Far too little allowance, also, is usually made for the difficult conditions under which this moral experiment is carried on at the present time. The position of the working classes in this country is very peculiar. They have but lately awaked to a sense of their freedom. Once slaves, and then serfs, they have now attained the condition of free workmen, bound to no man, free to labour where they please, and under whatsoever conditions (not contrary to the law) they can succeed in imposing. And this freedom they value very highly. In bringing their labour into the market, they stoutly reserve their liberty, except in so far as its surrender is necessary for the work they have to do. This minimum of sacrifice they watch with jealous eye. They are suspicious of any encroachment, real or apparent. They will not even concede to their employer the right to hold a fatherly relation towards them, because fatherhood implies a general right of control, and they will not concede such a right to any man. Hence the suspiciousness with which even the best-meant proposals of masters for the good of their workpeople are sometimes received. The fear of a snake in the grass makes them cautious and almost cold, Test somehow they should be compromising their freedom. We are acquainted with an employer, the owner of extensive flour-mills in England, who, when his men were working fourteen hours a day, many years ago, proposed to cut off two hours, and give them the same amount of pay for the twelve as they had for the fourteen; the proposal was rejected, owing to some insane imagination that it was an interference with the men! Nor is this all. The selfishness that has in time past presided so generally over the arrangements of large works makes workmen suspect, whenever a new proposal is made, that it must, in some clandestine way, be designed for the advantage of the employers. The whole bearing of the operative class towards the upper is one of suspicion. Officers in artisan volunteer companies remark with surprise that when they make any proposal, it seems to be the instinctive feeling of the men that in some way it is to operate against them. Does this fact tell no ugly tale as to our former habitual treatment of the class? Does it indicate no feeling, on the part of the poor, that whenever a new burden behoved to be borne, it was their shoulders it was laid on the weakest class went to the wall? Very likely, they are letting the spirit of suspicion survive the occasion that justified it. Very likely, too, they are allowing themselves to be perhaps unconsciously influenced by the demagogues who assure them that the upper classes are leagued against them, and that the policy of the country is to keep them down. But should not those whose hearts are earnestly bent on doing them good make great allowance for these things, and stretch their forbearance and their patience accordingly? Granting that they are suspicious,-unduly, discreditably suspicious,―are they for that reason to be abandoned? Those who in real earnestness desire their welfare, and show their desire perseveringly and unmistakably, may rest assured that ere long the last trace of suspiciousness towards them will vanish, and they will command the utmost confidence of their working friends. There is a kind of instinct that discovers, in the course of time, who are really in earnest, who are the real friends of the working man. It soon becomes known whether a master is the sort of man that will try to palm off on them sham or tinsel benefits, while he deprives them of substantial rights, or that will profess great zeal in their cause for the sake of a newspaper paragraph, or an electioneering cry. Let a master once convince his men that be has their welfare at heart, and let him take ordinarily prudent measures to promote it, all experience shows that he will become the object of their highest esteem and confidence, and be able to wield an almost unparalleled influence over them. And this leads us to make special mention of what, oftener than once in the course of this paper, we have hinted at as essential for inspiring men with confidence and esteem towards one occupying a higher sphere; we mean the manifestation of a personal interest in them, and of personal feelings of kindness towards them. It will not do for employers to stand on their dignity, to stand on their lofty pedestal, and from thence throw down their bounties on their people with however lavish a hand. It will not do for them to content themselves with building libraries, or institutes, or baths, or churches, at whatever expense, and never mingle with their people in kindly interconrse, nor let out one solitary manifestation of fellow-feeling towards them. It would be no difficult matter to fill a volume with proofs of the marvellous charm there is in the spirit of personal interest, the spirit that takes personal trouble. Just as we are thinking of this, we glance at a daily paper, and in a letter from a foreign correspondent, we find a description of the captain of a war-vessel, in discipline the sternest despot