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I say it-on my honour as a gentleman, on my the lucidity of its own conceptions in the most oath as a Christian, if the man you pointed out intelligible, appropriate and acceptable terms. at the Opera knows me, he is so altered, or so We have not the same means of tracing the disguised, that I do not know him. I am igno- mutations of tongues which we possess for markrant of his proceedings or his purposes in Eng- ing the different geological eras in the earth's land-I never saw him, I never heard his name, structure, but we know enough and see enongh to my knowledge, before to-night. I say no to convince us that the same great law of immore. Leave me a little, Walter: I am over-provement which is operating slowly and surely powered by what has happened; I am shaken on the world of matter, is carrying on its not by what I have said. Let me try to be like my-less important work on the world of mind. self again, when we meet next."

He dropped into a chair; and, turning away from me, hid his face in his hands. I gently opened the door, so as not to disturb himand spoke my few parting words in low tones, which he might hear or not, as he pleased.

"I will keep the memory of to-night in my heart of hearts," I said. "You shall never repent the trust you have reposed in me. May I come to you to-morrow? May I come as early as nine o'clock ?"

"Yes, Walter," he replied, looking up at me kindly, and speaking in English once more, as if his one anxiety, now, was to get back to our former relations towards each other. "Come to my little bit of breakfast, before I go my ways among the pupils that I teach."

Good night, Pesca." "Good night, my friend."

TRIBES AND TONGUES.

It was the fancy of past generations to derive all languages from one common root, all races from one aboriginal man and woman. Then came sundry subdivisions, whose origin remained utterly unexplained, of which the great distinctions were white, yellow, red, brown, and black men, with skulls characteristic of each. As to idioms, a few were deemed the source and origin of all the rest.

Has such a theory any foundation in truth? Will it be confirmed by observation, by tradition, by history Assuredly not. The better we are enabled to investigate through the past the means by which man holds, or has held, intercourse with man, the more varied, the less resembling one another, will the instruments of that intercourse be found. The tendency of time, of commerce and of civilisation is not to separate languages into many, but to fuse them into one. The languages of knowledge will as assuredly displace and supersede the languages of ignorance, as the superior races dispossess the inferior of their hold upon our common mother earth. The process is, in fact, identical. Imperfect idioms disappear with the beings that employ them; if they contain elements of strength and usefulness, those clements may indeed be preserved in the great transition that is going on. Languages, like other creations, have their progressive developments of improvement, but it is onward from something worse to something better. For ignorance is misty, clouded, complicated and obscure, as are the modes of expression by which it is represented; while knowledge is associated with clearness and simplicity, and conveys to others

We have not lost, we cannot lose, what antiquity possessed of excellence in the instruments of oral or written communication. The ancient Greek, Latin, Sanscrit and Chinese have left indelible marks on the existing languages of civilisation, but of the hundred, thousand, perhaps ten thousand, jargons which were employed by the rude tribes of remote times, no fragment, no record remains. Of the old Gothic, Scandinavian and Slavonic we find, pervading their derivatives, an impress which represents the better and sounder portions of their earlier forms; but of the idioms disassociated from traditional or historical compositions - from verse, or music, or any other representative of intellectual culture-of these, little or nothing is to be traced, and by them little or nothing could be taught.

The evidence of the very remote civilisation of the Chinese is of the most satisfactory character. Whatever was written in Chinese symbols four thousand years ago is understood now by one third of the human race. How many are there living at the present time who are able to enjoy the original writings of Homer or Herodotus? How many can master a Hebrew text? How many read the Shaster? But those who are now engaged in studying the works of Confucius in the very characters which he employed, may be reckoned by hundreds of millions. Time-changing habits and new necessities have no doubt greatly added to the number of these characters, and the great master, if now living, would not be able to interpret an imperial rescript, nor examine the paper of a modern candidate for literary honours. Yet all that the sage wrote and which is preserved, is intelligible, and is the substructure of the most widely extended influence in the world of letters existing at the present hour.

