slang, vulgarisms, and bad grammar, or indulges in mannerisms and artificial conceits, or twists words out of their true uses, from ignorance or caprice. But his individual influence is too weak to make head against the consenting usage of the community; his proposals, unless for special reasons, are passed over unnoticed, and he is forced to conform his speech to that of the rest; or, if he insist upon his independence, he is contemned as a blunderer, or laughed at as a humourist.
That an alteration should have been made at the time of Sigismund in any item of Latin grammar, either by the emperor himself, or by all the potentates and learned men of Christendom, was an impossibility. For the language was a dead one; its proprieties of speech were no longer dependent upon the sanction of present usage, but upon the authority of unchanging models. Much that we say is good English, though Shakspeare and Milton knew it not; nothing can be good Latin, unless it be found in Cicero and Virgil, or their compeers. And even under Tiberius, the case was nearly the same: the great authors whose example makes the law of Latin speech had already lived and written; and any deviation from their usage would have been recognized by all coming time as a later corruption. Hence, even had that emperor's blunder been accepted and slavishly imitated by his courtiers, his army, and his subjects at large, their consent could have made it good second-rate Latin only; it might have become the very best usage in the later Italian, French, and Spanish, but it would always have been rejected and avoided by the strict classicists. And all this, not for the reason that man has no power over language, but precisely for the contrary reason, that he has all power over it—that men's usage makes language. He, accordingly, who can direct usage can make or alter language. In this way only can exalted rank confer authority over speech: it can give a more powerful impulse toward that general acceptance and currency which anything must win in order to be language. There are instances on record in which the pun of a monarch has changed for all time the form of a word. Ethnologists well know that the name of
