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that, on this particular subject, a clear exposition of the true state of the case goes a long way towards proving itself, I shall begin by setting forth my own views with all confidence, and I shall not notice any of the objections which have been brought against them till I have done so. I shall therefore, in the remainder of the present lecture, show who the English people were, and whence they came. In the second lecture I shall show when and how they came and dwelt in that part of Britain which their coming made into England. Thus far I shall speak dogmatically. Let those who may take exception to anything that I may say wait for my third and last lecture. Then I shall come back to the subject controversially, and I shall do my best to dispose of certain other views which have been put forth with regard to the matter, but which I hold to be mistaken.

first jury. But if Elfred had summoned | look as my old friends. Believing as I do the first jury, it would certainly have been an English and not a British jury that he summoned. On the other hand, we often hear theological disputants talk very loudly about an English Church, or a Church of England, before the coming of Augustine. I have nothing to do with theological consequences one way or another, but it is a plain historical fact that, before the coming of Augustine, there was a British Church, but there was not an English Church. So people talk of Cæsar coming into England. Now Cæsar never came into England; neither he nor any of the old Cæsars after him ever reached the land which in their day was England. Cæsar landed in Britain, in that part of Britain which afterwards became England, but which was not England when he landed in it. More amusingly than all, I once read in a little book that Cæsar was withstood by "the English people, who were then called the Britons." The English people were then far away, and most likely never heard of Cæsar, nor he of them. A geologist would laugh if one talked of "the cave lions, who were then called the ichthyosauri; " and to speak of the English people who were then called the Britons," is really a confusion of very much the same kind.

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I would then, first of all, impress upon your minds the need of always using words in their right meaning, and in no other. Do not allow yourselves to call Englishmen Saxons; do not allow yourselves to call Britons Englishmen. Grasp firmly the great truth, which to so many it seems so hard to grasp, that we Englishmen who are here now, as we were here a thousand years back, are simply ourselves, and not somebody else. Remember that the men who fought under Harold at Stamfordbridge, the men who fought under Henry the Fifth at Agincourt, the men who fought under Wellington at Waterloo, all were alike Englishmen; but that the men who withstood Cæsar, when he landed on the shores of Kent were not English

men.

I have said thus much by way of preface, partly in order to persuade you of the need of constant accuracy in the use of names, partly in order that you may the better understand the manner in which I use names myself. I will now go on to set forth the scheme which I propose to myself in the course of three lectures, which I have come with great willingness to deliver, here in the town of the great Edward, to an audience on many of whom I may venture to

What then are we, the English people? and whence did we come? I answer that we are Low-Dutch with a difference, and that we came from those lands where the Low-Dutch blood and the Low-Dutch speech abide to this day. And here I must, perhaps, stop and explain myself. To some the use of the name Low-Dutch may sound strange, perhaps ludicrous; but it is the truest and most accurate name, and I use it specially in order to avoid using the word German, which may easily lead to misconceptions. Again I say, in all these matters we must define each name before we use it, so that we may be quite sure that we know what we mean by it. And when we have defined it, we must take care to use it in the sense in which we have defined it, and in no other. Now the whole Teutonic race is one thing; the particular nation which we commonly understand by the word German is another thing. The one is the whole; the other is the part. But whenever an accurate writer or speaker speaks of the English as a branch of the Teutonic race, inaccurate readers and bearers start off at once to that other particular branch of the Teutonic race whom we generally call Germans. They began to cry out, sometimes in elaborate books which have lawsuits manfully waged about them, “Oh, but we are so unlike the Germans. Our ways are quite different; our tastes are quite different; our heads, and therefore our hats, are of quite another shape." Now about the heads and the hats I shall have something to say in my last lecture; I wish now to speak about the name German, and some other names. Those whom we commonly mean by Germans are the High

