these two types, alternately dominating English civilization, politics, and war. It is not by accident but by a deep, inherent necessity that two great parties of Liberals and Conservatives, under whatever various names, have divided and alternately controlled the kingdom and the empire. As now one and now the other of these antagonistic tendencies has prevailed, as one has disarranged, hampered or restricted the other, the many sided English people have somehow, to use their own homely phrase, "muddled through," often to a success that has amazed even themselves. Turn where we will in English history or language, we can not get away from the mingling of races that has modified all.

The English language, as it exists to-day, has written all over it the historic story. To quote Freeman again:*

"The changes in language which followed the Norman Conquest were of two kinds. There is the great influx of foreign words into our vocabulary, and there is the loss of inflexions and the general breaking up of grammatical forms. . . . . The change in grammar has its parallel in other Teutonic languages; the change in vocabulary, in anything like the degree in which it took place in English, is peculiar to our own tongue. It is the direct result of what happened in Britain, and did not happen elsewhere; namely, the conquest of a Teutonic people by Romance-speaking conquerors.

"For three hundred years English ceased to be a literary and courtly language. English had become a vulgar tongue, the tongue which was the daily speech only of

* "History of the Norman Conquest," vol. V, ch. 25, p. 514.

the less cultivated classes. The tongue of learning was Latin; the tongue of polite intercourse was French."

How, then, did English ever rise again? There are, first, to be considered the pliancy and adaptability, the "imitative quality," of the Normans, which had led them to adopt the French language in Normandy. There was more in the steady rise of the English people, after the death of the Conqueror, to power in the State, in government and war. What was true of the position of the English speech in one generation would be less true in the next and the next. When a Saxon princess came to the throne as the bride of Henry I, the Conqueror's son, when Norman kings had again and again to depend on the loyalty of their English subjects to defend them against their own barons or against claimants from beyond the sea, the speech of the English people thus rising in importance could not be wholly neglected or despised. Finally, and probably most important of all, was the stubborn inflexibility of the native English race. They would not give up the English speech. The English yeomanry made up the substance of English armies. Agriculture, trade, and commerce were chiefly in their hands. To deal with them, to influence them, to command them, even to live with them, it was necessary for the government and courtly classes to learn their speech. As intermarriage became an increasing factor, the English mothers would persistently teach their children

English as the "mother-tongue." Nurses and servants in wealthy homes, the laborers on great estates, the workmen in all mechanic crafts, the tradesmen in all shops, would be chiefly English. Children and youth would grow up surrounded by the English speech. More and more the French language would come to seem courtly, indeed, but somewhat pedantic and foreign, a luxury rather than a necessity of life. It may be broadly stated that for three hundred years the Normans tried in vain to make Englishmen speak French, till at length they found it easier themselves to learn English.

At the same time the common people were constantly picking up isolated French words from the cultured classes, reshaping them into English form, and weaving them into their own speech. When, at length, Wyclif's Bible had popularized the English speech in written form and Chaucer's poetry had proved its literary power, the victory was won and English became the one language of England.

But English was now a language greatly modified, as English civilization had been modified by the Norman influence. The rejection of inflections, that had begun as the various Teutonic dialects coalesced in England before the Norman Conquest, had been rapidly accelerated as French and English were interwoven on the soil of England. The supply of a lack in English words from the French had opened the way to constant new derivations from the classic tongues of Greek and Latin, but always transformed

to the dominant English type. The foundation had been laid for the rich store of English synonyms that now enable our language to express so felicitously all varying shades of thought. The strength of the Anglo-Saxon had been retained, but its heaviness had been relieved by a considerable absorption of the mobility, vividness, and grace of the French. English is a composite but not an accidental language. It is not made up of words pitched together as they might be, as a mere medium of communication; but the selective power of mighty peoples, often unconscious, but always controlling, chose and correlated its various elements, to frame the speech which, through the five hundred years since the day of Chaucer and Wyclif, has built a wondrous literature and become the messenger of freedom and of a high and progressive civilization around the world.

Enthusiasts for the ancient speech greatly err when they refer to "the Anglo-Saxon-speaking peoples." Our language is vastly improved, ennobled and refined beyond anything that the AngloSaxons ever knew. The Normans introduced words of elegance, for rich dress and furniture, for fine horses and arms, for feasting, delicate rather than sumptuous, for stately and beautiful buildings, for the usages of courtesy and chivalry. Through their language they opened the way to a literature of grace and beauty previously unknown to the AngloSaxons.

All Chaucer's early work was either in

translations from the French or under the influence of French models.

But this was by no means the Normans' greatest service. It was, indeed, much to awaken the AngloSaxons to possibilities of grace and beauty, such as their own rugged speech had never attained. But the supreme triumph of the Norman influence-at the time unintended and unperceived-was in implanting the idea that the deficiencies of the native English could be supplied from without; that the undeveloped people need not wait till their language grew to a higher type by the evolution of centuries, but that they could begin them, as they were to bring in many gems already set in the literature of another speech. If from the French, why not also from the Italian and the Latin? Why not from the Greek? That process once begun, the language and the people started on a path of limitless advance. The language was not forever to spin the web of its future, like the spider, out of its own bowels, but to gather from every field, far and wide, every treasure suited to its purposes, as the bird builds her nest. Thus the language and the people were saved from that too intensive culture that breeds in and in, that makes a language and a people incapable of seeing beyond the horizon of their own civilization, and leads them to consider everything, however uncouth or monstrous, as good, beautiful, and sacred, so long as it is their very own. Under the Norman influence began that wide catholicity of En