t is
now making, the perils which have threatened or are threatening it, the
losses which it has sustained, the capacities which may be yet latent in
it, waiting to be evoked, the points in which it transcends other
tongues, in which it comes short of them, all this may well be the
object of worthy ambition to every one of us. So may we hope to be
ourselves guardians of its purity, and not corrupters of it; to
introduce, it may be, others into an intelligent knowledge of that, with
which we shall have ourselves more than a merely superficial
acquaintance; to bequeath it to those who come after us not worse than
we received it ourselves. "Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna",--this
should be our motto in respect at once of our country, and of our
country's tongue.

{Sidenote: _Duty to our own Tongue_}

Nor shall we, I trust, any of us feel this subject to be alien or remote
from the purposes which have brought us to study within these walls. It
is true that we are mainly occupied here in studying other tongues than
our own. The time we bestow upon it is small as compared with that
bestowed on those others. And yet one of our main purposes in learning
them is that we may better understand this. Nor ought any other to
dispute with it the first and foremost place in our reverence, our
gratitude, and our love. It has been well and worthily said by an
illustrious German scholar: "The care of the national language I
consider as at all times a sacred trust and a most important privilege
of the higher orders of society. Every man of education should make it
the object of his unceasing concern, to preserve his language pure and
entire, to speak it, so far as is in his power, in all its beauty and
perfection.... A nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous, must
be on the brink of barbarism in regard to everything else. A nation
which allows her language to go to ruin, is parting with the last half
of her intellectual independence, and testifies her willingness to cease
to exist"{2}.

But this knowledge, like all other knowledge which is worth attaining,
is only to be attained at the price of labour and pains. The language
which at this day we speak is the result of processes which have been
going forward for hundreds and for thousands of years. Nay more, it is
not too much to affirm that processes modifying the English which at the
present day we write and speak have been at work from the first day that
man, being gifted wit