the English language be _Dutch_{199}, yet it may be
said to have been inoculated afterwards on a French stock". He may know
that the Dutch is a sister language or dialect to our own; but this
that it is the mother or root of it will certainly perplex him, and he
will hardly know what to make of the assertion; perhaps he ascribes it
to an error in his author, who is thereby unduly lowered in his esteem.
But presently in the course of his reading he meets with the following
statement, this time in Fuller's _Holy War_, being a history of the
Crusades: "The French, _Dutch_, Italian, and English were the four
elemental nations, whereof this army [of the Crusaders] was compounded".
If the student has sufficient historical knowledge to know that in the
time of the Crusades there were no Dutch in our use of the word, this
statement would merely startle him; and probably before he had finished
the chapter, having his attention once aroused, he would perceive that
Fuller with the writers of his time used 'Dutch' for German; even as it
was constantly so used up to the end of the seventeenth century; and as
the Americans use it to this present day; what we call now a Dutchman
being then a Hollander. But a young student might very possibly want
that amount of previous knowledge, which should cause him to receive
this announcement with misgiving and surprise; and thus he might carry
away altogether a wrong impression, and rise from a perusal of the book,
persuaded that the Dutch, as we call them, played an important part in
the Crusades, while the Germans took little or no part in them at all.

{Sidenote: _Miscreant_}

And as it is here with an historic fact, so still more often will it
happen with the subtler changes which words have undergone. Out of this
it will continually happen that they convey now much more blame and
condemnation, or convey now much less, than formerly they did; or of a
different kind; and a reader not aware of the altered value which they
now possess, may be in continual danger of misreading his author, of
misunderstanding his intentions, while he has no doubt whatever that he
perfectly apprehends and takes it in. Thus when Shakespeare in _1 Henry
VI_ makes the gallant York address Joan of Arc as a 'miscreant', how
coarse a piece of invective this sounds; how unlike what the chivalrous
soldier would have uttered; or what one might have supposed Shakespeare,
even with his unworthy estimate of the holy warrior