nable disdain arts which
had neither preserved their cultivators from corruption nor raised them
from servitude. Theodoric, the most famous of the Ostrogoth kings in
Italy, could not write his name, and is said to have restrained his
countrymen from attending those schools of learning by which he, or
rather perhaps his minister Cassiodorus, endeavoured to revive the
studies of his Italian subjects. Scarcely one of the barbarians, so long
as they continued unconfused with the native inhabitants, acquired the
slightest tincture of letters; and the praise of equal ignorance was
soon aspired to and attained by the entire mass of the Roman laity.
They, however, could hardly have divested themselves so completely of
all acquaintance with even the elements of learning, if the language in
which books were written had not ceased to be their natural dialect.
This remarkable change in the speech of France, Spain, and Italy is most
intimately connected with the extinction of learning; and there is
enough of obscurity as well as of interest in the subject to deserve
some discussion.

[Sidenote: Corruption of the Latin language.]

It is obvious, on the most cursory view of the French and Spanish
languages, that they, as well as the Italian, are derived from one
common source, the Latin. That must therefore have been at some period,
and certainly not since the establishment of the barbarous nations in
Spain and Gaul, substituted in ordinary use for the original dialects of
those countries which are generally supposed to have been Celtic, not
essentially differing from those which are spoken in Wales and Ireland.
Rome, says Augustin, imposed not only her yoke, but her language, upon
conquered nations. The success of such an attempt is indeed very
remarkable. Though it is the natural effect of conquest, or even of
commercial intercourse, to ingraft fresh words and foreign idioms on the
stock of the original language, yet the entire disuse of the latter, and
adoption of one radically different, scarcely takes place in the lapse
of a far longer period than that of the Roman dominion in Gaul. Thus, in
part of Britany the people speak a language which has perhaps sustained
no essential alteration from the revolution of two thousand years; and
we know how steadily another Celtic dialect has kept its ground in
Wales, notwithstanding English, laws and government, and the long line
of contiguous frontier which brings the natives of that princi