CHAP.

III.

POPE.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot;
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Labour and rest that equal periods keep;
Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;
Desires compos'd, affections ever ev'n ;

Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to heav'n.
Grace shines around her with serenest beams,
And whispering angels prompt her golden dreams.
For her th' unfading rose of Eden blooms,
And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes.

YOUNG.

Let Indians, and the gay, like Indians, fond
Of feather'd fopperies, the sun adore;
Darkness has more divinity for me;

It strikes thought inward; it drives back the soul
To settle on herself, our point supreme.

There lies our theatre: there sits our judge.
Darkness the curtain drops o'er life's dull scene;
'Tis the kind hand of Providence stretch'd out
'Twixt man and vanity; 'tis reason's reign,
And virtue's too; these tutelary shades
Are man's asylum from the tainted throng.

Night is the good man's friend, and guardian too.

It no less rescues virtue, than inspires.

SWIFT.

Wisdom is a fox, who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out. 'Tis a cheese, which by how much the richer has the thicker, the homelier, and the coarser coat; and whereof, to a judicious palate, the maggots are the best. 'Tis a sack posset, wherein the deeper you go you will find it the sweeter. But then, lastly, 'tis a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth, and pay you with nothing but a

worm.

ROBERTSON.

This great emperor, in the plenitude of his power, and in possession of all the honours which can flatter the heart of man, took the extraordinary resolution to resign his kingdom; and to withdraw entirely from any concern in business or the affairs of this world, in order that he might spend the remainder of his days in retirement and solitude. Dioclesian is, perhaps, the only prince, capable of holding the reins of government, who ever resigned them from deliberate choice, and who continued during many years to enjoy the tranquillity of retirement, without fetching one penitent sigh, or casting back one look of desire towards the power or dignity which he had abandoned.

Charles V.

CHAP.

III.

HUME.

The beauties of her person, and graces of her air, combined to make her the most amiable of women; and the charms of her address and conversation, aided the impression which her lovely figure made on the heart of all beholders. Ambitious and active in her temper, yet inclined to cheerfulness and society; of a lofty spirit, constant and even vehement in her purpose, yet politic, gentle, and affable, in her demeanor, she seemed to partake only so much of the male virtues as to render her estimable, without relinquishing those soft graces which compose the proper ornament of her sex.

GIBBON.

The

In the second century of the Christian æra the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reve

rence.

CHAP.
III.

JOHNSON.

Of genius, that power, which constitutes a poet; that quality, without which judgment is cold and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates; the superiority must, with some hesitation, be allowed to Dryden. It is not to be inferred that of this poetical vigour Pope had only a little, because Dryden had more; for every other writer since Milton must give place to Pope; and even of Dryden it must be said, that if he has brighter paragraphs, he has not better poems.

FROM the preceding instances we may form an idea of the power of the Saxon language; but by no means a just idea; for we must not conclude that the words which are not Saxon could not be supplied by Saxon words. On the contrary, Saxon terms might be substituted for almost all the words not marked as Saxon.

To impress this sufficiently on the mind of the reader, it will be necessary to show how much of our ancient language we have laid aside, and have suffered to become obsolete; because all our writers, from Chaucer to our own times, have used words of foreign origin rather than our own.

IN three pages of Alfred's Orosius I found 78 words which have become obsolete, out of 548, or about 4. In three pages of his Boetius I found 143 obsolete, out of 666, or about. In three pages of his Bede I found 230 obsolete, out of 969, or about 3. The difference in the proportion between these and the Orosius proceeds from the latter containing many historical names. Perhaps we shall be near the truth if we say, as a general principle, that one fifth of the Anglo-Saxon language has ceased to be used in modern English. This loss must be of course taken into account when we estimate the copiousness of our ancient language, by considering how much of it our English authors exhibit.

I CANNOT agree with Hickes, in classing the works of Alfred under that division of the Saxon language which he calls Danish Saxon. The Danes had no footing in England till after the period of Alfred's manhood, and

when they obtained a settlement, it was in East Anglia and Northumbria. We cannot therefore suppose that Alfred borrowed any part of his language from the Danes. None of their language could have become naturalised in Wessex before he wrote, nor have been adopted by him without either reason or necessity. We may therefore refer to the Anglo-Saxon laws before the reign of Athelstan, and to the works of Alfred, as containing the Anglo-Saxon language in its genuine and uncorrupted state.

CHAP.

III.

IV.

CHAP. IV.

On the Affinities and Analogies of the ANGLO-SAXON Language.

CHAP. ALL languages which I have examined, besides discovering some direct ancestral consanguinity with particular tongues; as the Saxon with the Gothic, Swedish, Danish, &c., and the Latin with the Greek; display also, in many of their words, a more distant relationship with almost all. Some word or other may be traced in the vocabularies of other nations; and every language bears strong marks, that events have happened to the human race, like those which Moses has recorded in his account of the confusion of tongues, and the dispersion of mankind. The fragments of an original tongue seem, more or less, to exist in all; and no narrated phenomenon of ancient history accounts for the affinities and analogies of words which all languages exhibit, so satisfactorily as the abruption of a primitive language into many others, sufficiently different to compel separations of the general population, and yet retaining in all some indications of a common origin. '

In such a confusion of mind, memory, and organs, as must have attended such an incident, most of the words and much of the structure of language would be materially altered in the future pronunciation, recollection, and use of the scattered families then existing, and consequentially in the orthography. But it is probable that many words would descend amid these variations into all the subsequent tongues not the same words in every one, because various accidents would diversify what each retained; but every tongue will be found to have several terms which exist

1 The letters which I sent on the affinities of languages to the Royal Society of Literature, and which have been printed in the first volume of its Transactions, contain copious illustrations on this curious subject. The examples there given of numerous similarities, present many, which nothing that history has recorded satisfactorily accounts for, except the Mosaic narration of the incidents at Babel.