the original will
show that the translators could only have employed it there on the
ground that it also expressed rebel, revolter, and not runaway
merely{286}.

{Sidenote: _Assimilating Power of English_}

I might easily occupy your attention much longer, so little barren or
unfruitful does this subject of spelling appear likely to prove; but all
things must have an end; and as I concluded my first lecture with a
remarkable testimony borne by an illustrious German scholar to the
merits of our English tongue, I will conclude my last with the words of
another, not indeed a German, but still of the great Germanic stock;
words resuming in themselves much of which we have been speaking upon
this and upon former occasions: "As our bodies", he says, "have hidden
resources and expedients, to remove the obstacles which the very art of
the physician puts in its way, so language, ruled by an indomitable
inward principle, triumphs in some degree over the folly of grammarians.
Look at the English, polluted by Danish and Norman conquests, distorted
in its genuine and noble features by old and recent endeavours to mould
it after the French fashion, invaded by a hostile entrance of Greek and
Latin words, threatening by increasing hosts to overwhelm the indigenous
terms. In these long contests against the combined power of so many
forcible enemies, the language, it is true, has lost some of its power
of inversion in the structure of sentences, the means of denoting the
difference of gender, and the nice distinctions by inflection and
termination--almost every word is attacked by the spasm of the accent
and the drawing of consonants to wrong positions; yet the old English
principle is not overpowered. Trampled down by the ignoble feet of
strangers, its springs still retain force enough to restore itself. It
lives and plays through all the veins of the language; it impregnates
the innumerable strangers entering its dominions with its temper, and
stains them with its colour, not unlike the Greek which in taking up
oriental words, stripped them of their foreign costume, and bid them to
appear as native Greeks"{287}.

{FOOTNOTES}

{228} In proof that it need not be so, I would only refer to a paper,
_On Orthographical Expedients_, by Edwin Guest, Esq., in the
_Transactions of the Philological Society_, vol. iii. p. 1.

{229} [The scientific treatises on Phonetics of Mr. Alexander J. Ellis
and Dr. Henry Sweet have