Language is the soil of thought; and our own especially is a
rich leaf-mould, the slow growth of ages, the shed foliage of feeling,
fancy, and imagination, which has suffered an earth-change, that the
vocal forest, as Howell called it, may clothe itself anew with living
green. There is death in the Dictionary; and where language is limited
by convention, the ground for expression to grow in is straitened also,
and we get a _potted_ literature, Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy
trees.
We are thankful to Mr. Bartlett for the onslaught he makes in his
Introduction upon the _highfaluting_ style so common among us. But we
are rather amused to find him falling so easily into that _Anglo-Saxon_
trap which is the common pitfall of those half-learned men among whom
we should be slow to rank him.[A] He says, "The _unfortunate tendency_
to _favor_ the Latin at the _expense_ of the Saxon _element_ of our
_language_, which _social_ and _educational causes_ have long _tended_
to foster in the mother _country_, has with us _received_ an
_additional_ _impulse_ from the great _admixture_ of _foreigners_ in
our _population_." (p. xxxii.) We have underscored the words of Latin
origin, and find that they include _all_ the nouns, all the adjectives
but two, and three out of five verbs,--one of these last (the auxiliary
_have_) being the same in both Latin and Saxon.
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