that ever ruled a crew, and yet the idol of his men, because it is he that, when they are in hospital, makes kindly visits to them with grapes and lemons and soothing draughts, and writes their letters to parents and friends, and has withal a heart as brave as it is kind and true. We remember meeting in a large "The world's old, town a number of wealthy employers who | On the platform of Christianity, every enterhad laid out large sums of money for the prise of philanthropy has a tenfold greater benefit of their people, but had stood aloof power. For there the workers toil under the from their homes and hearts, grumbling not inspiration of a charity that never faileth, a little because their beneficence had not been and a hope that never dies. appreciated. Soon after, we were in the house of a zealous Christian worker in the middle rank of life, who could only say to the poor of the neighbourhood, Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have, in the form of personal Christian interest in you all, and personal sacrifices cheerfully made for your sakes, I freely give; and literally the house was crowded with memorials of the gratitude and devotion of the people. Even a genial, popular manner, though not represented by corresponding qualities within, does wonders. Since the days of Absalom, the charm of manner has often compensated for many great defects. But better far than a captivating manner is a genial, sympathizing heart. And greatest of all is its power in the case of those who, by their personal sacrifices, show how intensely love burns within. "Relinquishing their several 'vantage-posts Last of all, let it be borne in mind that the deeper one goes in one's efforts to advance the welfare of others, the greater is the power one acquires. If the interest be limited to things earthly and temporal, the hold one attains on the heart will be proportionally shallow. If it embrace the deeper and more momentous concerns of the immortal nature, it will be proportionally strong and enduring. We have certainly no desire to throw cold water on those whose efforts to do good among their people are limited to temporal interests. Very probably, if they did not work at this, they would work at nothing, pure selfishness would be the presiding genius of their establishment, and one is glad of anything that divides her dominion. But we must warn such persons not to expect great results, and not to anticipate that they will acquire any very strong hold on their people. Don't let them dream as if "The bread of man indeed made all his life, And washing seven times in the People's Baths' But the old world awaits the time to be renewed, ART. II.-A Dictionary of the English Language, by ROBERT GORDON LATHAM, M.A., M.D., F.R.S., etc. Founded on that of Dr. SAMUEL JOHNSON, as edited by the Rev. H. J. TODD, M.A. With numerous Emendations and Additions. To be completed in 36 parts. Parts I. to VI. London, 1864. How much is "AN English Dictionary." expressed in those three words. But wide as they are, there are three which are still wider "The English Language." No dictionary can contain the English language; the most that the best can do is to attempt to exhibit a fair sample of the golden grain garnered in the storehouse of English speech. The English language-what a stately tree upheld by many roots! In that one tongue how many others have merged their utterance. All the known races that have held this soil of Britain have left their mark behind them. First came the Britons. Some few words of daily use, many names of places, many a hill and river, many a surname of high and low, form the tiny upland rill, the glistening silver thread of Celtic speech, which serves as a clue to lead us to the very end of this philological labyrinth. Next came the Romans, and on our native soil threw up those earthworks and roads and walled camps, which still in ruins tell the tale of their strong hands, and to which many a Latin name or ending still clings. They came, they ruled, they left the land, and Britain was still Celtic in speech, though even then no doubt her dialect was laced with many a Teutonic word learned from the German colonists, which the Romans had brought in as mercenary soldiers but who remained as settlers. After the Roman legions left the Britons to themselves, there is darkness over the face of the land from the fifth to the eighth century. Those are really our dark ages. From 420, when it is his race. supposed that Honorius withdrew his troops, to 730, when Bede wrote his History, we see nothing of British history. Afar off we hear the shock of arms, but all is dim, as it were, when two mighty hosts do battle in the dead of night. When the dawn comes and the black veil is lifted, we find that Britain has passed away. The land is now England; the Britons themselves, though still strong in many parts of the country, have been generally worsted by their foes; they have lost that great battle which has lasted through three centuries. Their Arthur has come and gone; he lies at Glastonbury, never again to turn the heady fight. Henceforth