I shall not account the
fact that some are going on, so to speak, before our own eyes, a
sufficient ground to excuse me from noticing them, but rather an
additional reason for doing this. For indeed changes which are actually
proceeding in our own time, and which we are ourselves helping to bring
about, are the very ones which we are most likely to fail in observing.
There is so much to hide the nature of them, and indeed their very
existence, that, except it may be by a very few, they will often pass
wholly unobserved. Loud and sudden revolutions attract and compel
notice; but silent and gradual, although with issues far vaster in
store, run their course, and it is only when their cycle is completed or
nearly so, that men perceive what mighty transforming forces have been
at work unnoticed in the very midst of themselves.

Thus, to apply what I have just affirmed to this matter of language--how
few aged persons, let them retain the fullest possession of their
faculties, are conscious of any difference between the spoken language
of their early youth, and that of their old age; that words and ways of
using words are obsolete now, which were usual then; that many words are
current now, which had no existence at that time. And yet it is certain
that so it must be. A man may fairly be supposed to remember clearly and
well for sixty years back; and it needs less than five of these sixties
to bring us to the period of Spenser, and not more than eight to set us
in the time of Chaucer and Wiclif. How great a change, what vast
modifications in our language, within eight memories. No one,
contemplating this whole term, will deny the immensity of the change.
For all this, we may be tolerably sure that, had it been possible to
interrogate a series of eight persons, such as together had filled up
this time, intelligent men, but men whose attention had not been
especially roused to this subject, each in his turn would have denied
that there had been any change worth speaking of, perhaps any change at
all, during his lifetime. And yet, having regard to the multitude of
words which have fallen into disuse during these four or five hundred
years, we are sure that there must have been some lives in this chain
which saw those words in use at their commencement, and out of use
before their close. And so too, of the multitude of words which have
sprung up in this period, some, nay, a vast number, must have come into
being within the limit