“About the year 1150 the Saxon began to take a form in which the beginning of the present English may be plainly discovered; this change seems not to have been the effect of the Norman conquest, for very _few French words_ are found to have been introduced in the first Hundred years after it; the language must, therefore, have been altered by _causes like those which, notwithstanding the care of writers and societies instituted to obviate them, are even now daily making innovations in every living language_. I have exhibited a specimen of the language of this age from the year 1135 to 1140 of the Saxon Chronicle, of which the latter part was apparently written near the time to which it relates.”(31) Yet Professor Rask of Copenhagen, a writer of great learning and ability, in alluding to the changes that occurred at this period, attempts to account for them by vaguely attributing them to an infusion of the speech of the “old northern settlers,” (in other words—the Danes,) and to the ascendancy of the Norman French as a court language.(32) But the facts are singularly at variance with his conclusions! The sway of the Danish kings had produced, as he admits, no material alteration in the English language, even during its continuance; and how then could it have done so a century after its termination? Nor can the ascendancy of the Norman Court be accepted as a satisfactory explanation of these results, since the changes to be accounted for did not consist in the adoption of Norman words, but in an internal change in the structure and inflections of the original Anglo-Saxon itself, unattended by the introduction of any Foreign admixture. It is obvious, then, that the conclusion of Professor Rask cannot be regarded as a deduction naturally suggested by the phenomena, with which he was so profoundly conversant, but must be viewed rather as a result of the influence which the popular and generally received opinions on the subject, must have exercised upon his mind. Highly instructive is it to mark in this instance an example of the extent to which even erudite and admirable philologists have frequently been betrayed into inconsistency and error, by the supposed necessity of referring the revolutions which languages have undergone, to some abrupt and violent social revolution, with which, being connected in the order of events, they are also and not unnaturally conceived to be equally connected by the relation of cause and effect!