undergone by the Anglo-Saxon in becoming English. This loss, begun before the Conquest, took place largely during the centuries immediately following it. It was then that the guardianship of the language was in the hands of ignorant. men; when the dialect of Wessex, in which the Anglo-Saxon that has reached us was written, had lost its authority, and every man was a law unto himself. It is at such times that grammatical disintegration is most rapid. Grammatical changes do occur at other times, but the point to accent is, that they take place more slowly then. It is literature that gives to language much of its fixedness. Every grammatical change on the printed page challenges the attention of many, who, if conservative in anything, are so in speech. Indeed, the change cannot be made except by their suffrage, for usage alone determines what is law in language.

Loss of grammatical terminations is not unusual. All highly inflected languages suffer it. The Anglo-Saxon was unique only in the rapidity and in the extent of it. In the earlier, the synthetic, era, forms multiply until what seem afterward to be useless distinctions are registered in them, burdening the memory, and encumbering the machinery of expression. Then abandonment begins, and the language enters upon its analytic stage. It adds efficiency, as did the steam-engine, by simplification. Witness, in proof, the gain made by dropping the dative and instrumental cases, the dual number, and the declensions of the adjective.

But, as the language in its synthetic stage took on forms subsequently thought needless, so in its analytic period it may throw away what afterward we might like to recover. There seems to be no good reason why a language may not resume cast-off forms, though it seldom or never does. But it may take on wholly new ones, and this, too, when the analytic

tendency is rifest, and the changes most sweeping. We have seen that within a century and a quarter a continuous passive in the present and the imperfect has been added to our grammatical equipment. We have seen, too, that our Anglo-Saxon method of comparison has been reinforced by a second, the adverbial, and that now we uniformly place to before the infinitive. This addition and this extension, we wish to say parenthetically, have been made in face of the claim that a mixture of grammars is impossible; for we borrowed the one from the French, and did the other largely under the compulsion of French analogy.

Disuse of forms does not prove indifference to the distinctions which they indicate. These distinctions can be made in other ways. Indeed, the dropping of inflections has been continued in English while intellectual discrimination has been keenest, and while expression has kept pace in exactness with the growing definiteness of thought. It would be easy to show how, by our auxiliary verbs, our adjectives, and adverbs, modal and other, and our prepositional phrases, we can express more delicate relations and finer shades of distinction than by any multiplication of cases or other grammatical forms.

We might say, in closing, that along with the extinction of forms, and in consequence of it, words in English have lost something of their old freedom of position in the sentence. For when, in their terminations, words have ticketed upon them their relations to other words, they can stand almost anywhere in the sentence without disguising these relations and obscuring the thought.

But it is to be noted that where this freedom of position is very great, little is likely to be made of it in the matter of style. The very commonness of the possession incapacitates

it for service; just as in Latin and Greek, rhyme was not used, because, through a surfeit of like terminations, rhyming would have been easy. But any abridgment of freedom of position puts a price upon what remains, and makes position a valuable factor in expression. In a language like ours, then, where the place of words is by no means rigidly fixed, nor yet wholly without restriction, a word or a phrase, depending for its force upon those with which it is immediately yoked, can have its force brought out to the full; and the point of a sentence, resting in great measure upon the arrangement of its parts, can be perfectly secured. In such a language, the art of proper placing is hardly secondary to that of apt selection; and the skill and success of our literary commanders largely lie in the happy marshalling of their verbal hosts.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE DIALECTS IN ENGLISH.

XXX. The Differences between the Dialects.-As we saw, the Teutonic invaders of the island were not one people, but three, and they settled in different portions of Britain. Their linguistic differences, aggravated by the settlement of the Danes in the north, by the more active communication kept up between this portion of Britain and the continent, and by the flocking of the Normans to the north in greater numbers than elsewhere-these original differences, thus intensified, could not but show themselves in differences of speech persisting even after these peoples blended with the NormanFrench, and the English language began. At all events, the grammatical changes of which we have been speaking, changes in the noun and the verb particularly, changes which it took centuries to make, did not take place throughout England at the same uniform rate. The consequence was, that during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the language of England was not univocal; dialects prevailed, dialects differing essentially from each other.

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The geographical boundaries between these ran east and west; the men of these parts, as it were under the same portion of heaven, agreeing more in the sound of their speech than men of the north with men of the south." That spoken north of the Humber, and as far as to the Firth of Forth, was called the Northern Dialect; that spoken between the

Humber and the Thames was called the Midland Dialect; and that between the Thames and the southern coast, the Southern Dialect. The two differing most were those widest apart geographically.

In the matter of grammar, the Northern was radical, and abandoned its inflections without reluctance, attaining, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, the simplicity of modern English. The Southern was conservative, and held to the old inflections with great tenacity. And, in the matter of sounds, the Northern generally retained the hard, guttural sounds of the Anglo-Saxon; the Southern softened these into palatals.

1. The Noun.-The Northern dialect led the way in dropping the plural en (Anglo-Saxon an) ending, and in giving to nouns the plural ending es or s (Anglo-Saxon masculine as of the vowel declension). The s of the genitive they often dropped. The Southern clung tenaciously to the plural en, and even extended it to nouns which in AngloSaxon were of the vowel declension.

2. The Pronoun.-In the Northern, the double genitive oures, youres, hires, and heres occur side by side with oure, youre, hire, and here. These double genitives we keep in ours, yours, hers, and theirs. The Southern added n instead of s, and said ouren, youren, hiren, heren (their'n), which, somewhat changed, survive in provincial English now. 3. The Verb.-The Northern (1) led in exchanging for s the th of the third person singular indicative present eth; (2) used es in place of est in the second person; (3) at times made the first person end in s; and (4) made the present plural in s. It often dropped (1) the ending of the third singular; (2) the plural ending throughout; (3) the ed of the preterite; and (4) hardly ever used the prefix y or i in its