Britain has no hero, and merely consoles herself with the hope that he will one day rise and restore the fortunes of But though there were many battles in that dreary time, and many Arthurs, it was rather in the everyday battle of life, in that long unceasing struggle which race wages with race, not sword in hand alone, but by brain and will and feeling, that the Saxons won the mastery of the land. Little by little, more by stubbornness and energy than by bloodshed, they spread themselves over the country, working towards a common unity, from every shore. If the Britons stood in their way they threw them out; but the Britons had learned from their Roman lords to build towns and to dwell in them. The Saxons loathed cities; "they loved better to hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep," and thus there was room for a long time for two races who had little in common, and rarely crossed each other's path. In all likelihood the din of the battles between Celt and Saxon, with which those gloomy centuries are full, rose rather towards their close, when the Saxons had multiplied and grown to be a great power in Britain, and the settlers' seven kingdoms of the Heptarchy had so eaten their way into the waste, as to know that they formed a Saxon Confederation. However that may be, certain it is that for a long time after the time of Bede, and therefore undoubtedly also before his day, the Celtic and Saxon kings in various parts of the island lived together on terms of perfect equality, and gave and took their respective sons and daughters to one another in marriage. Hence it is that we find Saxon princes with Celtic names, and vice versa; and hence it was that many a word was borrowed by either speech, and soon passed as good Saxon or Celtic, as the case might be, after it had undergone the process of mastication, if we may be allowed the word, that alteration and attrition, whether it be in accent or in form, which every foreign word must undergo be. fore the tongue which is about to make it its own, will consent to swallow and digest it. But though this lasted some time, it was not to be always so. In language as in race the rule holds that the weakest must go to the wall. The Saxons were the strongest. They began by winning their way to being equal with the Celts, they ended by overpowering them altogether. This struggle for supremacy was prolonged for some time during that twilight in our history called the Saxon Heptarchy, but towards the close of that period the Saxons had mastered their foes, who henceforth are found only in the mountainous ridges and holes and corners of the land. In Egbert's time the Saxons are really lords in England. Had there been purists and precisians in those days, we may fancy some Priscian or Varro undertaking to weed the native field of Saxon speech of the Celtic growths which had been sown broadcast over it when the two races walked and strove upon it face to face. But even without the help of such learned labourers, no doubt many Celtic grafts on Saxon stems then dwindled and died out, simply because the fellowship which had first begotten and then nursed and fostered them was cut off. But as the Celts withdraw from the front of the stage, and henceforth merely fill up the scene as a background, another race steps forward, the most forward and daring that the world has ever known, and while it avenges the wrongs of the Celts leaves the Saxons neither power nor leisure to become purists in their native speech. These are the Northern Nations, the Scandinavian stock, Northmen, Norsemen, Danes, call them what you will: invaders from every bay and firth between the Eyder* and the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic on the one side, or the Lofoden Isles in the Icy Sea, on the other side of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The proper name of these invaders was "Viking," because vík which in their common speech meant “bay," and which lingers in our Sandwich, Berwick, and Greenwich, gave them at once an ambush, a shelter, and a name. They are said to have landed in England first of all about the time of Egbert who had bloody fights with them, just as they are said to have landed in France first of all in the latter days of Charlemagne, but this merely means that then it was they became so troublesome as to merit the attention of the king and to deserve a public chastisement. For all through those times it was common for the younger sons of kings or chiefs, denied advancement at home by those peculiar institntions which regarded kings and chiefs only as the first of freemen at home, and so cur which the god Ægir, the Neptune of the North * Egidora, or Ægir's Door, the gate through made his inroads into the goddess Earth's domain. tailed their power, except in time of war abroad, to leave their own land followed by bands of adventurous youth, whose first act on putting to sea was to hail their young leader as a sea-king. So the Vikings visited every shore in Europe, and as piracy has ever been an honourable calling in early states of society, there