Excerpt from Opuscula: Essays Chiefly Philological and Ethnographical The English Language is pre-eminently a mixed Lan guage. Its basis indeed is Saxon, but upon this basis lies a very varied superstructure, of Danish and of Norman French, of Modern French and of Greek, of Classical Latin and of the Latin of the Middle Ages imported at different periods and upon different occasions. 'words from these languages are comprehended by the writer just in the pro portion that he comprehends their origin and their deriva tion. 'hence it is that the knowledge of isolated words is subordinate to the formation of a style; and hence it is that the rules for their investigation are (their aim and object being alone considered) akin to the rules of Rhetoric.' About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.