Dutch, the people of Southern Germany, lies are the Slaves, the Lithuanians, and the people whose language we learn by the others of whom I need not now speak more name of German a language which is fully. Those with whom we have to do are spreading itself, as the polite and classical the Teutons or Dutch. Within the last language, over Northern Germany too, and two hundred years we have got into a which is driving our own Low-Dutch speech strange way of using the word Dutch to into holes and corners. Now, if by Ger- mean only one particular class of Dutchmans we mean High-Dutchmen, we certainly men, namely, our own Low-Dutch kinsmen are not Germans, and we have no very close in Holland and the other provinces which connexion with the Germans. Our con- now make up the Kingdom of the Nethernexion with them is no closer than the con lands. But we formerly used the word in nexion which there must be between any a much wider sense, and men use it so still one Teutonic people and any other. But in many parts of the United States. EngLow-Dutch we are, differing from the Low-lish travellers in America have sometimes Dutch of the Continent in the sort of way been puzzled at hearing men whom they in which we could not fail to differ from would have called Germans spoken of as them, considering that we have been parted Dutchmen. You will do well to bear this asunder from them for thirteen or fourteen in mind; when you find the word Dutch in hundred years, and that, during all that any English writer of the sixteenth century time, we have been exposed to one set of or of the first half of the seventeenth, it is influences, and they have been exposed to pretty certain to mean, not Hollanders in another. particular, but Hollanders, Saxons, Swabians, Bavarians, and so forth, altogether. And I need hardly tell you that the Germans call themselves and their tongue Deutsch to this day; only, a little confusion now and then arises from their using the word Deutsch, sometimes to express the Teutonic race in general, and sometimes to express their own particular nation and language. Teuton and Dutch are, in truth, only two forms of the same name. The word comes from theod, people or nation; each nation, of course, thinking itself the people or nation above all others. And the opposite to Dutch is Welsh — that is, strange, from wealh, a stranger. In our forefathers' way of speaking, whatever they could understand was Dutch, the tongue of the people; whatever they could not understand they called Welsh, the tongue of the strangers. "All lands, Dutch and Welsh," is a common phrase to express the whole world. This is the reason why, when our forefathers came into Britain, they called the people whom they found in the land the Welsh. For the same reason, the Teutons on the Continent have always called the Latin-speaking nations with whom they have had to do-Italian, Provençal, and. French-Welsh. People who know only the modern use of the words might be puzzled if they turned to some of the old Swiss Chronicles, and found the war between the Swiss and Duke Charles of Burgundy always spoken of as a war between the Dutch and the Welsh. Any one who knows German will be at once ready with instances of this use of the word, sometimes meaning strange or foreign in the general sense, sometimes meaning particularly French or Italian. The last case which I know of the

But perhaps it may be needful that I should still go somewhat further back, and explain more fully what I mean by the Teutonic race and languages, by HighDutch and by Low-Dutch. It would take too long to go through the whole story of the connexion which the languages of nearly all Europe, and of a great part of Asia, those which we call the Aryan languages, bave with one another. It is enough for my present purpose to say that no scientific student of language now doubts that there was a time a time, of course, ages before the beginning of recorded history - when the forefathers of all the chief European nations, as also the forefathers of the Persians, Hindoos, and some other nations of Asia, were all one people, speaking one language. Gradually one tribe after another branched off from the parent stock, and they thus formed nations and languages of their own. But it is easy to see that, in some cases, the forefathers of two or more existing nations must have kept together for some while after they had parted from the parent stock, and must have parted off from one another at a later time. Thus the likeness between the Greek and the Latin languages is enough to show that the forefathers of the Greeks and the forefathers of the Italians parted off together, and remained for some time one nation. Other families of the same kind branched off in the same way, and again parted off from one another at a later time. Thus one family, probably the oldest Aryan family in North-Western Europe, is that of the Celts, who have branched off again into at least two divisions, the British or Welsh, and the Irish or Scotch. Other such fami