The fusion of languages is one of the most striking evidences of progression; the absorption of dialects by the Latin, about the Christian era, gave a great impulse to civilisation. It is by superior instruments of intercourse that the more cultivated prevail over the less cultivated races. Imperfect and insufficient idioms are replaced by those which best supply the intellectual wants of society. In these islands the various Celtic dialects, which furnish no adequate expressions for philosophical science, disappear in the presence of our nobler English tongue, with its strong Saxon and Norman roots, which have intertwined themselves with so many classical auxiliaries, its multifarious branches stretching out to seek and find new forms and phrases suited to the progress of

inquiry and the development of mind. Great Britain-mother country and colonies-will, in a few generations, have but one language. The dialects of France are disappearing; so are those of Italy. German literature is now only represented by the Saxon tongue. The Castilian is driving all the provincial idioms of Spain from the field. The Russian, in the course of centuries, will, probably, alone occupy the Slavonian field. Hundreds upon hundreds of aboriginal tongues have disappeared before the presence of the Saxon and the Spanish races. As the larger water-drops attract, absorb, and combine with the lesser, the languages of commerce and civilisation will, in progress of time, take possession of the whole social field, but rescuing and appropriating whatever is valuable in the instruments of communication they displace. The languages of future ages will be enriched out of the spoils of the present and the past; but of those now spoken the greater part are destined to decay and to disappear.

Little more than a generation has passed since the Adelungs published their Mithridates and the Catalogues of known languages, which amount to several thousand. These are works of great industry, but very incomplete, and altogether insufficient to give a correct idea of the multitudinous forms of speech which have been invented by gregarious man. Imperfect as is the list, many of the idioms of which some account is given are no longer existent.

tongues, mostly collected by the friars for facilitating the main object of their missions-the conversion of the heathen to Catholicism. At the present time two native languages, the Tagal and the Bisayan, are gradually invading and absorbing the many native dialects which are or were used among the aboriginal tribes ; while the Castilian, which, of course, represents the highest civilisation, is, in its turn, intruding on the Bisayan and the Tagal. It may be laid down as a guiding and positive fact that where there has been no communication between human beings, there will be no resemblance, no affinity, in the various modes by which expression is given to thought or feeling. Nonintercourse makes men alien to one another, by denying to them the means of mutual intercourse. There are in the lower regions of savage life, spoken only by very small groups of mankind, hundreds of idioms of which every century sweeps away the traces. Where wants are few, words will not be many. There are tribes whose numerals only go out as far as one, two, and three, at which point language fails; and four, many, incalculable multitudes are represented by the same word and confounded in the same idea. Where the savage neither cooks his food, but lives solely on wild fruits, roots, or grubs; where he neither clothes nor ornaments his person, but wanders about in primitive nakedness; where he builds for himself no habitation, but, like any other brute animal, seeks shelter in the shades of the forest, or the caves of the mountain, or holes in the ground; where the seasons to his narrow intellect are only represented by the transitions of light and darkness, heat and cold, a very small vocabulary will suffice; but when, either from the visits of neighbours less savage than himself, or his personal wanderings into localities more advanced than his own, something is presented to his senses which becomes an object of desire, that object, which has no name in his own rude jargon, will be represented by the word which he first hears attached to it, and in this simple way the groundwork is laid for the extension of one and the exclusion of another idiom. Again, the savage sees what he had never seen before, the smoking of tobacco. He imitates the smoker-the sensa tion is pleasurable-a want is awakened. How can he obtain the tobacco? He must give something for it, something that he can himself provide. Then comes the idea of barter, of value. One, two, three, much, many, are insufficient for effecting the exchange; so he finds four, five, six, and so forth, necessary terms, and he learns them, and they become part of his stock of words; but as he finds his own words, one, two, three, &c., will not serve him in his negotiations, he adopts the words of Not long ago I had an opportunity of watch-corresponding meaning, which are understood by ing some of the phases by which the feeble idioms die out, to be replaced by what is stronger and more available for the purposes of daily life. In the Philippine Islands there exist some forty or fifty vocabularios of Indian

