however, with one or two other considerations-to that preference which almost all English poets exhibit for words of native or Anglo-Saxon origin, as distinguished from those derived from foreign sources, especially from the Latin through the French. "Remuneration?" says Shakespear's clown Costard'; "O that's the Latin word for three farthings." "Are you aware," says the author' of the "Strange Adventures of a Phaeton" to his heroine, "that, at a lecture Coleridge gave in the Royal Institution in 1808, he solemnly thanked his Maker that he did not know a word of that frightful jargon, the French language?" From the few contrasted expressions considered a little while ago, we can understand what Coleridge with his fine poetic conceptions probably felt. Concealed, threw a veil over,—depravity, grossness,—integrity, uprightness,-impaired, bends,—severe, pressing,—and others might be added to the list, intelligence, understanding,—defer, put off,-divest, strip off,-retire, go to bed. No one can fail to see how much more capacity for producing representative effects there is in the latter words of these pairs than in the former. This is so for several reasons. To begin with, as Herbert Spencer suggests in his "Essay on Style," the words of Anglo-Saxon origin include most of those used in our youth, in connection with which, therefore, through long familiarity with them, we have the most definite possible associations; whenever we hear them, therefore, they seem preeminently representative.

Then, too, we hear in the Anglo-Saxon derivatives, to a greater extent than in the foreign, the sounds which, when originally uttered, were meant to be significant of their sense. In fact, almost all the words instanced in another place as having sounds of this kind were Anglo'Love's Labor Lost, iii., 1.

"William Black.

Saxon. On the contrary, almost all our words derived from the Latin through the French have suffered a radical change in sound, both in the French language and in our own. Therefore their sounds, if ever significant of their meanings, can scarcely be expected to be so now.

Again, we know, as a rule, the history of our AngloSaxon terms, inasmuch as we still use them in their different meanings and applications, as developed by association and comparison. But foreign words are usually imported into our language in order to designate some single definite conception, and often one very different from that which they designated originally. All of us, for instance, can see the different meanings of a word like way or fair and the connections between them; but to most of us words like dunce and pagans, from the Latin Duns and pagani, have only the effects of arbitrary symbols. One other reason applies to compound words. If the different terms put together in these exist and are in present use in our own language, as is the case with most of our native compounds, then each part of the compound conveys a distinct idea of its separate meaning; so that we clearly perceive in the word its different factors. For instance, the terms uprightness, overlook, underwriter, understanding, pastime, all summon before the mind both of the ideas which together make up the word. We recognize, at once, whatever comparison or picture it represents. In compound words of entirely foreign origin, on the contrary, it is almost invariably the case that, at least, one of the factors does not exist at present in our own tongue. Integrity meant a picture to the Roman. But none of us use the word from which its chief factor is derived. So we fail to see the picture. Nor do we use either factor of the words depravity, defer, retire.

For reasons like these our words of Anglo-Saxon origin are more representative of their sense, and hence more forcible and expressive, than our words of foreign extraction, even if, at times, less elegant and more homely. Homeliness, however, is not a wholly unpleasant characteristic. "Who can enjoy a chat with a man," says a writer in one of the old numbers of the London Saturday Review," who always talks of women as females, and of a man as an individual; with whom things are never like, but similar; who never begins a thing, but commences it; who does not choose, but elects; who does not help, but facilitates; nor buy, but always purchases; who calls a beggar a mendicant; with whom a servant is always a domestic when he is not a menial; who calls a house a residence, in which he does not live but resides; with whom a place is always a locality, and things do not happen but transpire. The little girl working in the brick-fields, who told the commissioners, 'We swills the spottles off us faces before we has us dinners,' made them understand exactly the degree of cleansing she went through. If the time ever comes when she will say instead, 'We perform our ablutions before we dine,' more will be left to guesswork. The cook-maid of the future may count up the dishes she has to wash, and expatiate on the toil of her task in pedantic English; but when the char-woman of the present day says: He fouled a matter o' six plates,' there is a protest against luxury in the use of a verb that conveys more than the simple numbers would do if twice told."

The lack of representative power in the majority of words introduced from foreign languages, is probably one reason why, from Homer to Shakespear, poets have ranked highest who have written at an early stage in the

history of a nation's language, before it has become corrupted by the introduction of foreign words and phrases. It may furnish one reason, too, why Dante, near the end of his life, thought fit to deliver lectures to the people of Ravenna upon the use of their vernacular. It may explain why Goethe, at the beginning of his career, turned his back upon the fashionable French language, and gave himself to the cultivation of the neglected tongue of his fatherland. At any rate, it does explain, as has been said before, why most of the great poets of England, from Chaucer to Tennyson, have been distinguished among other things for their predominating use of words derived from the Anglo-Saxon. These words still exist in our tongue; and fortunately, notwithstanding the natural tendency of all words to grow less poetic, they have lost little of their original significance and force; because side by side with them there exist other words, almost synonymous, derived mainly from Latin sources. The fact that these latter by common consent are used almost exclusively for the technical purposes of science, philosophy, and trade, thus leaving the Anglo-Saxon terms to the slighter changes and deteriorations that take place in literature, may furnish the best reason that we have for hoping that this composite language of ours will continue to be for centuries in the future, as it has been in the past, perfectly fitted to give form to the grandest poetry.

CHAPTER XVIII.

PLAIN AND FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE.

Two Kinds of Language used in Poetry, that depending for its Meaning on Association and that depending on Comparison-Distinction between the Term Figurative Language, as applied to Poetry and as used in ordinary Rhetoric-Figures of Rhetoric containing no Representative Pictures: Interjection, Interrogation, Apostrophe, Vision, Apophasis, Irony, Antithesis, Climax-Figures of Rhetoric necessitating Representative Language: Onomatopoeia, Metonymy, Synecdoche, Trope, Simile, Metaphor, Hyperbole, Allegory-Laws to be observed, and Faults to be avoided, in using Similes and Metaphors-When Plain Language should be used—And when Figurative.

FRO

ROM the facts noticed in the last chapter, we may infer that two kinds of language-whether we apply this term to single words or to consecutive ones—can be used in poetry: that which depends for its meaning upon the associations which the words suggest, and that which depends upon the comparisons which they embody. The former corresponds in most of its features, but not in all of them, to what is ordinarily called plain language, and its words have a tendency to appeal to us like arbitrary symbols. The latter corresponds in a similar way to what is called figurative language, and its words have a tendency to appeal to us like pictures.

A distinction needs to be drawn, however, between the term figurative language as it is generally applied to poetic phraseology, and the same term as used in rhetoric. Many of the so-called "figures of rhetoric" scarcely necessitate