word being used in English in the wide | forehand what the German form of an Engsense is in Sir Thomas Smith's book on the lish word-if there be one must be, and Government of England, written in the time what the English form of a German word— of Queen Elizabeth, where he speaks of if there be one-must be. This may be "such as be walsh and foreign," not mean- carried out much further between English ing Britons in particular, but any people and Greek, or between any two Aryan lanwhose tongue cannot be understood. guages that may be chosen; in all of them there are fixed rules according to which certain letters in one language answer to certain letters in another. But I am now concerned with these rules only so far as they apply to English and German. Let us take a few examples. Thus D in English answers to Tin German. Thus dip is taufen, duck is tauchen, deer (a beast) is Thier, dear (an adjective) is theuer, bed is Bett, God is Gott, good is gut, and so on. So Tin the middle of a word in English is in German either S or Z, while at the beginning or end it is Z. Thus better is besser, kettle is Kessel, heart is Herz, smart is Schmerz, ten is zehn, tooth is Zahn. You will find very few exceptions to this rule at the end of words, and I think none at the beginning, except words beginning with tr; thus true is treu, because it would be almost impossible to say zreu. again English TH is in German D. think is denken, thing is Ding, brother is Bruder; and if you ask why father and mother are Vater and Mutter, and not Vader and Mudder, I will tell you. Father and mother are comparatively modern forms in English. Down to the sixteenth century the words were always written fader and moder; and those, you will see, answer quite regularly to Vater and Mutter.

It may be worth noticing that this way of a nation speaking of itself as the nation, and of the rest of the world as strangers or such like, has many parallels among other people. The Jews, for instance, called all other people the Gentiles, the nations, using a different word to express them from the word which expressed themselves, the chosen people. So the old Greeks called all other nations Barbarians, a word which has gradually got another and a worse meaning, but which at first simply meant that their language could not be understood. But when Saint Paul says, "I shall be to him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me," he uses the word in the older sense, and an Old-English translator might very well have rendered it, "I shall be unto him that speaketh a Welshman." So the ancient Egyptians spoke of all other nations by a word which answered to the Greek barbarian, and the modern Chinese seem to do the same. So the Slavonic people, who lie to the east of the Teutons, - the Wends, Poles, Bohemians, Russians, and others, used to call all nations which did not speak their tongue by a word meaning dumb.

We thus get the Teutons or Dutch as one great division of the Aryan family, the_division to which we ourselves belong. But here we must make a further division, and for my purpose it will be enough to make a very rough division, into Low-Dutch and High. If I were making a purely philological lecture, I might divide a little more minutely and scientifically, but the division which I make is enough to show the relations of the English people to other nations. Let me here point out a few things which those who do not understand German may learn for the first time, while those who do may not be sorry to be reminded of them. Any one who has learned German must have remarked that a vast number of the words which we are always using, the words which we cannot get on without in either language, are the same in both languages. But he must also have remarked that though the words are essentially the same, yet there is for the most part some difference in their spelling and pronunciation, that we systematically use certain letters where the Germans use certain others so that we may know be

So

Thus

This then is the kind of difference which every one who learns German with any care must remark between the German language and his own. Putting aside words of later introduction or later formation, the most essential words in both languages from the beginning, are really the same, only with certain letters answering, according to a fixed rule, to certain other letters. But English and German, the classical literary German which we learn, do not between them make up the whole of the Teutonic languages. First of all, there is the oldest monument of Teutonic speech in the world, the translation of parts of the Bible into the old Gothic tongue, made by Ulfilas in the fourth century. Now this is one of the most wonderful books to read that I ever saw. Cast your eye carelessly over it, and it seems like an utterly strange language, in which you would have no chance of understanding a word besides the familiar proper names. Look a little more carefully, and you will gradually see that most of the words are the words which we use every day; only they have, so to speak, long tails to them. That

of conquest pushing eastwards has carried it over the Slavonic, Lithuanian, and Finnish lands which fringe the whole southern coast of the Baltic. And another wave of conquest pushing westwards has carried it to the lands beyond the German Ocean, and has made it the true speech of this our Isle of Britian, from the shores of Thanet to the Usk, from Chichester harbour to the Firth of Forth.

