what he learnt. On
the other hand, he was unimaginative; and this want of imagination may
be traced in the more Teutonic counties to the present day. But when
these qualities have been counteracted by the Celtic wealth of fancy,
the race has produced the great English literature,--a literature whose
form is wholly Roman, while in matter, its more solid parts doubtless
owe much to the Teuton, and its lighter portions, especially its poetry
and romance, can be definitely traced in great measure to known Celtic
elements. While the Teutonic blood differentiates our somewhat slow and
steady character from the more logical but volatile and unstable Gaul,
the Celtic blood differentiates it from the far slower, heavier, and
less quick or less imaginative Teutons of Germany and Scandinavia.

In _language_ we owe almost everything to the Anglo-Saxons. The Low
German dialect which they brought with them from Sleswick and Hanover
still remains in all essentials the identical speech employed by
ourselves at the present day. It received a few grammatical forms from
the cognate Scandinavian dialects; it borrowed a few score or so of
words from the Welsh; it adopted a small Latin vocabulary of
ecclesiastical terms from the early missionaries; it took in a
considerable number of Romance elements after the Norman Conquest; it
enriched itself with an immense variety of learned compounds from the
Greek and Latin at the Renaissance period: but all these additions
affected almost exclusively its stock of words, and did not in the least
interfere with its structure or its place in the scientific
classification of languages. The English which we now speak is not in
any sense a Romance tongue. It is the lineal descendant of the English
of AElfred and of Baeda, enlarged in its vocabulary by many words which
they did not use, impoverished by the loss of a few which they employed,
yet still essentially identical in grammar and idiom with the language
of the first Teutonic settlers. Gradually losing its inflexions from the
days of Eadgar onward, it assumed its existing type before the
thirteenth century, and continuously incorporated an immense number of
French and Latin words, which greatly increased its value as an
instrument of thought. But it is important to recollect that the English
tongue has nothing at all to do in its origin with either Welsh or
French. The Teutonic speech of the Anglo-Saxon settlers drove out the
old Celtic speech throug