252 Miscellaneous Observations. English language is : so much accustomed are they to Latin terminations^ that they seem to forget the difference between those and our own. Now when a vast mass of forein words is let all at once into a nation, a similar bluntness of perception ensues. They many of them refuse to conform to the ana- logies which have hitherto guided its speech : and thus the people has to deal with two distinct classes of words, which cannot be brouscht under the same laws. Meanwhile that instinct, which is ever at work in all languages, assimilating whatever is incorporated into them, and endeavouring to produce a uniform homogeneous whole, does not cease to act : it picks out those forms in the old language which are most easily fitted to the new ; for instance the mode of formation by affixes, instead of that by modifying the radical part of the theme : but above all it has recourse to auxiliaries and prepositions, in lieu of organic flexions; for these may be applied to any word without the slightest alteration of its character. At the same time a kind of compromise takes place ; and the homesprung words gradually throw aside more and more of those peculiarities which separate them from their new brethren, till at length the combination assumes something like a harmonious consistency. Thus at the mar- riage of the Anglosaxon with the Norman French, one of the natural conditions was that the former should give up its cases : and to this stipulation it agreed, provided that some substitute could be found for them, in order to express the same relations which till then had been exprest by their means. Now when the genitive followed the noun on which it depended, the substitute was easily procured : the prepo- sition of fully answered the purpose, and, as it corresponded to the French de. served moreover to brine; the two Ian- guages nearer to each other; de having in like manner taken the place of the Latin genitive in the Romanesque tongues. On the other hand when the genitive preceded its noun, there was no way of filling up its place. To have said of heaven the ruler instead of heaverCs ruler ^ of the sword with the edge instead of ivith the sword'^s edge^ would have been utterly repugnant to the genius of each of the two united languages. In the former case the Norman had shewn what was to be done ; but it had nothing parallel to the