When the study of language is entered on, the first impulse is to seek resemblances and affinities; but, as the field of observation is extended, one is more and more struck with the wonderful dissimilarities, the absence of links of connexion, the radical differences in words, in grammatical construction, in all that can be said to give to languages their peculiar character. Take any two portions of the globe of which it can be certainly said the inhabitants have never interchanged a thought-take for an example a sentence from the idiom of an aboriginal tribe of central Africa, compare it with one conveying the same meaning from central America, or central Asia, and you will be amazed with the extraordinary unlikeness in the sound, the arrangements, the number of words employed for giving expression to the same idea. What marvellous contrasts between the polysyllabic languages of more than half the world, and the monosyllabic languages of nearly the other half. Explain-but you cannot explain-how some nations revel in words of enormous length, and make every modification of time, place, or circumstance an instrument for adding new elongations to what is already intolerably long, and complicating the complicated with new complications, while in others not a word is to be found exceeding a single syllable.

the seller of the tobacco; and thus it is that similar sounds representing numerals are more widely spread than any other part of the vocabulary. The name tobacco is in itself an example of the association of new words with new

wants; it has found its way, with very slight modifications, into all the languages of Europe, and into many of the Oriental world.

which was only preserved in some parts of Cornwall, but has now wholly disappeared; the last person who spoke it-her name was Dolly Penreath-died at the end of the expired century. At the beginning of the present, the Manx was generally understood through the Isle of Man, and was used in the Church services of many of the districts remote from the larger towns. I believe a Manx sermon is now seldom heard, and though the language is still employed in some official formula of the Tynwald (or ancient court) in the same manner as, in our Parliamentary proceedings, la Reine le veult is still the Norman form in which the royal assent is given to an act of Parliament-the ancient idiom of Mona is very near extinction.

I remember to have heard from Bishop Grégoire (who, during his life, was the object of most cruel and undeserved calumny, and who, since his death, has not been honoured as one so wise and good deserved to be*) that when the first National Assembly met, at the beginning of the Revolution, it was found that of the whole people no more than seven millions spoke or understood the French language, the language of cultivated and literary men. The Bas Breton in Bretagne, the Basque and Béarnais along the Western Pyrenees, the Gascon throughout the regions of the Landes, the Languedocian and Provençal in South-Eastern Gaul, to say no- The same process is going on with the Welsh. thing of many dialects more confined and local, Within the memory of man, it was the language formed the idioms of the vast majority of the of many market towns, where not a single Camnation. In all the great towns and cities, no brian word can now be heard. It is retreating doubt, the aristocracy understood and spoke more and more from the busy world to secluded (but often imperfectly) what Chaucer calls the rural districts. Its value, both social and com"French of Paris;" Chaucer does not say what mercial, is constantly diminishing, and it palls was the "French of Stratford atte Bowe," but in the presence of the sturdier Anglo-Saxon we may be assured in his days pure Parisian tongue. The difficulty of making it the medium French was of rare acquirement. Attempts for conveying the advanced knowledge of the have been made to legitimatise the grammar, to time is pretty generally acknowledged. It has revive the literature, to secure the permanence brought to literature no valuable contributions of the provincial dialects of France, Germany, of its own. Nothing but curiosity excites an Italy, and Spain, but the sentence of extinction Englishman to study Welsh, while a hundred is pronounced against them, they move slowly, but most certainly, towards their destined tombs, and, in a few generations, will all be registered among the dead. At the present hour, the number of persons in the French empire who speak the provincial dialects and do not understand French, is not greater than the number of those who half a century ago used classical French as their habitual language. Every now and then a spark of vitality breaks out, generally under poetical inspiration-for France has its Jasmin as Scotland her Burns-and a village bard is borne aloft by provincial enthusiasm; but the field of influence is narrower, and narrowing every day, the number of listeners diminishes hour by hour, and the only hope of immortality must be in some future Raynouard or Fauriel, who may be engaged in literary gleanings up of "things that were" but have ceased to be.

