the
taking up into itself of that ill, all these errors are themselves the
utterances and evidences of life. A dead language is the contrary of all
this. It is dead, because books, and not now any generation of living
men, are the guardians of it, and what they guard, they guard without
change. Its course has been completely run, and it is now equally
incapable of gaining and of losing. We may come to know it better; but
in itself it is not, and never can be, other than it was when it ceased
from the lips of men.

{Sidenote: _English a Living Language_}

Our own is, of course, a living language still. It is therefore gaining
and losing. It is a tree in which the vital sap is circulating yet,
ascending from the roots into the branches; and as this works, new
leaves are continually being put forth by it, old are dying and dropping
away. I propose for the subject of my present lecture to consider some
of the evidences of this life at work in it still. As I took for the
subject of my first lecture the actual proportions in which the several
elements of our composite English are now found in it, and the service
which they were severally called on to perform, so I shall consider in
this the _sources_ from which the English language has enriched its
vocabulary, the _periods_ at which it has made the chief additions to
this, the _character_ of the additions which at different periods it has
made, and the _motives_ which induced it to seek them.

I had occasion to mention in that lecture and indeed I dwelt with some
emphasis on the fact, that the core, the radical constitution of our
language, is Anglo-Saxon; so that, composite or mingled as it must be
freely allowed to be, it is only such in respect to words, not in
respect of construction, inflexions, or generally its grammatical forms.
These are all of one piece; and whatever of new has come in has been
compelled to conform itself to these. The framework is English; only a
part of the filling in is otherwise; and of this filling in, of these
its comparatively more recent accessions, I now propose to speak.

{Sidenote: _The Norman Conquest_}

The first great augmentation by foreign words of our Saxon vocabulary,
setting aside those which the Danes brought us, was a consequence,
although not an immediate one, of the battle of Hastings, and of the
Norman domination which Duke William's victory established in our land.
And here let me say in respect of that victory, in cont