any collateral information connecting it with
human life or animate existence, has a charm for
the young that at once fixes it in their
memories; and a dense-witted, wearied, yawning
class can be brightened up into a little circle of
bright-eyed listeners all agape for knowledge,
if the teacher strike out of the stupid old
droning track, and begin his next section with
an anecdote or an illustration.

There is one part of grammar, at present a
terrible weariness and vexation of spirit, which
might be made very pleasant reading, and that
is the derivation of words. There are better
methods of teaching this art and mystery than
by mere lists of Greek and Latin roots; and in
an admirable section called the Matter of the
English Language, Mr. Meiklejohn has shown
in his Easy English Grammar how charmingly
this subject can be treated. Though our
language is an aggregation of many materials, rather
than one broad stream flowing from one original
source, and merely changing by the way, yet
it has a certain inner life of its own which
assimilates all these varying materials, and welds
them into one harmonious whole. Certainly
the manner of construction is somewhat
irregular, and the application is not unfrequently
strained, but this is because we have never
given any serious scientific attention to the
creation or preservation of our tongue, but
have trusted to chance and haphazard, and the
natural cohesion of verbal particles, when once
placed in contact with each other. Consequently,
a full and exhaustive system of analysis
and derivation shows some strange and
unlooked-for results. Once all Keltic, we have
now comparatively few words of the old tongue
left among us. The Thames, the Severn, and
the Trent; the Mendip Hills, the Chiltern,
and the Malvern; Devon, Wilts, Kent; London,
Dover, Liverpool, are all Keltic names of
rivers, hills, counties, and towns respectively;
so are names of places beginning with Aber,
the mouth of a river, as Arbroath, formerly
Aberbrothwick, and Aberwick, now Berwick";
the names of places beginning with Caer, a fort,
as Carlisle, Carnarvon, Caerlton; with Dun, a
hill, as Dumbarton, Dunmore, Huntingdon;
with Lin, a deep pool, as Linlithgow, King's
Lynn; with Llann, a church, as Llandaff,
Llanberis; with Tre, a town, as Coventry (or
convent town); with Inver, the mouth of a
river, as Inverness, Inverary. Also certain
common words are Keltic, as basket, trap, cart,
gown, pike, crag, whip, brave, cloud, plaid,
crockery, tartan, darn, wire, mattock, mop,
rasher, rug, button, crook, kiln, flannel, gyves,
gruel, welt, mesh, rail, glue, tackle, coat, pranks,
balderdash, happy, pert, sham, and others. The
Scandinavian or Norse element is found chiefly
in the provincial dialects of Northumberland,
Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Cumberland, and
Westmoreland, where we have force for waterfall,
greet for weep, ket for carrion, and lile for
little; "all of which," says Mr. Meiklejohn,
from whom we are quoting, and who is responsible
for these assertions, "are pure Scandinavian
words." In the names of places we
have by for village, in Whitby, Grimsby, &c.;
fell for hill (Norse fjeld) in Crossfell, Scawfell;
gill (this should be spelt ghyll), a ravine, in
Ormesgill; Scar, a steep rock, in Scarborough;
Tarn, a small deep lake, in Tarnsyke, &c. Had
Mr. Meiklejohn been acquainted with the lake
country, he could have infinitely enriched and
amended his examples, but we have taken what
we have found, there being enough to illustrate
the principle. There are said to be thirteen
hundred and seventy-three names of places in
England, of Danish or Norse origin, among which
are the islands ending in ey—ey, ea, or æ, being
all different forms of the Norse word for an island
—as Jersey, Caesar's Island; Athelney, Noble's
Island; Anglesea, island of the Angles, &c.

The greatest addition to our language has
been from the Latin, either directly to a small
extent, during the Roman occupation from
A.D. 43 to 480, or to a large extent when
Roman missionaries introduced Christianity
among us in A.D. 596; or indirectly, by the
introduction of the Norman-French language
and literature in the time of Edward the
Confessor first, and later, when William the
Conqueror came. The Latin element in English
comprises ten-fortieths of the whole; the purely
English is twenty-five fortieths; and the
remaining five-fortieths are made up of Keltic,
Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Italian,
Hindostanee, Spanish, Dutch—in fact, from
words of almost every language of the globe.
One hundred and fifty-four Greek and Latin
roots give thirteen thousand English words.
From pono, to place, we have two hundred and
fifty words; from plico, to fold, two hundred;
from capio, to take, one hundred and ninety-
seven; from specio, to see, one hundred and
seventy-seven; from mitto, to send, one hundred
and seventy-four; from teneo, to hold, one
hundred and sixty-eight; from tendo, to stretch,
one hundred and sixty-two; from duco, to lead,
one hundred and fifty-six; from logos, a word,
one hundred and fifty-six; from grapho, to
write, one hundred and fifty-two. Yet great as
is this classic influence, it is greater in the
fixed than in the moving language. We write
down in our dictionaries one-fourth or ten-
fortieths of Latin words, we speak from thirty-
six to thirty-nine-fortieths of Saxon words, and
we write from twenty-nine to thirty-eight-
fortieths of the same Saxon. In Macaulay's
essay on Bacon there are thirty Saxon words
out of every forty, while in the New Testament
there are thirty-seven. "All the common words
of every-day use, all the joints of the language,
all that makes it an organism, all the words
that express the life of individuals or of the
nation are pure English. In one word, all that
makes a language a language is English; the
Latin element merely fills up gaps and interstices."

Another odd and interesting part of grammar
is the tracking out of the meanings of words
hanged by constant application. Thus, gazette,
which was once gazetta, a small Venetian coin
said to have been the price of the first newspaper,