motives encourage the Welshman to become master of English. For the English opens the door to preferment; it enables the Cymry to start fair with the Sassenach. A Welshman, ignorant of English, will not get into Parliament, he will hardly be made a Justice of the Peace; it may be doubted if he could obtain an appointment as an officer of the excise or customs. The Welshman, like all of the Celtic races, is slow to move, but he moves, notwithstanding. He wrestles against change, but change is too strong even for Cambrian nationality, which is strong in its way, and obstinate into the bargain. How long is the tongue of Taliessin likely to live? The electric telegraph, railways, penny postage, have pronounced its doom. These, and other such mighty ones, repudiate alliances with anything that is backward or retardatory. They are the children of progress, and hold in due reverence their omnipotent sire. Their diplo

There is one mode of dealing with decaying languages which has often succeeded in giving them vitality-persecution. Toleration, emanci pation, liberty, conceded to dissenters, brought many of them within the pale of orthodox profession, many who had spurned conformity while non-conformity was visited with disability and disgrace. Pride would not consent to a surrender which implied a recognition of superiority. So a government that wants to give

In our own islands, a hundred and fifty years ago, six separate languages were spoken, to say nothing of what are called provincial dialects-macy is all carried on in the language of high and advancing civilisation. six languages so distinct that the speakers of any one of them would be unintelligible to the rest; these were the modern English, the Gaelic, the Erse, the Welsh, the Manx, and the old British, * No more energetic, no more persistent, no more eloquent advocate of negro emancipation ever appeared than was the Abbé Grégoire. I do not know what became of the curious library of books which he collected, written by men and women of black African race. They amounted to many hundreds of ployed in gathering together so many specimens of new stamina and firmer roots to a language, negro intellect, it would be sad to learn that they had best begin by discouraging, and finish by had been dispersed for the want of some congenial punishing, those who employ it. The German spirit to sympathise with, and carry forward, the good had been quietly treading on the heels of the Magyar; the Russian had been undermining

volumes. When such trouble and expense were em

bishop's labour of love.

the Polish; but the impatience of emperors and tzars could only be satisfied by edicts, whose object was the more speedy extirpation of these national emblems. Then it was that the Hungarian and the Polonian mothers pressed their infants more warmly to their bosoms, and whispered with sweeter and more emphatic eloquence the mother tongue into the ears of the child. This was an influence no despotism could reach, a right against whose exercise no tyranny could avail. The banned languages waxed stronger because they were bathed in the waters of adversity, and the violence with which it was endeavoured to break the bonds only bound and riveted them more tightly and more lastingly.

The current opinions with regard to the origin and dispersion of races and languages are alike unobservant, unphilosophical, and unfounded. It is a sound as well as an ancient doctrine that we ought to reason from the known to the unknown, in other words to build, if possible, our theories upon the solid foundation of knowledge and experience, and not upon the shifting sands of uncertainty or paradox. But, instead of reasoning from the present, which is clear, up to the past, which is obscure, most writers on Tribes and Tongues have chosen to take their departure from the darkness of departed days, and thence, with some preconceived theory-generally a current common-place-to grope their way through twilight into light. If, starting from the fields of observation which now surround us, we would take the torches of present positive knowledge to illuminate the mistiness of "auld lang syne," we should assuredly not so often lose our way in hunting those Wills-o'-the-wisp, which may be amusing enough, but are more treacherous than amusing.

