who was a fine classical scholar, tells us that the perfect purity with which the Greeks wrote their own language was justly attributed to their entire abstinence from every other. It is a saying as old as Cicero that women, being accustomed solely to their native tongue, usually speak and write it with a grace and purity surpassing those of men. "A man who thinks the knowledge of Latin essential to the purity of English diction," says Macaulay, "either has never conversed with an accomplished woman, or does not deserve to have conversed with her. We are sure that all persons who are in the habit of hearing public speaking must have observed that the orators who are fondest of quoting Latin are by no means the most scrupulous about marring their native tongue. We could mention several members of Parliament, who never fail to usher in their scraps of Horace and Juvenal with half-a-dozen false concords."

Mr. Buckle, in his "History of Civilization in England," does not hesitate to express the opinion that our great English scholars have corrupted the English language by jargon so uncouth that a plain man can hardly discern the real lack of ideas which their barbarous and mottled dialect strives to hide." He then adds that the principal reason why well educated women write and converse in a purer style than well educated men, is "because they have not formed their taste according to those ancient classical standards, which, admirable as they are in themselves, should never be introduced into a state of society unfitted for them." To nearly the same effect is the declaration of that most acute judge of style, Thomas De Quincey, who says that if you would read our noble language in its native beauty, picturesque form, idiomatic

propriety, racy in its phraseology, delicate yet sinewy in its composition, you must steal the mail-bags, and break open the women's letters. On the other hand, who has forgotten what havoc Bentley made when he laid his classic hand on "Paradise Lost"? What prose style, always excepting that of the "Areopagitica," is worse for imitation than that of Milton, with its long, involved, half-rhythmical periods, "dragging, like a wounded snake, their slow length along "? Yet Bentley and Milton, whose minds were imbued, saturated with Greek literature through and through, were probably the profoundest classical scholars that England can boast. Let the student, then, who has a patriotic love for his native tongue, study it in its most idiomatic writers, and beware lest while he is wandering in fancy along the banks of the Meander, the Ilyssus, or the Tiber, or drinking at the fountains of Helicon, he heedlessly and profanely trample under foot the beautiful, fragrant, and varied productions of his own land.

CHAPTER X.

ONOMATOPES.

'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence;

The sound must seem an echo to the sense.-POPE.

Our blunted senses can no more realize the original delicacy of the appellative faculty, than they can attain to the keen perfection in which they still exist in the savage.-LEPSIUS.

W

HATEVER opinion we have of the onomatopoeia theory of the origin of language, so ably advocated by Farrar, Wedgwood, and Whitney, and so keenly ridiculed by Max Müller and others, it is impossible to deny that there is a natural relationship between thought and articulate sound,—in other words that certain sounds are the natural expression of certain sensations, and of mental states that are analogous to those sensations. All languages contain words which, in their very structure as composite sounds, more or less nearly resemble in quality, as soft or harsh, the sounds they designate. Such, in our language, are words representing animal sounds, as quack, cackle, roar, whinny, bellow, caw, croak, hiss, screech, etc.; words representing inarticulate human sounds, as laugh, cough, sob, shriek, whoop, etc.; sounds representing the collision of hard bodies, as clap, rap, tap, slap, etc.; sounds representing the collision of softer bodies, as dab, dub, thud, dub-a-dub; sounds representing motion through the air, as whizz, buzz, sough, etc.; sounds representing resonance, as clang, knell, ring, twang, etc.; and sounds rep

resenting the motion of liquids, as clash, splash, dash, etc.* Even the various degrees of intensity in sound are expressed by modifications of the vowels,-high notes being represented by i, low, broad sounds by a, and diminution by the change of a or o to i; while continuance is expressed by a reduplication of syllables, as in murmur, etc., and by the addition of r and l, as in grab, grapple, wrest, wrestle, crack, crackle, dab, dabble. Animals are often named, upon the same principle, from their cries, birds especially, as we see in whip-poor-will, cuckoo, crow, quail, curlew, chough, owl, peewit, turtle, and many others. Again, we find that, independently of all confusion between a word. and its associations, words having a harsh signification generally have a rough, harsh form, while words that denote something soft and pleasing, or sweet and tender, seem to breathe the very sensation they describe. The various passions of men naturally find expression in different sounds. Anger, vehemence, gentleness, etc., have each a language, a style of utterance, peculiar to themselves. Love and sorrow prompt smooth, melodious expressions, while violent emotions express themselves in words that are hurried, abrupt and harsh.

Were further proof wanting of this connection between external sounds and the processes of the mind, it is supplied in the strongest form by the fact that the different languages of the earth are stamped with marks of predominant local influences,― of the climate, scenery, and other physical conditions amid which they have been evolved. Rousseau, a century ago, called attention to the fact that the languages of the rich and prodigal South, being the

*This classification is from Farrar, who has abridged it from Wedgwood, in Phil. Trans. II., 118.

daughters of passion, are poetic and musical, while those of the North, the daughters of necessity, bear a trace of their hard origin, and express by rude sounds rude sensations. Who does not discern in the "soft and vowelled undersong" of the Italian the effect of a climate altogether different from that which has produced the stridulous, hirrient roughness of the German, the Dutch, and the Russian tongues? What but different geographical positions has made the language of the South-Sea Islanders so different from the dissonant clicks of the Hottentot, or the guttural polysyllables of the Cherokee? What other cause has made the language of the Tlascalans, the hardy and independent mountaineers dwelling in the high volcanic regions between Mexico and Vera Cruz, so much rougher than the polished Tezucan, or the popular dialect of the Aztecs, who are of the same family as the mountaineers ? It is because the vocal organs, which are formed with exceeding delicacy, are affected by the most trifling physical influences, that English is spoken in Devonshire, England, with a splutter, and in Suffolk with an attenuated whine; that the language spoken in the northern counties is harsher than that spoken in the southern; and that in the mountainous regions we find a harsher dialect than we hear in the plains.

The manner in which words are formed by means of the imitations of natural sounds is illustrated by the word "cock" which is considered by etymologists to be an abbreviated imitation of chanticleer's "cock-a-doodle-doo!" From the name of the animal, which is thus derived from its cry, and then generalized and made fruitful in derivatives, come, by allusion to the bird's pride and strut, the words "coquette," cockade," the "cock" of a gun, to

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