Latin, but particulars under it, run, jump, walk, ride, are all Saxon. Marsh remarks: "When we come to words which indicate different states, emotions, passions, mental processes, all, in short, that expresses the moral or intellectual man, the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary is eminently affluent." This is true, unless we are using scientific language, and many of our words expressing these ideas are lineal descendants of the language of the West Saxons, e. g., afyrht (afeard), bewepan (beweep, bemoan), blis (pleasure), blithe (joyful).

Likewise, the words first used in childhood and the words expressing the closest ties of relationship and the sweetest association are Saxon. Thus the words father, mother, brother, sister, husband, wife, home, are all Saxon, and it is only when we have become hardened by contact with the world that we begin to speak of paternal and maternal relatives, of habitation, residence or domicile.

Thus briefly and imperfectly we have referred to some classes of words for which English is indebted to Anglo-Saxon. Now let us notice some of the characteristics which the latter stamped indelibly upon the former.

Anglo-Saxon was vigorous, direct, and monosyllabic, and these qualities equally characterize the language of to-day. Latin and Romance words have their special place in our language. For some kinds of writing they are peculiarly adapted, and not to use them would mar composition. If we write upon metaphysics or philology, if we engage in scientific discussion, or enter upon æsthetic criticism, we find that we must use Latin and Greek derivatives very often; and it would be absurd to use a Saxon word simply because it was Saxon, or to reject a foreign word on account of its foreign origin. But when, in the common affairs of life, we wish to use a vigorous expression, our thoughts naturally clothe themselves in plain Saxon words.

heat of debate or under the excitement of anger, when we wish our language to be as clear and forcible as we can make it, the Saxon words come pouring from our lips, not from design, but because from their very nature they give inherent strength.

It is sometimes thought necessary to use many words and say nothing. But when this is the case we must avoid the words of native birth. In the language of circumlocution Anglo-Saxon was deficient. The very words circumlocution and periphrasis are foreign words and express foreign ideas. The natural taciturnity of the Saxon caused him to state his meaning with directness and in as few words as possible. There was no dodging issues, but what he had to say he said

forcibly and directly. (These statements need qualification in one particular. Anglo-Saxon poetry is often utterly unintelligible, and the translator thereof must be a good interpreter.) For perspicuity English cannot be surpassed, and this characteristic is largely due to the Saxon element, modified and strengthened by Latin syntax.

This same spirit of reserve and taciturnity made the Saxon use short words. This tendency, strengthened by the French custom of making final vowels silent, has made English even more monosyllabic than its progenitor, as far as the Saxon element is concerned. This gives it great power. Here are given two quotations illustrating this monosyllabic nature of our tongue. The first is from Macbeth: "That is a step

On which I must fall down or else o'erleap,
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires,
Let no light see my dark and deep desires.
The eye winks at my hand. Yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see."

Here out of fifty-two words fifty have one syllable only.
A sonnet written by Dr. Addison Alexander runs as follows:
"Think not that strength lies in the big round word,

Or that the brief and plain must needs be weak.

To whom can this be true who once has heard

The cry for help, the tongue that all men speak,
When want, or woe, or fear is in the throat,

So that each word gasped out is like a shriek
Pressed from the sore heart, or a strange wild note
Sung by some fay or fiend! There is a strength
Which dies if stretched too far or spun too fine,

Which has more height than breadth, more depth than length.
Let but this force of thought and speech be mine,

And he that will may take the sleek, fat phrase,

Which glows but burns not, though it beam and shine

Light, but no heat; a flash, but not a blaze."

You will observe that there is not even a dissyllable in the whole passage and nearly all the words are Saxon.

It would be a pleasant task to trace the changes through which the language has passed between the days of Ælfred and the present time, but it is a work of too great length to be condensed into one article. Suffice it to say that the changes have tended to make the language simpler, and the result is that we have a speech of the greatest compass and widest adaptation. Jacob Grimm, the great master of linguistics, said of it: "In wisdom, wealth, and strict economy, no living

language can vie with it." It fully merits and will richly repay all study put upon it, and we may well rejoice that the day is not far distant when the historical study of English will be required by our colleges; when all educated English-speaking people will be able to trace the stream of our language back to its sources; and when a flood of light will be thrown upon it by deep researches into the misty past. Millwood, Va. WM. H. WHITING, JR.

VII. CRITICISMS AND REVIEWS.

BRACE'S "UNKNOWN GOD."

THE UNKNOWN GOD; OR, INSPIRATION AMONG PRE-CHRISTIAN RACES. By C. Loring Brace, author of "Gesta Christi," "Races of the Old World," etc. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son. 1890. (All rights reserved.) 8vo., pp. ix., 336.

