Our original Saxon tongue was not conquered by the Greek and Roman, as were those of the nations of the South of Europe; _it appropriated them_--leading them, as it were, in a kind of magnificent triumph. Out of the interfusion, such as it was, came a dialect and afterwards a literature, wholly _sui generis_. We find the same characteristic in the assimilation of the Roman civil law by our own common law. Our legal system did not become Latinised--but whatever was good, sound, and relevant in the civil law became incorporated and was Anglicised. In dwelling upon our literature for a moment, I shall not, as is usually done, glorify particular names--Spenser, Shakespeare, the dramatists, Milton, Bacon, Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, Burke, the classicists so-called. All the long array of great thinkers, eloquent preachers, exquisite poets, and novelists will occur at once to everyone. Let me rather dwell, as more germane to our present purpose, upon certain traits common to all, notwithstanding the diversities of styles and epochs. I would mention, then, as one such { 121} trait, a certain solidity of thought--a something derived from the actual experience of life and close experimental contact with nature. This is visible at all times, and impresses one as quite in keeping with that other something in the character of the people (if the two can be at all separated), which has led to the creation and preservation of their political institutions. It is certainly a native quality, being equally characteristic of the very loftiest and most fervent productions of English genius, and of those which have no other claim upon us than sober good sense. Carrying the thought a little farther, these observations of man and nature become a positive force in the formation of individual character, and, of course, of society. It is this sure, well-grounded, _homelike_ quality which, among all the other literatures of the world, peculiarly distinguishes the English, united as it may be and has been in many instances, with the utmost perfection of art. It is to detract from an almost universal characteristic to cite instances, but what other literature has productions like the _Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe_, or poetry in this respect like Cowper's _Task?_ What is Shakespeare but a revelation of familiar thought and feeling sublimed by genius? What is Milton, classicist as he is, in the garden scenes of Paradise, but the painter of an English home? The very flowers of _his_ Paradise seem made to bloom there. Addison and all the essayists,--in what does their charm consist, but in their communion with daily life and thought? So, too, as to their legitimate successors, the great { 122} novelists. The new world they have given us--what is it but an accurate representation of the men and women we have known, and a delightful participation in all their experiences? Truly we have a rich and ever-abiding inheritance in this literature. The inheritance itself is a positive gift, but it is more. It points out infallibly the direction our minds should take in dealing with those from whom we have derived it. With such a genuine emanation before us of the mental, moral, political, and religious life of a people, shall we go amiss in extending to them our sympathies and establishing a mutual friendship? In this way we know them--know them as we can in no other way--not through the obscuring haze of momentary passion, and the disturbance of abnormal aberrations, but through a medium deep as the life of nations and of universal binding efficacy. If language and literature have made us one, by what unhallowed process shall we be "put asunder"?