is to say, the old Gothic was a highly inflected language, marking the cases, moods, and so forth, by a system of endings at least as elaborate as that used in Greek. In modern German many of these inflexions have been lost, and in modern English we have kept very few indeed. In the old Gothic they are there in all their fulness. But most of the roots are words which everybody knows in English, only they are disguised at first sight by their inflections. Now, for my purpose, all these varieties Gothic, in short, is like a tree with all its of the Teutonic speech, the Old Gothic, the branches spreading out and in full leaf,|Scandinavian, and the Low Dutch, all hang while English is like the same tree pollarded, with nothing but the trunk left. I need not say that this old Gothic tongue has not been spoken for ages; but it forms part of my story, not only as being the oldest existing specimen of any Teutonic language, but because it is a language in which we have a special interest. Secondly, we have all the Scandinavian languages ancient and modern, the speech of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and, above all, Iceland, the speech of a highly important body of the settlers in our own island, the speech of the old Sagas in which their doings are recorded, the speech, I may say, at one time, of the part of England in which I find myself at this moment, the speech of those among the continental nations of Europe to whom Englishmen should always feel themselves bound by ties only less close than the closest. Lastly, and to us more important than all, come the folk of the old Low-Dutch speech, our brethren of Northern Germany. You in this town at least know something of them; ships sail to and fro between their havens and your own, and I can well believe that there may even be some kinsmen from the old brother-land among my hearers this evening. Every one who knows that part of the world knows that the German which we learn in books and grammars, the polite, classical, literary German, is not the true native speech of the men who live at the mouths of the Trave, the Elbe, and the Weser. It is the book-speech, the fashionable speech, but it is not the speech of the people. Even superficial observers, if they have any chance of coming across the true speech of the people, at once remark how close its likeness to English is. But the geographical range of this speech is far wider than what we should understand by Northern Germany. It takes in Northern Germany and something more. In one shape or another - for of course it has its local dialects like other tonguesit stretches from Flanders - we might once have said from lands even south of Flanders -to the Elbe and the Eyder. One wave

together as opposed to the German of our books. I drew out, a little time back, some of the essential differences between English and that kind of German; how certain letters in one systematically answer to certain letters in another. Now in most of the cases where English differs from German in these matters, the Gothic, the Scandinavian, and the Low-Dutch, all agree with the English and differ from the German. The only important exception is rather apparent than real. Most of the existing forms of Scandinavian and Low-Dutch have lost the sound of th, which we have kept, and in modern Low-Dutch d has taken its place, just as in the German that we learn. But there can be no doubt that this is simply a case of losing a sound. The th was certainly sounded in Gothic, and we can trace it a good way down in Low-Dutch. In Iceland, where the old Scandinavian language has scarcely changed at all, it is still sounded, and I believe that it is still sounded in the local speech of some parts of Denmark. So this is a merely accidental difference; in the essential differences, all the Gothic, Scandinavian, and Low-Dutch dialects stand together with English as against German. If I were lecturing on philology to a, scientific society, it would not be hard to draw out important points of difference between Gothic, Scandinavian, and Low-Dutch. But for my purpose they may be all lumped together. They all use their letters as we use them. The two most necessary of human actions are expressed in our German books by the roots-I do not here trouble myself with the inflections-ess and trink. We call them, and all the other Teutonic languages call them, eat and drink.

