The nasal sound of our neighbours still prevails; thus Gracchus sinks into _Gracque_; Titus Livius is but _Tite Live_; and the historian of Alexander the Great, the dignified Quintus Curtius, is the ludicrous _Quinte Curce_!--Auguis, "Du Génie de la Langue Françoise." [3] Turner's "History of England." [4] See "Curiosities of Literature," article Recovery of Manuscripts. [5] ERASMUS composed a satirical dialogue between two vindictive Ciceronians; it is said that a duel has been occasioned by the intrepidity of maintaining the purity of a writer's latinity. The pedantry of mixing Greek and Latin terms in the vernacular language is ridiculed by RABELAIS in his encounter with the Limousin student, whom he terrified till the youngster ended in delivering himself in plain French, and left off "Pindarising" all the rest of his days.--"Pantagruel," lib. ii. c. 6. [6] Collier's "History of Dramatic Poetry," ii. 463. [7] We now possess this valued literary history, which none, perhaps, but Anthony à Wood could have so fervently pursued: "The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford," in five volumes, quarto. Edited by John Gutch. It is a distinct work from the far-known "Athenæ Oxonienses." Why did this great work, as well as some others, come forth with a Latin title? This absurdity was a remaining taint of the ancient prejudice. But an English work was not the more classical for bearing a Latin title. ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. Johnson pronounced it impossible to ascertain when our speech ceased to be Saxon and began to be English; and although since his day English philology has extended its boundaries, the lines of demarcation are very moveable for the literary antiquary. At whatever point we set out, we may find that something which preceded has been omitted; a century may pass away and leave no precise epoch; and transitions of words and styles, like shades melting into each other, may elude perception. Too often wanting sufficient data, the toil of the antiquary becomes baffled, and the microscopic eye of the philologist pores on empty space. The learned have their theories; but in darkness we are doomed to grope, and in a circle we can fix on no beginning. The elegant researches of Ellis, the antiquarian lore of Ritson, the simplicity of taste of Percy, the poetic fervour of Campbell, the elaborate diligence of Sharon Turner, and more recent names skilled in Saxon lore, have given opposite hypotheses, conjectures, and refutations. "A modification of language is not in reality a change," observes a powerful researcher in literary history,[1] who is at a loss "whether some compositions shall pass for the latest offspring of the mother, or the earliest fruit of the daughter's fertility"--a shrewd suspicion which the genealogists of words may entertain concerning the legitimate and the illegitimate, or the pure and the corrupt.