ore orthography is unfixed, or being
purely phonetic, cannot properly be said to exist at all, such words for
a long while live orally on the lips of men, before they are set down in
writing; and out of this fact it is that we shall for the most part find
them reshaped and remoulded by the people who have adopted them,
entirely assimilated to _their_ language in form and termination, so as
in a little while to be almost or quite indistinguishable from natives.
On the other hand a most effectual check to this process, a process
sometimes barbarizing and defacing, however it may be the only one which
will make the newly brought in entirely homogeneous with the old and
already existing, is imposed by the existence of a much written language
and a full formed literature. The foreign word, being once adopted into
these, can no longer undergo a thorough transformation. For the most
part the utmost which use and familiarity can do with it now, is to
cause the gradual dropping of the foreign termination. Yet this too is
not unimportant; it often goes far to making a home for a word, and
hindering it from wearing the appearance of a foreigner and
stranger{26}.

{Sidenote: _Analysis of English_}

But to return from this digression--I said just now that you would learn
very much from observing and calculating the proportions in which the
words of one descent and those of another occur in any passage which you
analyse. Thus examine the Lord's Prayer. It consists of exactly seventy
words. You will find that only the following six claim the rights of
Latin citizenship--'trespasses', 'trespass', 'temptation', 'deliver',
'power', 'glory'. Nor would it be very difficult to substitute for any
one of these a Saxon word. Thus for 'trespasses' might be substituted
'sins'; for 'deliver' 'free'; for 'power' 'might'; for 'glory'
'brightness'; which would only leave 'temptation', about which there
could be the slightest difficulty, and 'trials', though we now ascribe
to the word a somewhat different sense, would in fact exactly correspond
to it. This is but a small percentage, six words in seventy, or less
than ten in the hundred; and we often light upon a still smaller
proportion. Thus take the first three verses of the 23rd Psalm:--"The
Lord is my Shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing; He shall feed me in a
green _pasture_, and lead me forth beside the waters of _comfort_; He
shall _convert_ my soul, and bring me forth in the paths of
righ