It was a testimony too which cost them something; at present we can very little understand the amount of courage which this ‘thou-ing’ and ‘thee-ing’ of all men must have demanded on their parts, nor yet the amount of indignation and offence which it stirred up in them who were not aware of, or would not allow for, the scruples which obliged them to it{196}. It is, however, in its other aspect that we must chiefly regret the dying out of the use of ‘thou’--that is, as the pledge of peculiar intimacy and special affection, as between husband and wife, parents and children, and such other as might be knit together by bands of more than common affection. {Sidenote: _Gender Words_} I have preferred during this lecture to find my theme in changes which are now going forward in English, but I cannot finish it without drawing one illustration from its remoter periods, and bidding you to note a force not now waning and failing from it, but extinct long ago. I cannot well pass it by; being as it is by far the boldest step which in this direction of simplification the English language has at any time taken. I refer to the renouncing of the distribution of its nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter, as in German, or even into masculine and feminine, as in French; and with this, and as a necessary consequence of this, the dropping of any flexional modification in the adjectives connected with them. Natural _sex_ of course remains, being inherent in all language; but grammatical _gender_, with the exception of ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘it’, and perhaps one or two other fragmentary instances, the language has altogether forgone. An example will make clear the distinction between these. Thus it is not the word ‘poetess’ which is _feminine_, but the person indicated who is _female_. So too ‘daughter’, ‘queen’, are in English not _feminine_ nouns, but nouns designating _female_ persons. Take on the contrary ‘filia’ or ‘regina’, ‘fille’ or ‘reine’; there you have _feminine_ nouns as well as _female_ persons. I need hardly say to you that we did not inherit this simplicity from others, but, like the Danes, in so far as they have done the like, have made it for ourselves. Whether we turn to the Latin, or, which is for us more important, to the old Gothic, we find gender; and in all daughter languages which have descended from the Latin, in most of those which have descended from the ancient Gothic stock, it is fully established to this day. The practical, business-like character of the English mind asserted itself in the rejection of a distinction, which in a vast proportion of words, that is, in all which are the signs of _inanimate_ objects, and as such incapable of sex, rested upon a fiction, and had no ground in the real nature of things. It is only by an act and effort of the imagination that sex, and thus gender, can be attributed to a table, a ship, or a tree; and there are aspects, this being one, in which the English is among the least imaginative of all