“By St. Dunstan,” answered Gurth, “thou speakest but sad truths; little is left to us but the air we breathe, and that appears to have been reserved with much hesitation, solely for the purpose of enabling us to endure the tasks they lay upon our shoulders. The finest and the fattest is for their board; the loveliest is for their couch; the best and bravest supply their foreign masters with soldiers, and whiten distant lands with their bones, leaving few here who have either the will or the power to protect the unfortunate Saxon!” The effect of the Norman Conquest was simply to introduce among the Saxon population a certain class of new terms, which—though they were eventually embodied in their language—are still readily distinguishable from the Stock on which they were thus engrafted. But the general structure and composition of the language remained unaffected by any Foreign alloy. The most common verbs, nouns, and grammatical inflections and forms—Horne Tooke’s “epea pteroenta” of the English language—remained, and have since continued to be, pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon! Such was the character of those modifications in the English Tongue that flowed from the Norman Conquest. Partial and peculiar were those changes in their nature—brief, also, was the interval of which they were the result! A period can be fixed, at which it is certain that the dialect of the Norman had ceased to encroach on that of the Anglo-Saxon people. In the age of Chaucer, for example, the Norman and Saxon races had long become undistinguishable, and the languages they spoke had blended into one. Can the same age be fixed upon as an epoch at which the process of transition in the English language had also been arrested? That considerable changes have since occurred will not be disputed—for it is an historical fact which does neither admit of doubt nor discussion. But had all _important_ changes ceased at that time? Can it be said that—in the time of Chaucer—that progressive revolution which has so widely separated the modern English from the original Anglo-Saxon had gone through all its stages? Can it be said that the innovations which have since occurred are few in number, and trifling in point of character, compared to those which belong to earlier periods of our History?