wants; it has found its way, with very slight
modifications, into all the languages of Europe,
and into many of the Oriental world.

I remember to have heard from Bishop
Grégoire (who, during his life, was the object of
most cruel and undeserved calumny, and who,
since his death, has not been honoured as one
so wise and good deserved to be*) that when the
first National Assembly met, at the beginning of
the Revolution, it was found that of the whole
people no more than seven millions spoke or
understood the French language, the language
of cultivated and literary men. The Bas Breton
in Bretagne, the Basque and Béarnais along the
Western Pyrenees, the Gascon throughout the
regions of the Landes, the Languedocian and
Provençal in South-Eastern Gaul, to say
nothing of many dialects more confined and local,
formed the idioms of the vast majority of the
nation. In all the great towns and cities, no
doubt, the aristocracy understood and spoke
(but often imperfectly) what Chaucer calls the
"French of Paris;" Chaucer does not say what
was the "French of Stratford atte Bowe," but
we may be assured in his days pure Parisian
French was of rare acquirement. Attempts
have been made to legitimatise the grammar, to
revive the literature, to secure the permanence
of the provincial dialects of France, Germany,
Italy, and Spain, but the sentence of extinction
is pronounced against them, they move slowly,
but most certainly, towards their destined tombs,
and, in a few generations, will all be registered
among the dead. At the present hour, the number
of persons in the French empire who speak
the provincial dialects and do not understand
French, is not greater than the number of those
who half a century ago used classical French as
their habitual language. Every now and then a
spark of vitality breaks out, generally under
poetical inspiration—for France has its Jasmin
as Scotland her Burns—and a village bard is
borne aloft by provincial enthusiasm; but the
field of influence is narrower, and narrowing
every day, the number of listeners diminishes
hour by hour, and the only hope of immortality
must be in some future Raynouard or Fauriel,
who may be engaged in literary gleanings up of
"things that were" but have ceased to be.

* No more energetic, no more persistent, no more
eloquent advocate of negro emancipation ever
appeared than was the Abbé Grégoire. I do not know
what became of the curious library of books which
he collected, written by men and women of black
African race. They amounted to many hundreds of
volumes. When such trouble and expense were
employed in gathering together so many specimens of
negro intellect, it would be sad to learn that they
had been dispersed for the want of some congenial
spirit to sympathise with, and carry forward, the good
bishop's labour of love.

In our own islands, a hundred and fifty years
ago, six separate languages were spoken, to say
nothing of what are called provincial dialects—
six languages so distinct that the speakers of any
one of them would be unintelligible to the rest;
these were the modern English, the Gaelic, the
Erse, the Welsh, the Manx, and the old British,
which was only preserved in some parts of Cornwall,
but has now wholly disappeared; the last
person who spoke it—her name was Dolly
Penreath—died at the end of the expired century.
At the beginning of the present, the Manx was
generally understood through the Isle of Man,
and was used in the Church services of many of
the districts remote from the larger towns. I
believe a Manx sermon is now seldom heard,
and though the language is still employed in
some official formulae of the Tynwald (or ancient
court) in the same manner as, in our Parliamentary
proceedings, la Reine le veult is still the
Norman form in which the royal assent is given
to an act of Parliament—the ancient idiom of
Mona is very near extinction.

The same process is going on with the Welsh.
Within the memory of man, it was the language
of many market towns, where not a single
Cambrian word can now be heard. It is retreating
more and more from the busy world to secluded
rural districts. Its value, both social and
commercial, is constantly diminishing, and it palls
in the presence of the sturdier Anglo-Saxon
tongue. The difficulty of making it the medium
for conveying the advanced knowledge of the
time is pretty generally acknowledged. It has
brought to literature no valuable contributions
of its own. Nothing but curiosity excites an
Englishman to study Welsh, while a hundred
motives encourage the Welshman to become
master of English. For the English opens the
door to preferment; it enables the Cymry to
start fair with the Sassenach. A Welshman,
ignorant of English, will not get into Parliament,
he will hardly be made a Justice of the Peace;
it may be doubted if he could obtain an appointmet
as an officer of the excise or customs.
The Welshman, like all of the Celtic races, is
slow to move, but he moves, notwithstanding.
He wrestles against change, but change is too
strong even for Cambrian nationality, which is
strong in its way, and obstinate into the bargain.
How long is the tongue of Taliessin likely to
live? The electric telegraph, railways, penny
postage, have pronounced its doom. These, and
other such mighty ones, repudiate alliances with
anything that is backward or retardatory. They
are the children of progress, and hold in due
reverence their omnipotent sire. Their diplomacy
is all carried on in the language of high
and advancing civilisation.

There is one mode of dealing with decaying
languages which has often succeeded in giving
them vitality—persecution. Toleration, emancipation,
liberty, conceded to dissenters, brought
many of them within the pale of orthodox
profession, many who had spurned conformity
while non-conformity was visited with disability
and disgrace. Pride would not consent to a
surrender which implied a recognition of
superiority. So a government that wants to give
new stamina and firmer roots to a language,
had best begin by discouraging, and finish by
punishing, those who employ it. The German
had been quietly treading on the heels of the
Magyar; the Russian had been undermining