The answer to these inquiries involves a truth that I believe will be found no less startling to the Philologist than to the general reader, in whose mind the changes which the English language has undergone are associated with the violent shock given by the Norman Conquest to Anglo-Saxon institutions. The truth to which I allude—and it is one for which I apprehend few inquirers will be prepared—is this: that the changes which have occurred in the English language since the age of Chaucer are at least equal in importance to those which took place in the antecedent periods of our history. Novel as this conclusion may appear, the proofs are so simple and so conclusive, as to place its accuracy beyond the possibility of doubt. The features which distinguish different languages from each other are divisible into two classes—Words and Grammatical inflections. In both these features marked differences have arisen between our modern English and its parent Saxon, and to both these classes we must refer in forming our conclusion as to the relative importance of the alterations which have taken place in our language at two different epochs. 1st. The difference in words between the language of Chaucer and our modern English will be sufficiently obvious, from a cursory glance at the venerable remains of that poet. How many terms are there in the pages of the father of English poetry that require the aid of a glossary to render them intelligible even to an educated Englishman! These terms too, be it observed—and it is a reflection highly deserving of the attention of those who may still cling to the impression that the Norman Conquest has been the sole agent of those phases through which the English Tongue has passed—do not consist exclusively of Anglo-Saxon roots, but comprise also a large number of Norman words which have shared the same fate! 2d. Still more striking have been those Changes in the Grammatical forms of the English which may be referred to the last four centuries. The ancient Saxon was a language of inflections—the modern English is a language of simple forms. Thus, in the Anglo-Saxon the terminations of the Verb were varied in different Persons, as they are in the Latin “Hab-_eo_, Hab-_emus_, Hab-_ent_,” and in the German “Hab-_e_, Hab-_en_, Hab-_en_.” These inflections have, for the most part, progressively disappeared from the English, which expresses the changes of Persons by separate Pronouns, in conjunction with a Root, in most instances unvarying, as “I _Have_, We _Have_, They _Have_.” There is distinct evidence that this change has, in a great measure, perhaps principally, taken place since the time of Chaucer—whose writings, to a great extent, preserve the Anglo-Saxon inflections, such as “They Hav-_en_,”(34) &c., corresponding with the German “Sie Hab-_en_,” &c.