volume on "Some Writers on English Country Life," where Cobbett's descriptive powers were illustrated.

But, as has been already said, it is with Cobbett's attitude to "those huge human things that create what we call history" that Mr. Chesterton is above all concerned. His interpretation of that attitude, his revelation of Cobbett in the role of prophet, his comparison of him with Carlyle on the one hand and .with Blake on the other, must be read in his own words. All that is particular and personal falls away; the matter is brought sub specie æternitatis.

It has been a pleasing feature of these volumes that each has included, in addition to the essays on literature, one on a subject from the allied arts. Leonardo da Vinci and Beethoven have thus had a place in our collections, and this year Mr. Fagg deals with "The Naturalistic Motive in Modern Pictures." Even those who, like myself, can claim no expert knowledge of the subject must be impressed by the philosophic grasp shown in the essay, and profit by the illumination that it throws on phases of the art of painting from the time of El Greco downwards to contemporary Post-Impressionism.

THE FUTURE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

BY SIR HENRY NEWBOLT, C.H., D.LITT., LL.D. [Read March 22nd, 1922.]

THE subject which I am to consider here is not one of those about which either argument or prophecy would be in place. The best that can be done is only to suggest, and suggestion is often conveyed more easily when it is thrown out, as it were, unconsciously, or at any rate without any apparent exercise of the will. I propose then to set forth a simple train of thought as it actually ran through my own mind, without motive, and without preparation.

The beginning of my meditation was as follows: I chanced to have taken down from the shelf for some other purpose the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and I was captivated afresh by the little landscape picture with which the story begins. The young man going to Thessaly on business, riding wearily through the night on his white pony, over valleys of wet turf and sticky fields, comes at last to the cheering moment of dawn. He jumps down from the saddle, and like a good rider rubs down his horse with a bunch of fern, takes off the bit, and leads him to a gentle slope where he can refresh himself in the way usual with horses; then while the hungry beast wrenches a walking breakfast from the grass, his master overtakes two of his fellow travellers who had got a little ahead-and immediately we enter upon the long chain

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of tales which make the book. No one who has ever read this story can have failed to be struck by its modernity; it is true that the prevailing atmosphere is romantic and picaresque, but the social habits and superstitions of the personae often remind us strangely of those of the last ten years in England, seen perhaps through a rather Elizabethan imagination: the style and vocabulary seem nearer to the twentieth than to the second century. It is difficult, for example, not to believe that "jentaculum ambulatorium " a walking breakfast-would have sounded stranger in the ears of the Augustans than it does in our own. The word "jentaculum " is not, I believe, found in classical Latin. Perhaps historians will say that breakfast was not a meal known to the Romans; they have said the same thing about the Middle Ages, and there they are undoubtedly wrong, as John of Gaunt's household bills will prove. The truth would appear to be that breakfast was not a meal known to Latin literature of the best period; but that is quite a different matter. If language was given to us to conceal our thoughts, literature has certainly been created by us to conceal our lives. Intimate and familiar details are so seldom and so slightly referred to, that to discover anything about the daily life of the Romans or Greeks, it is necessary to read the dull mosaics into which learned professors like Herr Becker have worked up the result of their researches. When I first discovered for myself that breakfast was recognised by name, at any rate in the Silver Age, I was as much surprised and pleased as when in the pages of Martial I first came upon the ancestor of the Italian ice-cream merchant, selling

little glass tumblers of sherbet and snow in the streets of Rome. And that was in my last year at school instead of in my first.

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Even more complete-more necessarily completeis the concealment in literature of the everyday use of language. People do not talk like books; they do not even try to. A boy may have read nearly all the orthodox Latin books before he comes across the word "oppido." I believe that Cicero never once used it in the whole range of his speeches, though it peeps out in a private letter where he says he is afraid he looked, or might look, "oppido ridiculus "-mighty absurd. Oppido" is, of course, a bit of slang, an intensive word, as it were magnifying whatever was spoken of to the proportions of a whole town. By the time of Apuleius it must have been old, for this derivation was entirely forgotten. Lignum a me toto oppido et quidem oppido quaesitum "—he had been looking for wood all over the town, and with any amount of energy-as it were, a town-full of energy. This expression, which was in fact a tautology, was intended by Apuleius, and no doubt accepted by his readers, as a good pun. Slang and puns then were common among the Romans, and though Livy, Virgil, Horace and Tacitus have nearly succeeded in concealing the fact, it has been given away to us by Apuleius; and this is just what one would expect from a writer who, though a Roman citizen of the Empire, was by birth a Numidian from near Tunis, contemptuous of the old Roman morality and the classical Roman style, not above writing " ingenious verses in honour of a patent dentifrice," and seeking success by the equally modern trick of