For an example. By far the greatest, the most compact, the most peculiar, the most self-resembling, the most national of all the peoples of the world, is the Chinese people. They comprise certainly more than one-third of the whole human race. We have very lately obtained censuses of the population from independent sources, and we may with tolerable certainty aver that the Chinese empire contains about four hundred and thirteen millions. Surely a little reflection would teach us that such a multitudinous nation was likely to have an origin of its own, to be descended from the aboriginal possessors of the soil, and rather to have given character to, than have received an impress from, the neighbouring nations. We know that at the present hour, tens of thousands -nay, millions-of Chinese migrate to every part of the Oriental world. We find them everywhere in the East, mingling with and modifying the native races, and producing the most marvellous changes in the physical, phrenological and physiognomical character of man. Yet what absurd fancies have been circulated as to the ancient races of China, what they were, and whence they came. The Jesuits would have it that they descended from a Hebrew colony, and that we were to look to Judæa as the cradle of the Chinese people. Sir William Jones

believed that they emanated from Hindoo tribes who wandered from India to the Flowery Land. More than one writer insists that they came from the red people of Western America; nay, I have lately seen a speculation that they are of Cambrian origin, a Welsh woman having declared on a visit to Canton that she both understood and was understood by the Chinese people, so many of the words were Welsh. But the most accepted, and the least irrational supposition is, that the Chinese nation has for its ancestry the Manchurian races, who, marching as emigrants, are supposed most naturally to march, towards the rising sun, found the fertile fields of China more attractive than the snowy steppes or the misty mountains of their primitive abodes.

There is no satisfactory authority for any of these surmises. The Tartar tribes, no doubt, Manchus and Moguls, have made their way into China, conquerors in war, settlers in peace. They have established dynasties, possessed themselves of the powers of government, yet they remain from the Chinese multitude nearly as distinguishable and as separate now as at the first moment of their intrusion. In the great cities they occupy separate quarters; scarcely a word of their language has found its way into Chinese conversation or into Chinese books. Their numbers have been calculated at from eight to ten millions. It is probable that much more than half of that estimate have melted into the four hundred millions of the Chinese, having forgotten their own dialects, and lost their distinguishing characteristics. And what we can ascertain to be passing now, we may safely suppose to have occurred in remoter times. History is generally a repetition of itself; and there is profound wisdom in the axiom that there is nothing really new under the sun. The study of what is-and we stand on safe ground when engaged in that study-will be our best guide to the knowledge of what was.

FAIRIES AND FLOWERS. CHILDREN who gather common flowers at will,

And leave them, withering, on the path to lie,
Dream not that sprites, in pain, cling to them still,
And cannot wander till the moon is high;
When evening's hush is felt on hill and dell,

The fairies of all flowers round them meet,
And charm the night with tones ineffable,
And circle o'er the grass with glimmering feet.
The fairies gathered round, with pity view

The broken flowers lying helplessly,
And trick out the crushed leaves with diamond dew ;
But when the moon is high, the sprites are free.
These, long unhappy, now at freedom set,

Yet linger for a moment quite forlorn, Droop o'er their faded flowers with regret,

Then fly to find new homes before the morn. Good fairies guard and guide them through the night,

To waiting buds these lonely sprites they bring, And to the beauty yet concealed from sight,

Link them by magic of their wondrous ring;

The light flows round them with a happy tune,
While the uniting charm is made complete
With hands thrice waved towards the setting moon,
And the buds ope to give us flowers sweet.

HUNTED DOWN.

BY CHARLES DICKENS.

IN TWO PORTIONS. PORTION THE SECOND.

IV.

FOR six or seven months, I saw no more of Mr. Slinkton. He called once at my house, but I was not at home; and he once asked me to dine with him in the Temple, but I was engaged. His friend's Assurance was effected in March. Late in September or early in October, I was down at Scarborough for a breath of sea air, where I met him on the beach. It was a hot evening; he came towards me with his hat in his hand; and there was the walk I had felt so strongly disinclined to take, in perfect order again, exactly in front of the bridge of my nose. He was not alone; he had a young lady on She was dressed in mourning, and I looked at her with great interest. She had the appearance of being extremely delicate, and her face was remarkably pale and melancholy; but she was very pretty. He introduced her, as his niece, Miss Niner.'

his arm.