were many Vikings besides those of Scandinavia, though these, as the most daring, have eclipsed the deeds of all the rest. So it has ever been and so it will ever be. "Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona" at all times and in all ages, but as he has outshone them all in glory, he is remembered and they are all forgotten. From the days of Egbert to the Conquest the annals of England are fast bound to those of the Northern kingdoms: bound often with chains, "fast bound in misery and iron." We think of Alfred, and our hearts burn within us as we call to mind the hero who first freed his country from a foreign yoke, and then sat down at once as her teacher, lawgiver, and king; but even Alfred's genius and fortune were only able to save a portion of England from the clutch of the invader whose chiefs, like the hydra's heads, seem to grow sevenfold for every one that fell to the ground. Before Alfred's time the Northmen had seated themselves firmly in Northumberland, and with Alfred in the case of Guthrum-Athelstane began the fatal system of buying off the hostility of the invaders by ceding them a portion of Saxon soil as an everlasting settlement. From the days of Alfred, East Anglia remained more or less a northern settlement, and even before his days Northumbria was as good as lost. He did his best against the foe, and his best was better than any other man's, but all he could do was to check though in nowise to break the fury of the Vikings. Nor was Athelstane's glory much greater. He was never really master of what was nominally called his kingdom, and even his victory on the bloody field of Brunanburgh, splendid as it was, is only another proof of the power of the Northmen, whose forces combined with those of the British could meet the great king with so terrible a host, which Athelstane could only conquer by the aid of northern auxiliaries. But if we are forced to say this of Alfred and Athelstane, what shall we say of such characters as Edmund the First, who agreed to share England with that Anlaf or Olaf whom his brother Athelstane had so signally defeated at Brunanburgh; of the priest-ridden Edred; of Edwy who was not priest-ridden inasmuch as he drove Dunstan out, but who did little else during his short reign; of Edgar the Peaceable who recalled Dunstan and built about fifty monasteries, whose dutifulness to the Church seems to have excused the lust with which he dragged a nun from her convent, as well as his marriage with Elfrida whose husband he murdered? But he was a great king, and eight tributary princes rowed him in a barge on the river Dee. Then came Edward whom Elfrida murdered at Corfe Castle, and last of all came Ethelred the Unready, the man void of counsel or of plan, whose first weapon against the Danes was gold, 10,000 pounds weight of gold, 30,000 pounds weight of gold, and his next the midnight massacre of St. Brice's Day, November 13, 1002. A foul deed, which brought the whole force of Denmark on unhappy England, and began a struggle in which the treacherous King himself, betrayed by Edric Streon, and other traitors, had to fly to Normandy, leaving England to Canute the Great. True he returned again, while Canute was called away for a while to look after his dominions in the north; but it was only to fly before Canute on his return, and to die after having reigned to the great misery of England for thirty-five years. Edmund Ironside was a man of better spirit breathed into him by his Norman mother Emma, but his reign was too short to do any good. Then England fell wholly into Danish hands, and Canute ruled it, every inch a king for nineteen years. The two sots, his two sons by different mothers, Harold Harefoot and Hardicanute, both ruled, and both drank themselves to death. Then came Edward the Confessor, the saint, the ascetic, the everything but king and lawgiver, the man of dreams and visions, of church-building and endowments, who would rob his mother and who did rob his mother to found a church, who spent part of his wretched life in looking for the millennium, and the rest in weeping that it would not come; who never could forgive the world for having lasted sixty years beyond the thousand, at the expiration of which it was forethought if not foretold that it must come to an end, and who must have felt like the astronomers who predicted the return of the great comet of 1556 in 1856, and have still neither forgiven it for not coming back, nor abandoned all hope that after all it may perhaps repent and return. After Edward came Harold, in whom, half Northman as he was-his mother was a sister of Ulf Jarl of Denmark, and King Sweyn, the son of Ulf, was his first cousin--the long line of fainéans Saxon kings expired with a flash of light. Then came the Conquest, but at the Conquest England was more than half-Scandinavian. Besides the great district of Northumbria, which reached, it must be remembered, far across the Border into Scot- | the Northumbrian, East Anglian, and other land, and the province of East Anglia, where provincial dialects. The result of the Conthe Scandinavian