One observation more let me make, before entering on the special details of my subject. It is this. The losses and diminutions of a language differ in one respect from its gains and acquisitions--namely, that they are of _two_ kinds, while its gains are only of _one_. Its gains are only in _words_; it never puts forth in the course of its evolution a new _power_; it never makes for itself a new case, or a new tense, or a new comparative. But its losses are both in words and in _powers_--in words of course, but in powers also: it leaves behind it, as it travels onwards, cases which it once possessed; renounces the employment of tenses which it once used; forgets its dual; is content with one termination both for masculine and feminine, and so on. Nor is this a peculiar feature of one language, but the universal law of all. “In all languages”, as has been well said, “there is a constant tendency to relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinction, and detect as it were a royal road to the interchange of opinion”. For example, a vast number of languages had at an early period of their development, besides the singular and plural, a dual number, some even a trinal, which they have let go at a later. But what I mean by a language renouncing its powers will, I trust, be more clear to you before my lecture is concluded. This much I have here said on the matter, to explain and justify a division which I shall make, considering first the losses of the English language in _words_, and then in _powers_. {Sidenote: _Words become Extinct_} And first, there is going forward a continual extinction of the words in our language--as indeed in every other. When I speak of this, the dying out of words, I do not refer to mere _tentative_, experimental words, not a few of which I adduced in my last lecture, words offered to the language, but not accepted by it; I refer rather to such as either belonged to the primitive stock of the language, or if not so, which had been domiciled in it long, that they might have been supposed to have found in it a lasting home. Thus not a few pure Anglo-Saxon words which lived on into the times of our early English, have subsequently dropped out of our vocabulary, sometimes leaving a gap which has never since been filled, but their places oftener taken by others which have come up in their room. Not to mention those of Chaucer and Wiclif, which are very numerous, many held their ground to far later periods, and yet have finally given way. That beautiful word ‘wanhope’ for despair, hope which has so _waned_ that now there is an entire _want_ of it, was in use down to the reign of Elizabeth; it occurs so late as in the poems of Gascoigne{129}. ‘Skinker’ for cupbearer, (an ungraceful word, no doubt) is used by Shakespeare and lasted till Dryden’s time and beyond.