When about the end of the fourth century (A.D.) Germanic and Asiatic hordes began to invade the Western Empire with more and more irresistible force, the refined voice of Roman eloquence and poetry was soon drowned by the noise of barbarous tongues. Even before this irruption of new elements the language of the Romans had lost much of its classic purity. It was no longer the idiom of Cicero and of Horace. Familiar phrases, provincialisms and barbarisms had found their way into the written language. Thence it is that we find the illiterate expressions of the comic characters in Plautus and Terence occupying a place as legitimate words in the dictionaries of the Romance idioms. When with the already decaying language of the fourth and fifth centuries the variegated dialects of the conquering barbarians were mingled, confusion became worse confounded and linguistic chaos seemed at hand. It need not be said that for artistic purposes this mongrel type of speech became totally unfit. But in the same measure as the healthy, though uncultured, peoples of the North were destined to revivify the old institutions of Roman political life, their languages also added new vitality to the decaying forms of Roman speech. The chaos was a preparatory stage of amalgamation and new development. For the formation of languages, like any other natural process, is ruled by a strict law of decay and growth. In the derivation of the Romance dialects from the common Latin mother-tongue, two main principles are observable. The German invaders, like all barbarous conquerors, soon adopted the speech of their more civilised subjects; but they adhered to certain terms and denominations of objects particularly familiar or dear to them. Thus the terms for warfare and many of its chief implements were characteristically retained by them. The French _guerre_ and the Italian _guerra_ are identical with the old High German _werra_, our _war_; and the title of highest dignity in the French army of the present day, _Maréchal_ (mediæval Latin _mariscalcus_), means nothing but _shalc_ (groom) of the mares.