guards the Hesperides of West-End society, in the rigid training which
stops many an adventurer midway in his career, are written the old
characters of the forest-laws of Rufus and the Charter of John. Races
and families change, but the distinction endures, is stamped upon all
things pertaining to both.

We in America, who boast our descent from this matrimony of Norman and
Saxon, claim also that we have blent the features of the two into one
homogeneous people. In this country, where the old has become new, and
the new is continually losing its raw lustre before the glitter of some
fresher splendor, the traces of the contest are all but obliterated.
Only our language has come to us with the brand of the fatherland upon
it. In our mother-tongue prevails the same principle of dualism, the
same conflict of elements, which not all the lethean baptism of the
Atlantic could wash out. The two nations of England survive in the two
tongues of America.

We beg the reluctant reader not to prematurely pooh-pooh as a "miserable
mouse" this conclusion, thinking that we are only serving up again that
old story of Wamba and Gurth with an added _sauce-piquante_ from Dean
Trench. We admit that we allude to that original composition of English
past and present from a Latin and a Teutonic stock. But that is to us
not an ultimate, but a primal fact. It is the premise from which we
propose to trace out the principle now living and working in our present
speech. We commence our history with that strife of the tongues which
had at the outset also their battle of Hastings, their field of Sanilac.
There began the feud which to-day continues to divide our language,
though the descendants of the primitive stocks are inextricably mingled.

For it is as in "Sibyl." That novel showed us the peer's descendants at