Germany{73} (it is not an old one in our tongue) during the course of the last century. If ‘_life_-guard’ was originally, as Richardson suggests, ‘_leib_-garde’, or ‘_body_-guard’, and from that transformed, by the determination of Englishmen to make it significant in English, into ‘_life_-guard’, or guard defending the _life_ of the sovereign, this will be another word from the same quarter. Yet I have my doubts; ‘leibgarde’ would scarcely have found its way hither before the accession of the House of Hanover, or at any rate before the arrival of Dutch William with his memorable guards; while ‘lifeguard’, in its present shape, is certainly an older word in the language; we hear often of the ‘lifeguards’ in our Civil Wars; as witness too Fuller’s words: “The Cherethites were a kind of _lifegard_ to king David”{74}. Of late our German importations have been somewhat more numerous. With several German compound words we have been in recent times so well pleased, that we must needs adopt them into English, or imitate them in it. We have not always been very happy in those which we have selected for imitation or adoption. Thus we might have been satisfied with ‘manual’, and not called back from its nine hundred years of oblivion that ugly and unnecessary word ‘handbook’. And now we are threatened with ‘word-building’, as I see a book announced under the title of “Latin _word-building_”, and, much worse than this, with ‘stand-point’. ‘Einseitig’ (itself a modern word, if I mistake not, or at any rate modern in its secondary application) has not, indeed, been adopted, but is evidently the pattern on which we have formed ‘onesided’--a word to which a few years ago something of affectation was attached; so that any one who employed it at once gave evidence that he was more or less a dealer in German wares; it has however its manifest conveniences, and will hold its ground. ‘Fatherland’ (Vaterland) on the contrary will scarcely establish itself among us, the note of affectation will continue to cleave to it, and we shall go on contented with ‘native country’ to the end{75}. The most successful of these compounded words, borrowed recently from the German, is ‘folk-lore’, and the substitution of this for popular superstitions, must be esteemed, I think, an unquestionable gain{76}. To speak now of other sources from which the new words of a language are derived. Of course the period when absolutely new roots are generated will have past away, long before men begin by a reflective act to take any notice of processes going forward in the language which they speak. This pure productive energy, creative we might call it, belongs only to the earlier stages of a nation’s existence,--to times quite out of the ken of history. It is only from materials already existing either in its own bosom, or in the bosom of other languages, that it can enrich itself in the later, or historical stages of its life. {Sidenote: _Compound Words_}