is true, are harder and more technical
than these; but a vast proportion of them present no greater difficulty
than those which I have adduced{49}.

The period during which this naturalization of Latin words in the
English Language was going actively forward, may be said to have
continued till about the Restoration of Charles the Second. It first
received a check from the coming up of French tastes, fashions, and
habits of thought consequent on that event. The writers already formed
before that period, such as Cudworth and Barrow, still continued to
write their stately sentences, Latin in structure, and Latin in diction,
but not so those of a younger generation. We may say of this influx of
Latin that it left the language vastly more copious, with greatly
enlarged capabilities, but perhaps somewhat burdened, and not always
able to move gracefully under the weight of its new acquisitions; for as
Dryden has somewhere truly said, it is easy enough to acquire foreign
words, but to know what to do with them after you have acquired, is the
difficulty.

{Sidenote: _Pedantic Words_}

It might have received indeed most serious injury, if _all_ the words
which the great writers of this second Latin period of our language
employed, and so proposed as candidates for admission into it, had
received the stamp of popular allowance. But happily it was not so; it
was here, as it had been before with the French importations, and with
the earlier Latin of Lydgate and Occleve. The re-active powers of the
language, enabling it to throw off that which was foreign to it, did not
fail to display themselves now, as they had done on former occasions.
The number of unsuccessful candidates for admission into, and permanent
naturalization in, the language during this period, is enormous; and one
may say that in almost all instances where the Alien Act has been
enforced, the sentence of exclusion was a just one; it was such as the
circumstances of the case abundantly bore out. Either the word was not
idiomatic, or was not intelligible, or was not needed, or looked ill, or
sounded ill, or some other valid reason existed against it. A lover of
his native tongue will tremble to think what that tongue would have
become, if all the vocables from the Latin and the Greek which were then
introduced or endorsed by illustrious names, had been admitted on the
strength of their recommendation; if 'torve' and 'tetric' (Fuller),
'cecity' (Hooker), 'fastide' a