an hardly trace the small rivulets which run on in the main bed. But
if lower down, that is to say, later in history, we meet again with a new
body of stationary language, forming or formed, we may be sure that its
tributaries were those very rivulets which for a time were almost lost
from our sight. Or it may be more accurate to compare a classical or
literary idiom with the frozen surface of a river, brilliant and smooth,
but stiff and cold. It is mostly by political commotions that this surface
of the more polite and cultivated speech is broken and carried away by the
waters rising underneath. It is during times when the higher classes are
either crushed in religious and social struggles, or mix again with the
lower classes to repel foreign invasion; when literary occupations are
discouraged, palaces burnt, monasteries pillaged, and seats of learning
destroyed,--it is then that the popular, or, as they are called, the vulgar
dialects, which had formed a kind of undercurrent, rise beneath the
crystal surface of the literary language, and sweep away, like the waters
in spring, the cumbrous formations of a by-gone age. In more peaceful
times, a new and popular literature springs up in a language which _seems_
to have been formed by conquests or revolutions, but which, in reality,
had been growing up long before, and was only brought out, ready made, by
historical events. From this point of view we can see that no literary
language can ever be said to have been the mother of another language. As
soon as a language loses its unbounded capability of change, its
carelessness about what it throws away, and its readiness in always
supplying instantaneously the wants of mind and heart, its natural life is
changed into a merely artificial existence. It may still live on for a
long time, but while it seems to be the leading shoot, it is in reality
but a broken and withering branch, slowly falling from the stock from
which it sprang. The sources of Italian are not to be found in the
classical literature of Rome, but in the popular dialects of Italy.
English did not spring from the Anglo-Saxon of Wessex only, but from the
dialects spoken in every part of Great Britain, distinguished by local
peculiarities, and modified at different times by the influence of Latin,
Danish, Norman, French, and other foreign elements. Some of the local
dialects of English, as spoken at the present day, are of great importance
for a critical study of Eng