uld be necessary in the collecting, or rather in the
adopting of any statements about the newness of a word--for the
passages themselves, even when erroneous, ought not the less to be
noted--namely, that, where there is the least motive for
suspicion, no one's affirmation ought to be accepted simply and at
once as to the novelty of a word; for all here are liable to
error. Thus more than one which Sir Thomas Elyot indicates as new
in his time, 'magnanimity' for example (_The Governor_, 2, 14),
are to be met in Chaucer. When Skinner affirmed of 'sentiment'
that it had only recently obtained the rights of English
citizenship from the translators of French books, he was
altogether mistaken, this word being also one of continual
recurrence in Chaucer. An intelligent correspondent gives in
_Notes and Queries_, No. 225, a useful catalogue of recent
neologies in our speech, which yet would require to be used with
caution, for there are at least half a dozen in the list which
have not the smallest right to be so considered.

{126} There is an admirable Essay by Leibnitz with this view (_Opera_,
vol. vi, part 2, pp. 6-51) in French and German, with this title,
_Considerations sur la Culture et la Perfection de la Langue
Allemande_.

{127} _Zur Geschichte und Beurtheilung der Fremdwoerter im Deutschen_,
von. Aug. Fuchs, Dessau, 1842, pp. 85-91.

III

DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

I took occasion to observe at the commencement of my last lecture that
it is the essential character of a living language to be in flux{128}
and flow, to be gaining and losing; the words which constitute it as
little continuing exactly the same, or in the same relations to one
another, as do the atoms which at any one moment make up our bodies
remain for ever without subtraction or addition. As I then undertook for
my especial subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our own
language had made, I shall consider in the present some of the losses,
or at any rate diminutions, which during the same period it has endured.
But it will be well here, by one or two remarks going before, to avert
any possible misapprehensions of my meaning.

It is certain that all languages must, or at least all languages do in
the end, perish. They run their course; not at all at the same rate, for
the tendency to change is different