long centuries the heptarchy in England had been followed by a monarchy
with London for its capital; and in like manner the seven kingdoms of
Spain had been united under monarchs who dwelt in Madrid. Normandy and
Gascony, Burgundy and Provence had been incorporated finally with the
France of which the chief city was Paris.

Latin had been the tongue of every man who was entitled to claim benefit
of clergy; but slowly the modern languages compacted themselves out of
the warring dialects when race after race came to a consciousness of its
unity and when the speech of a capital was set up at last as the
standard to which all were expected to conform. In Latin Dante discust
the vulgar tongue, tho he wrote the 'Divine Comedy' in his provincial
Tuscan; yet Petrarch, who came after, was afraid that his poems in
Italian were, by that fact, fated to be transitory. Chaucer made choice
of the dialect of London, performing for it the service Dante had
rendered to the speech of the Florentines; yet Bacon and Newton went
back to Latin as the language still common to men of science. Milton
practised his pen in Latin verse, but never hesitated to compose his
epic in English. Latin served Descartes and Spinoza, men of science
again; and it was not until the nineteenth century that the invading
vernaculars finally ousted the language of the learned which had once
been in universal use. And even now Latin is retained by the church
which still styles itself Catholic.

It was as fortunate as it was necessary that the single language of the
learned should give way before the vulgar tongues, the speech of the
people, each in its own region best fitted to phrase the feelings and
the aspirations of races dissimilar in their characteristics and in
their ideals. No one tongue could voice the opposite desires of the
northern peoples and of the southern; and we see the several modern