The tongues of all these successive occupiers of the soil have doubtless left traces in the noble Spanish language, but in very unequal proportions. A very few words belong to the old Iberian speech, but it is to that, perhaps, that Spanish owes the purity and the paucity of its vowel sounds, as from the Arabic it has gained the gutturals which have prevented its sinking to the effeminate softness of the Italian, and it still preserves the lofty sonority of the Latin. Some few of the elements of its vocabulary may be traced to the Keltic, less to the Teutonic languages. From Arabic it has taken more, and those words of more important character. But the bulk of the language still remains Latin. It is essentially one of the Romance dialects which sprang from the "lingua rustica," the country speech of the decaying Roman Empire. It has been calculated that six-tenths of its words are Latin, a tenth Gothic or Teutonic, one-tenth liturgical and Greek, one-tenth American or modern borrowings, and one-tenth Arabic. But as to this last, we must not forget that the different parts of the vocabulary of a language have a very different value. Some could be well dispensed with, some are of first necessity. There are words which we only see in print, and seldom or never hear spoken; there are words which belong only to science or to pedantry; but there are others which are in daily and hourly use, and whose employment is many times more frequent than the whole number of words in all the rest of the language put together. It is thus that the contribution of Arabic to Spanish vocabulary is of far more importance than is apparent by its numerical proportion; many of the most common terms, especially of those used in the south of Spain, are of Arabic origin. Thus has been formed the noble Spanish tongue, the richest and most dignified of all that have sprung from the decay of Latin. Marvellously adapted to oratory and to verse, most incisive and mordant in the tongues of the lowest class, stately and sonorous almost to a fault, it is yet unequalled in grace and tenderness in the old romances and in the mouths of women and of children. Italian is its only rival. While reading its stately sentences, and marking the majestic rhythm of Scio's grand translation of the Bible and of its other religious literature, we can well understand why Spain's greatest emperor, the lord of many lands and of many tongues, spoke Spanish only to his God. It is rare to find a foreigner who has mastered Spanish, who does not ever afterwards delight in its use above all other tongues except his own.