en embodied in poems or hymns or laws,
which may be repeated for hundreds, perhaps for thousands of years with
a religious accuracy, so that to the priests or rhapsodists of a nation
the whole or the greater part of a language is literally preserved;
secondly, it may be written down and in a written form distributed more
or less widely among the whole nation. In either case the language which
is familiarly spoken may have grown up wholly or in a great measure
independently of them. (1) The first of these processes has been
sometimes attended by the result that the sound of the words has been
carefully preserved and that the meaning of them has either perished
wholly, or is only doubtfully recovered by the efforts of modern
philology. The verses have been repeated as a chant or part of a ritual,
but they have had no relation to ordinary life or speech. (2) The
invention of writing again is commonly attributed to a particular
epoch, and we are apt to think that such an inestimable gift would have
immediately been diffused over a whole country. But it may have taken
a long time to perfect the art of writing, and another long period may
have elapsed before it came into common use. Its influence on language
has been increased ten, twenty or one hundred fold by the invention of
printing.

Before the growth of poetry or the invention of writing, languages were
only dialects. So they continued to be in parts of the country in which
writing was not used or in which there was no diffusion of literature.
In most of the counties of England there is still a provincial style,
which has been sometimes made by a great poet the vehicle of his
fancies. When a book sinks into the mind of a nation, such as Luther's
Bible or the Authorized English Translation of the Bible, or again great
classical works like Shakspere or Milton, not only have new powers
of expression been diffused through a whole nation, but a great step
towards uniformity has been made. The instinct of language demands
regular grammar and correct spelling: these are imprinted deeply on the
tablets of a nation's memory by a common use of classical and popular
writers. In our own day we have attained to a point at which nearly
every printed book is spelt correctly and written grammatically.

(9) Proceeding further to trace the influence of literature on language
we note some other causes which have affected the higher use of it:
such as (1) the necessity of clearness and co