For these were not “French” words. Right at the beginning of the thirteenth century the English kings had abandoned Normandy, and the English Normans, separated from their brethren, began to blend more and more completely with their neighbours. In England French remained at first the exclusive language of the Court and the law, but, as the blood of the two peoples mingled, the Norman words which were not dropped gradually altered their shapes, developing various English characteristics, which not only differentiated from their original French forms the words already in the language, but served as permanent moulds into which new borrowings could be poured as they were made. _Gentil_ changed to _gentle_, _pitee_ to _pitie_ or _pity_; and it was the same with innumerable others. Familiar French-English terminations like _-tion_, _-ty_, _-ance_, _-age_, _-able_, _-on_, were already nearly as common in Chaucer as they are in the pages of an average modern writer. Begotten on Latin words by generations of happy-go-lucky French and English lips, they were fixed for ever by the printing press, and to-day, if we want to borrow a word directly from Latin, we still give it a shape which tacitly assumes that it came to us through the French language at about that time. As Nature takes the human embryo through repetitions of its discarded forms—fish, reptile, mammal, and vertebrate—before bringing it to birth, so whoever introduced, let us say, the word _heredity_ in the nineteenth century went through the instinctive process of deriving from the Latin ‘hereditare’ an imaginary French word, ‘heredité’, and converting the latter into _heredity_. It is usually done when we wish to borrow a new word from Latin. We have borrowed so many that it has lately been calculated that as many as one-fourth of the words which we can find in a full-sized Latin dictionary have found their way directly or indirectly into the English vocabulary. A large number of these are Greek words which the Romans had taken from them. Thus, taking into account those Greek words which have come to us by other channels, Greek and Latin form a very large and a very important part of the English language. All through the history of our nation the two threads can be seen running together. At first sight they appear to be so inextricably twisted round one another as to form but one solid cord, but in reality it is not so difficult to unravel them. The fact, for instance, that _hospital_, _parliament_, and _prison_ are Latin, while _church_ and _school_ have only come _through_ Latin from the Greek, is symbolical of the two main divisions into which the classical part of our language falls; for words which are genuinely of Latin origin—unless they have been especially used at some time to translate the thoughts of Greek writers—are very often concerned with the material outer world, but words of Greek origin are more likely to be landmarks in the world of thoughts and feelings.