We may thus, somewhat roughly, it is true, but accurately enough for our purpose divide the Teutonic languages into two classes, the High-Dutch and the Low. The former is the tongue of Southern or Upper Germany, the high lands away from the sea and near the sources of the rivers. The latter is the tongue of Northern, lower, or Nether Germany, the lands near the sea

and at the mouths of the rivers, the speech | European influence is less than it was two of what we specially call the Netherlands or or three hundred years back, they hold a Low Countries, and of the great plain really higher position as among the foremost stretching away eastward till we get out of of those nations who can reconcile order the reach of Teutonic and Aryan languages and freedom, and can work reforms without altogether. Of the High-Dutch, the speech plunging into revolutions. That their hisof Southern Germany, our book German, tory had, a thousand years back, a most our classical polite German, is the type; important bearing on our own I need tell no but High-Dutch, like other tongues, has its one in a part of England which was once local dialects, and I cannot help cherishing a reckoned as a Danish land. But they are doubt whether the literary German, exactly not immediately concerned with the very as we have it, is really the native speech of beginnings of our nation. Their influence any part of the country. Still the native was later and secondary, and, after all, it speech of all Southern Germany is High- extended only to a part of the English naDutch; only with any form of High-Dutch tion. The Danish element in England was all that we have to do for our present pur- an infusion, a kindred infusion, at a time pose is carefully to distinguish it from Low- when the English nation, if not yet fully Dutch. But with Low-Dutch we have formed, was already a long way gone in everything to do. Our relation to the other the work of forming. Still it is an infuAryan tongues is that of distant clanship; sion, and not an original element; it is our relation to the High-Dutch is that of something poured into a mass which was real kindred, or cousinhood; but our rela-there already. But we cannot talk of a tion to the Low-Dutch is of actual brotherhood. They are our bone and our flesh; their blood is our blood; their speech is our speech; modified only by the different influences which have, in the nature of things, affected the two severed branches of the race during a separation of fourteen hundred years.

Of the three forms of Teutonic which I classed along with our own as opposed to the High-Dutch, we may at once put the Gothic aside. Of all philological relics it is to an Englishman, to a Low-Dutchman of any kind, the most precious and the most venerable. It shows us what is essentially our own speech in its earliest and most perfect extant shape. But it has no direct historical connexion with us and our tongue. Gothic stands to modern English not in the relation of a grandmother, but in that of a great-aunt. We are not a colony of Goths, nor is there any other people who can call themselves so. The Goths settled within the limits of the Roman Empire, and founded kingdoms within it. But they were gradually lost among their Roman subjects, and gradually came to exchange their own tongue for such Latin as was spoken at the time. Gothic blood must form a certain element probably not a very large element in the population of Italy, of Aquitaine, and of Spain. But the Gothic language and the Goths as a nation have long vanished from the face of the earth.

It is not so with the nations and tongues which formed my second head, those of our still living kinsmen in this place I might almost say our neighbours of Scandinavia. They still dwell in their old land, they still use their old speech, and, if their general

Low-Dutch infusion, or even of a LowDutch element, in the English nation, because the Low-Dutch part of us is not an element or an infusion, but the thing itself. Our nation is like some ancient building, a church or a castle, built in some given century, all whose essential portions, the main walls, the main pillars, the main arches, abide to this day as they were built. But here and there a later architect has put in a window in a later style; here and there he has added a parapet or a pinnacle; he may even have carried up a tower higher than was at first designed, or he may have added a chapel or two, a turret or two, which the first builders never thought of. In such a case we do not look on these later changes as elements in the building co-ordinate with the original work. They may be improvements or they may not, according to the skill and taste with which they are made; but they are at most additions and alterations, which do not touch what we may call the personal identity of the original building. So it is with our English nation, with our laws, our language, our national being. It is a Teutonic fabric, and, in all that forms the personal identity of the fabric, it remains a Teutonic fabric to this day. But builders in other styles, in the French or Latin style above all, have wrought many important changes in detail; many of the ornaments and smaller portions of the building have changed their form, or are wholly new additions of the later architect. Still the old walls, the old pillars, the old arches, are there throughout, though even the walls and pillars may have here and there been new-cased and tricked out in some later form of art. That is, we are essentially

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