d
loud and deep in sound. I will engage two Manxmen quarrelling in Manx
to make more noise in a given time than any other two human brethren in
Christendom, not excepting two Irishmen. Also I think the Manx must be
capable of notes of sweet feeling, and I observe that a certain higher
lilt in a Manx woman's voice, suggesting the effort to speak about the
sound of the sea, and the whistle of the wind in the gorse, is lost in
the voices of the younger women who speak English only. But apart from
tangible loss, I regret the death of the Manx tongue on grounds of
sentiment. In this old tongue our fathers played as children, bought and
sold as men, prayed, preached, gossiped, quarrelled, and made love. It
was their language at Tynwald; they sang their grim carvals in it, and
their wailing, woful ballads.

* The Rev. T. E. Brown.

When it is dead more than half of all that makes us Manxmen will be
gone. Our individuality will be lost, the greater barrier that separates
us from other peoples will be broken down. Perhaps this may have its
advantages, but surely it is not altogether a base desire not to be
submerged into all the races of the earth. The tower of Babel is built,
the tongues of the builders are confounded, and we are not all anxious
to go back and join the happy family that lived in one ark.

But aside from all lighter thoughts there is something very moving and
pathetic in the death of an old language. Permit me to tell you, not
as a philologist, a character to which I have no claim, but as an
imaginative writer, how the death of an ancient tongue affects me. It is
unlike any other form of death, for an unwritten language is even as a
breath of air which when it is spent leaves no trace behind. A nation
may die, yet its history remains, and that is the tangible part of its
past. A city may fall to decay and lie a thousand years under the sands
of the desert, yet its relics revivify its life. But a language that is
dead, a tongue that has no life in its literature, is a breath of wind
that is gone. A little while and it went from lip to lip, from lip to
ear; it came we know not whence; it has passed we know not where. It was
an embodied spirit of all man's joys and sorrows, and like a spirit it
has vanished away.

Then if this old language has been that of our own people its death is a
loss to our affections. Indeed, language gets so close to our heart that
we can hardly separate it from our emotions. If y