One is strongly attracted to this book as soon as one looks at it and lays hold of it. Its outward form is highly engaging, and its title piques the curiosity and sets the mind to thinking along the most important and at the same time most abstruse lines. The author's name is that of one of the accepted masters in his own chosen department, that of antique, and especially Oriental studies, considered particularly in their relation to the problems of comparative ethnology and religion. His lamented name and his works are by this time alike famous. We do not, however, care to be prejudiced one way or the other by this admitted fact. On the contrary, we intend to deal with the volume before us pretty much as if its author had never been heard of until now. We purpose, in other words, to consider Mr. Charles Loring Brace's discussion simply from the point of view of what we conceive to be its intrinsic merits or demerits.

The book we have in hand is one of high pretension, and, notwithstanding its immense range and the aridity of many of the fields it traverses, singularly captivating to any one at all competent to appreciate such investigations. The author of this massive treatise might seem at the first glance to have been able to cope with Dominie Sampson, or even with the younger Scaliger, in erudition, or at least in the erudition bearing mainly and directly upon his subject. He is in every sense a scholar, and apparently a ripe and good one. His style is clear and neat, if now and then a little diffuse, and, what is an admirable trait in a writer upon great subjects, he is never afraid to say right out just what he means, without parley or mitigation, and without regard to consequences. Mr. Brace could not have belonged to what Archbishop Whately, with injurious application to Maurice and his followers, denominated "the magic-lanthorn school." He does not put things in a half-luminous fog or leave them in an iridescent haze. His skies are windswept and utterly bare, and his ancient and foreign stars shine keen and cold.

If the writers from whom Mr. Brace quotes are at times hesitating or ambiguous, or for any reason obscure, Mr. Brace himself is always downright and always perspicuous. If, as we have intimated, this book to the sober and thoughtful reader is one of profound interest, we feel constrained to add that it is not to the attentive critic one of profound ability. There is, we grant, no little skill displayed in the marshalling and displaying of such an array of widely separated opinions, and opinions seemingly in diametrical conflict with each other, and so dressing the line as to make them appear to be in mutual harmony. The whole presentation of

The

the case is, we own, one of pleasing symmetry, and at last one of unity. same praise may be bestowed upon Schelling's or Spinoza's scheme of pantheism. We do not mean to allege or to insinuate for one moment that Mr. Brace is himself a pantheist. We only mean that what the great Arnauld wrote upon the face of his copy of Mallebranche's Philosophy might, in our judgment, with some color of appropriateness, be written across the face of this fascinating work on "The Unknown God,”—“ Nova, palchra, falsa.”

The doctrine of this book is that the various pagan religions are due to a process of evolution from fetichism to fire-worship. at which, or at some kindred point, a pure theism has been detected through the symbols, a process which has been helped on by the inspiration of certain great sages and seers.

A large part of the author's contention is indeed by no means new. For in large part the effort would appear to be to reestablish the shattered structure of the socalled "Absolute Religion" of Theodore Parker and his forerunners and successors, who held that all forms of religion upon the surface of the earth and in the history of the world, no matter how superstitious or perverted, are at bottom but phases or varied manifestations of the same êtres uprème and universal father. This is the Catholic creed maintained in Pope's terse and sharp-witted line in the Universal Prayer, where it is the same Being essentially who is worshipped under the several names of "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord," and who makes all the necessary allowances and smiles with impartial benignity upon all the wrangling devotees. This might seem to be hinted ever even in the preliminary statement of the agnostic, Mr. Herbert Spencer, that there is always a core of good even in things evil. It is far more conclusively determined to be the view entertained by eminent continental writers, Mr. Baring Gould, Mr. Moncure Conway, and we suppose the great majority of comparative religionists of the day. Surely there is nothing new in all this. Nor is there anything new in the theory here propounded of inspiration, which is confessedly au fond that of Morell (who borrowed it from Schleiermacher), and if we understand the Yale teacher, substantially also the improved theory of Professor Ladd; nor in the view that the difference between the inspiration of the canonical writers and that of the pious founders of religions (and we suspect Mr Brace would concur with Morell in holding even that of ordinary Christians) is only a difference of degree. The novelty of Mr. Brace's exhibition of the doctrine of a universal, or nearly universal, spiritual religion and a world-wide inspiration may be said to lie in the splendid supremacy and final, and perhaps exclusive, triumph assigned in his ground-chart to Christianity, and the complacent, yet audacious, sang froid with

1 If our author had gone no farther than to contend that the most debased forms of heathenism in our day were the deformed relics of a lofty, pure, spiritual monotheism that underlies some or even most of them, and originally preceded them all, we should not have demurred so strongly to the position he has taken up. In this, indeed, also there would have been nothing new. What we object to on the threshold is that he should seem to make, so little of the prohibitions in the first and second commandments, and should, with so many other religious optimists, adopt an attitude of tolerance, not to say friendship, rather than one of stern resistance towards the avowed enemies of Jehovah. We object once more to his theory of a variable inspiration— variable we mean in degree-and to his contention that certain pagan sages and theosophists were endowed with an inspiration which (if we take his idea) was the same in kind with that of Moses and Isaiah. We allow that the word is legitimately used in lower senses, and that we may have failed to catch his true drift.

"The Egyptian faith at one period seems only another form of the highest belief; it is one aspect, apparently, of the Absolute Religion." (Page 292.)