of our dictionaries have marked it as such; a word first appearing
at the same period, it may have reached us through the same channel.
'Iceberg' (eisberg) also we must have taken whole from the German, as,
had we constructed the word for ourselves, we should have made it not
'ice_berg_', but 'ice-_mountain_'. I have not found it in our earlier
voyagers, often as they speak of the 'icefield', which yet is not
exactly the same thing. An English 'swindler' is not exactly a German
'schwindler', yet the notion of the 'nebulo', though more latent in the
German, is common to both; and we must have drawn the word from
Germany{73} (it is not an old one in our tongue) during the course of
the last century. If '_life_-guard' was originally, as Richardson
suggests, '_leib_-garde', or '_body_-guard', and from that transformed,
by the determination of Englishmen to make it significant in English,
into '_life_-guard', or guard defending the _life_ of the sovereign,
this will be another word from the same quarter. Yet I have my doubts;
'leibgarde' would scarcely have found its way hither before the
accession of the House of Hanover, or at any rate before the arrival of
Dutch William with his memorable guards; while 'lifeguard', in its
present shape, is certainly an older word in the language; we hear often
of the 'lifeguards' in our Civil Wars; as witness too Fuller's words:
"The Cherethites were a kind of _lifegard_ to king David"{74}.

Of late our German importations have been somewhat more numerous. With
several German compound words we have been in recent times so well
pleased, that we must needs adopt them into English, or imitate them in
it. We have not always been very happy in those which we have selected
for imitation or adoption. Thus we might have been satisfied with
'manual', and not called back from its nine hundred years of oblivion
that ugly and unnecessary word 'handbook'. And now we are threatened
with 'word-building', as I see a book announced under the title of
"Latin _word-building_", and, much worse than this, with 'stand-point'.
'Einseitig' (itself a modern word, if I mistake not, or at any rate
modern in its secondary application) has not, indeed, been adopted, but
is evidently the pattern on which we have formed 'onesided'--a word to
which a few years ago something of affectation was attached; so that any
one who employed it at once gave evidence that he was more or less a
dealer in German wares; it has however