stock was fast settled, their quest was a general scramble of all these nationality reached as far south as Derby and forms of speech for precedence, a struggle for Rugby in the very heart of Mercia; and all mastery more or less desultory, but which, over the land the speech of the people was after centuries, has resulted in our modern laced and patched with Northern words and English, which presents to those who read it idioms. Even setting aside these ethnologi- aright a wonderful blending of those various cal facts, the dialect of the contemporary dialects, in which no one quite won the day chronicles shows that quite apart from exter- over the other, but in which the Northumnal influences the vernacular Anglo-Saxon brian on the whole had the mastery over the before the Conquest was undergoing that West Saxon, and that not only in conjugation change which all languages suffer in obe- and construction but even in accent and prodience to an internal law. After the nunciation. A dialect which was so powerConquest the mother-tongue of the people ful as to supplant many of the West Saxon was banished from Court and public life, and forms of the verb to be, to throw them out of fled in exile to the woods and fields. There the philological nest, and bring in its own it stubbornly maintained its ground, but de- offspring, must have been strong indeed; and based and degraded, though vulgar, strong, yet this is just the way in which the Northand healthy, while the lordly Norman pro- umbrian cuckoo-or "gowk," as the bird longed a sickly existence in the close air of would be called beyond the Humber-bas walled town and gloomy castle. Thus each treated the West Saxon hedge-sparrow in recontinued to exist apart so long as the Nor- gard to the verb-substantive. The present man barons looked to Rouen as their capital, plural of am-we are, ye are, they are-are and the duchy won by Hrolf Ganger from Northumbrian forms which have supplanted the Carlovingians as their true home. We the syndon of the West Saxons, which clung jump in retrospect at results, and fancy be- closer to the seyn of the Germans. So also cause Duke William overthrew Harold he am is nearer to em, the Northumbrian first made England a Norman land; but in that person present, than to the West Saxon com ; sense he never won England; nay, it may and the same remark holds good of many rather be said of the Normans that they other examples both of declension and conjuwere at last subdued by their serfs. From gation. As for single words, the preference William till John the Norman barons strove given to the Northumbrian is even more to subdue the land and held it as foreigners. striking. Not content with existing merely In John's time they ceased to be aliens, Eng- as a kindred or sister form, the Northern land then lost her possessions in France, the dialect has often entirely extirpated the West Norman barons began to look on England as Saxon equivalent, and will not suffer it to live their home, the languages began to mix, and by its side. As for our pronunciation, it certhe fusion of speech which had scarcely be- tainly appears to be much more Northern gun at the beginning of the thirteenth cen- than Saxon. There are some young ladies tury was almost complete in the fourteenth. indeed who talk of skjy, and kjind, and chjild, Hitherto there had been a debased Anglo- for "sky," and "kind," and "child;" some, Saxon literature fast falling into semi-Saxon, too, talk of care for "care;" and some and a cultivated courtly Norman-French clodpoles in the West talk of being sceared literature, of each of which Layamon and for being "scared" or frightened, or of a Wace may be taken as the two representa- meare for a "mare;" but as a nation we tives. In all Layamon's lengthy alliterative speak with a less mincing mouth. We poem there are scarcely more Norman words speak our vowels out broad and boldly; and to be found than can be proved to have been in speech at least, we have sent the West current in Anglo-Saxon in the days of Ed- Saxon broken vowels to the right about, and ward the Confessor, and Wace's Norman has even where we have kept them to the eye, as few Saxon words. The Conquest then had in swear, and such-like words, we have lost little direct influence at first on the vernacu- them to the ear, for though we write swear, lar dialects in England. We say dialects, for we pronounce sware. besides the West Saxon form of speech which had been the language of literature and the Court, there was the Northumbrian or Scandinavian dialect in the North and East. The first suffered most by the degradation of the vernacular which followed the Conquest; it was expelled from Court, and lost its precedence, and was thus placed on a level with During the eleventh, and all through the twelfth centuries, the vernacular dialects of England were left by the Normans to adjust their differences as they could. The king and his barons spoke Norman-French, their subjects and serfs, whether Scandinavians or Saxons, might speak whatever jargon they chose. It never occurred to the Conqueror |