212 On certain Tenses according to principles drawn not from its own practice, but from that of other tongues : and Mr Bosworth repeats his protest, and commends it: which however, specious as it may have been in Wallises days, — when there was so much that was merely inveterate and taken for granted in the prevalent opinions on such matters, that whatever led men to explore their validity and tenableness was not without its use, — seems at the present day quite out of place. Now that the afBnity of the Teutonic languages to the Greek and Latin, as well as the other offsets of the great Indian family, has been so incontrovertibly establisht, — ^now that the family likeness which runs through them, and which in some features, as is often the case in families, after having been lost sight of for a time, reappears in the remoter branches, has been so clearly pointed out, — now that the pervading operation of the same principles has been traced through all their vari- eties of formation and inflexion with such subtilty and accu- racy, as it has been more especially by Bopp, — it is time to give over the barbarian cry that we have nothing to do with the Greeks and Romans. We too, it ought to be our boast, ^' are sprung of Earth'^s first blood '^ we too belong to that race, which has brought forth almost every great act and almost every wise thought whereby man has adorned and enlightened his birthplace: and our speech is the titledeed of our descent from it. Greatly as it has been modified and changed by the concourse, the shock, and the fusion of dialects, and by the influences of climate, of habits, of ways of thinking, our language in its primary characteristics still resembles the Latin and Greek : and the same elementary principles of classification may not inappropriately be applied to it. Even Hickes, though he gives only one regular conjugation of the Anglosaxon verbs, and throws all the others in a heap as anomalous or irregular, remarks (pp. 54, 55) that the greater part of these anomalous verbs follow a principle of their own, and form their preterite by casting off* the ter- mination of the present, and changing its penultimate vow^el, generally into a ; and he adds that these for s an magis proprie secundam conjtigationem constituere videantur quam inter anomala recenseri. Quamobrem in Grammatica Francica id gemis verba ad secundam conjtigationem tanquam ad suam