Are you strolling, Mr. Sampson? Is it possible you can be idle ?"

It was possible, and I was strolling.
"Shall we stroll together ?"
"With pleasure."

The young lady walked between us, and we walked on the cool sea sand in the direction of Filey.

"There have been wheels here," said Mr. Slinkton. "And now I look again, the wheels of a hand-carriage! Margaret, my love, your shadow, without doubt!"

"Miss Niner's shadow ?" I repeated, looking down at it on the sand.

"Not that one," Mr. Slinkton returned, laughing. "Margaret, my dear, tell Mr. Samp

son.

"Indeed," said the young lady, turning to me, "there is nothing to tell-except that I constantly see the same invalid old gentleman, at all times, wherever I go. I have mentioned it to my uncle, and he calls the gentleman my shadow."

"Does he live in Scarborough ?" I asked. "He is staying here."

"Do you live in Scarborough ?"

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No, I am staying here. My uncle has placed me with a family here, for my health." 66 And shadow" said I, smiling. "My shadow," she answered, smiling too, "is-like myself-not very robust, I fear; for, I lose my shadow sometimes, as my shadow loses me at other times. We both seem liable to confinement to the house. I have not seen my shadow for days and days; but it does oddly happen, occasionally, that wherever I go, for many days together, this gentleman goes. We

have come together in the most unfrequented nooks on this shore."

"Is this he?" said I, pointing before us.

The wheels had swept down to the water's edge, and described a great loop on the sand in turning. Bringing the loop back towards us, and spinning it out as it came, was a hand-carriage drawn by a man.

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Yes," said Miss Niner, "this really is my shadow, uncle!"

As the carriage approached us and we approached the carriage, I saw within it an old man, whose head was sunk on his breast, and who was enveloped in a variety of wrappers. He was drawn by a very quiet but very keenlooking man, with iron-grey hair, who was slightly lame. They had passed us, when the carriage stopped, and the old gentleman within putting out his arm, called to me by my name. I went back, and was absent from Mr. Slinkton and his niece for about five minutes.

When I rejoined them, Mr. Slinkton was the first to speak. Indeed, he said to me in a raised voice before I came up with him: "It is well you have not been longer, or my niece might have died of curiosity to know who her shadow is, Mr. Sampson."

"An old East India Director," said I. "An intimate friend of our friend's at whose house I first had the pleasure of meeting you. A certain Major Banks. You have heard of him?" Never."

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Very rich, Miss Niner; but very old, and very crippled. An amiable man-sensible-much interested in you. He has just been expatiating on the affection that he has observed to exist between you and your uncle."

Mr. Slinkton was holding his hat again, and he passed his hand up the straight walk, as if he himself went up it serenely, after me.

"Mr. Sampson," he said, tenderly pressing his niece's arm in his, "our affection was always a strong one, for we have had but few near ties. We have still fewer now. We have associations to bring us together, that are not of this world, Margaret."

Dear uncle!" murmured the young lady, and turned her face aside to hide her tears.

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My niece and I have such remembrances and regrets in common, Mr. Sampson," he feelingly pursued, "that it would be strange indeed if the relations between us were cold or indifferent. If you remember a conversation you and I once had together, you will understand the reference I make. Cheer up, dear Margaret, Don't droop, don't droop. My Margaret! I cannot bear to see you droop!"

The poor young lady was very much affected, but controlled herself. His feelings, too, were very acute. In a word, he found himself under such great need of a restorative, that he presently went away, to take a bath of sea water; leaving the young lady and me sitting on a point of rock, and probably presuming-but, that, you will say, was a pardonable indulgence in a luxury-that she would praise him with all her heart.

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