English Past and Present | Page 3

out the lines of much more, to which I shall not venture so much
as to put my hand. They are the more welcome to me, because they
encourage me to believe that if, in choosing the English language, its
past and its present, as the subject of that brief course of lectures which
I am to deliver in this place, I have chosen a subject which in many
ways transcends my powers, and lies beyond the range of my
knowledge, it is yet one in itself of deepest interest, and of fully
recognized value. Nor can I refrain from hoping that even with my
imperfect handling, it is an argument which will find an answer and an
echo in the hearts of all who hear me; which would have found this at
any time; which will do so especially at the present. For these are times
which naturally rouse into liveliest activity all our latent affections for
the land of our birth. It is one of the compensations, indeed the greatest
of all, for the wastefulness, the woe, the cruel losses of war{1}, that it
causes and indeed compels a people to know itself a people; leading
each one to esteem and prize most that which he has in common with
his fellow countrymen, and not now any longer those things which
separate and divide him from them.
{Sidenote: Love of our own Tongue}
And the love of our own language, what is it in fact, but the love of our
country expressing itself in one particular direction? If the great acts of
that nation to which we belong are precious to us, if we feel ourselves
made greater by their greatness, summoned to a nobler life by the
nobleness of Englishmen who have already lived and died, and have
bequeathed to us a name which must not by us be made less, what
exploits of theirs can well be nobler, what can more clearly point out
their native land and ours as having fulfilled a glorious past, as being
destined for a glorious future, than that they should have acquired for
themselves and for those who come after them a clear, a strong, an
harmonious, a noble language? For all this bears witness to

corresponding merits in those that speak it, to clearness of mental
vision, to strength, to harmony, to nobleness in them that have
gradually formed and shaped it to be the utterance of their inmost life
and being.
To know of this language, the stages which it has gone through, the
sources from which its riches have been derived, the gains which it is
now making, the perils which have threatened or are threatening it, the
losses which it has sustained, the capacities which may be yet latent in
it, waiting to be evoked, the points in which it transcends other tongues,
in which it comes short of them, all this may well be the object of
worthy ambition to every one of us. So may we hope to be ourselves
guardians of its purity, and not corrupters of it; to introduce, it may be,
others into an intelligent knowledge of that, with which we shall have
ourselves more than a merely superficial acquaintance; to bequeath it to
those who come after us not worse than we received it ourselves.
"Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna",--this should be our motto in respect
at once of our country, and of our country's tongue.
{Sidenote: Duty to our own Tongue}
Nor shall we, I trust, any of us feel this subject to be alien or remote
from the purposes which have brought us to study within these walls. It
is true that we are mainly occupied here in studying other tongues than
our own. The time we bestow upon it is small as compared with that
bestowed on those others. And yet one of our main purposes in learning
them is that we may better understand this. Nor ought any other to
dispute with it the first and foremost place in our reverence, our
gratitude, and our love. It has been well and worthily said by an
illustrious German scholar: "The care of the national language I
consider as at all times a sacred trust and a most important privilege of
the higher orders of society. Every man of education should make it the
object of his unceasing concern, to preserve his language pure and
entire, to speak it, so far as is in his power, in all its beauty and
perfection.... A nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous,
must be on the brink of barbarism in regard to everything else. A nation
which allows her language to go to ruin, is parting with the last half of

her intellectual independence, and testifies her willingness to cease to
exist"{2}.