore, language is incapable of alteration by its speakers.
The utter futility of deriving such a doctrine from such a pair of incidents, or from a score, a hundred, or a thousand like them, is almost too obvious to be worth the trouble of pointing out. Against what authority more mighty than their own did these two emperors offend? Simply against the immemorial and well-defined usage of all who wrote and had ever written Latin—nothing more and nothing less. High political station does not confer the right to make and unmake language; a sovereign's grammatical blunders do not become the law of speech to his subjects, any more than do those of the private man. Each individual is, in a way, constantly trying experiments of modification upon his mother-tongue, from the time when, as a child, he drops sounds and syllables which it does not suit his convenience to pronounce, and frames inflections upon mistaken analogies, to that when, as a man, he is guilty of
