England in the Eighteenth Century.. Epworth League, The..... Edward A. Freeman.. .639 .187 Farmers' Alliance and Other Political Parties. H. R. Chamberlain.. France Have an Eight-Hour Day, Shall?.... Vicomte George D'Avenel.. France, Traveling in Provincial.... Hypnotism, The Physical and the Mental Naval Apprentice, The Life of a. .Elizabeth Robins Pennell. -338 .486 .633 48 .G. Valbert.. 197 J. N. Ingram... -755 Prof. Calvin Thomas. .205 Theodore Temple.. .478 622 .597 Persia, What the World Owes to the Arts of..S. G. W. Benjamin.. Contracts a Married Woman May Make, What. Lelia Robinson Sawtelle, LL.B.. Married Woman May Make a Will, How a.. Lelia Robinson Sawtelle, LL.B.. .Mrs. C. R. Corson.. T. De Wyzewa.. ..Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney. Morizot, The Artist Madame Berthe.. Women. Ella Loraine Dorsey.. .227 .Fannie C. W. Barbour... .769 ..665 .Fraulein H. Buzello-Stürmer. .220 .Sarah K. Bolton.... .774 ..Kate Carnes.. ..663 .Henrietta E. Page. .369 .Lilian Whiting. .766 ..Anna Churchell Carey. 85 87 .224 .214 .506 ..660 Woman's Clubs have done for Women, What. Kate Tannatt Woods.. Woman's Work in America..... .Olive Thorne Miller. .217 .Sarah K. Bolton.. .222 .Dr. Klara Kühnast. ..778 Woman's World of London, The.... Woman as Scholar.. Woman's Suffrage. A Symposium........ 72 .251, 389, 530, 675, 792 Course of Study for 1891-1892, Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle... Local Circles.... Notes and Word Studies.. Outline and Programs.. .III, 256, 392 ..IOI, 242, 380 "Impatient to Mount and Ride", ......548 THE CHAUTAUQUAN. VOL. XIII. APRIL, 1891. No. I. OFFICERS OF THE CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC CIRCLE. JOHN H. VINCENT, Chancellor. LEWIS MILLER, President. JESSE L. HURLBUT, Principal. Counselors: LYMAN ABBOTT, D. D.; BISHOP H. W. WARREN, D. D.; J. M. GIBSON, D. D.; W. C. WILKINSON, D. D.; EDWARD EVERETT HALE, D. D.; JAMES H. CARLISLE, LL. D. Miss K. F. KIMBALL, Office Secretary. A. M. MARTIN, General Secretary. The REV. A.H. GILLET, Field Secretary. required reading foR THE CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY AND SCIENTIFic circle. THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.* BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN. T CHAPTER VI. ENGLAND IN THE MIDDLE AGES. HUS by the end of the fourteenth century English had again become the common speech of all men in England. By the end of the fifteenth all traces, save the merest survivals, of the use of French even as an official language had passed away. But the English tongue which in the end won the day had in many things changed from the English tongue which had been spoken when the tongues were first spoken side by side in England. It was still the same tongue; we had not changed it for any other; but great changes had happened in the tongue itself. In so long a time as three hundred years great changes always do happen in any language, even if it is not brought into any special connexion with any other. Grammatical forms wear out; old words fall out of use, new words come into use, even when the language, so to speak, lives by itself. But all this happens yet more largely when a language lives in what we may call daily intercourse with another language. Each borrows something from the other; but that which is looked on as the less polite and literary of the two will borrow more largely from the other than the more polite and literary tongue will borrow from it. Thus, while English and French were spoken side by side in England, there is no doubt that French borrowed something from English; but English borrowed very much more from French. At *Special Course for C. L. S. C. Graduates. B-Apr. first, as we have seen, it borrowed very little. was no need ; they supplanted English words The borrowing of foreign words by the English tongue came directly of its living side by side with another tongue. The same cause helped on another change which would no doubt have taken place to some extent in This is the loss of the old gramany case. matical forms, the inflexions, of the language. This happens in every language as it goes on; men seem to get tired of speaking Modern Hightheir words accurately. German, which has been less influenced by other languages than English, though it keeps many more inflexions than English, has lost a great many. Danish, which hass had less to do with other languages than either, has lost its inflexions quite as thoroughly as English has. When English ceased for a while to be a polite and literary language, men no longer took care to speak and write it accurately. We see this in the last pages of the English Chronicles, where the grammar is greatly broken up. While new words were coming in, old forms were dropping off, and we can sometimes distinctly see the influence of French in grammatical forms as well as in the vocabulary. Thus in Old-English we had many plural endings, that in s for one of them. Now most English plurals are formed in s; when a plural is still formed in any other way (as men, sheep, mice) the grammars mark it as an exception. This means that the ending s has come to the front, and has well-nigh driven out all the others. And we may be pretty sure that the s ending was helped in so doing by the fact that much the same change was going on at about the same time in French, and that there too the s ending got the better of the others. Meanwhile in High-German the s ending, which took the first place both in English and French, dropped out altogether. Such are the chances of language. Thus the English language, when it came to the front again in the fourteenth century, had changed a great deal from what it had been when it fell into the background in the twelfth. But the English tongue is still the same tongue that it has ever been. It has changed in the same way in which a man changes from his childhood to his old age. If we meet a man in his later years whom we have not seen since his childhood, we shall not know him again. Yet he is the same man. So a language changes so that those who know only the earlier stages will not understand the later, and those who know only the later stages will not understand the earlier. Yet it is the same language. We are sometimes told that in an English dictionary there are now more French, Latin, and other foreign words than those words that are really English. Perhaps this is so. But the life of our language is still English; our grammar is English; the names of things that we cannot help having about us, the little words which we cannot speak or write without, are still English. We all use many French, many Latin words in speaking and Swriting. But we cannot put together the Sehortest sentence that shall be really and Thilly grammatical out of French or Latin To rds only. We can put together sentence after sentence of purely English words without one French or Latin. While the language, the outward badge of the nation, was in this way changing, the nation itself was also changing in many ways. We largely took in the thoughts and manners of the people who had come among us. Just as in the case of language, the Normans and other strangers who came into England gradually became part of our own people; but in so doing, they made some changes in the people of which they became part. In religion there was strictly speaking no change; all Western Christendom had one creed and one manner of worship. But the closer connexion with the Bishops of Rome which followed the Norman Conquest, as it had some direct results, had also some indirect. The Popes were constantly asking for English money and encroaching on the rights of Englishmen in various ways. Our kings had constantly to make laws to restrain these things. One immediate consequence of the Norman Conquest was the bringing in of foreign bishops, and at a time somewhat later the Popes were constantly sending other foreigners to receive the revenues, rather than to discharge the duties, of offices in the English Church. The papal power thus became deeply disliked in England; kings made laws to restrain it and popular feeling was against it. This may be safely said of any time from the Norman Conquest till the religious changes of the sixteenth century. Practical abuses too grew up in the church; the older monastic orders fell away from their old love, and men began to grudge the great amount of wealth which was in the hands of the clergy and monks. In the thirteenth century came the religious revival of the friars, the Franciscans, Dominicans, and other orders which professed poverty. There is no doubt that for a while it was a real revival in every way, religious and intellectual. Some of the friars were among the most learned men of the time; others played an useful part as the advisers of kings and great men. But their first zeal did not last; the newer orders waxed cold as well as the elder. In truth, when they did fall away, they fell lower than the older orders, as professing a higher standard which it was harder to keep up to. When in the latter part of the fifteenth century, Wickliffe and his followers began both to preach against practical abuses and presently to touch points of doctrine, very many |