MISSIONARY HYMN.

FROM Greenland's icy mountains,
From India's coral strand,
Where Afric's sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand;
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver

Their land from error's chain.

What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft on Ceylon's isle,
Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile?
In vain, with lavish kindness,
The gifts of God are strewn,
The heathen in his blindness

Bows down to wood and stone.

Shall we whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high;
Shall we to men benighted
The lamp of life deny ?
Salvation! oh! Salvation!
The joyful sound proclaim,
Till each remotest nation
Has learn'd Messiah's name.

Waft, waft, ye winds, his story,
And you, ye waters, roll,
Till, like a sea of glory,

It spreads from pole to pole;
Till o'er our ransomed nature,

The Lamb for sinners slain,
Redeemer, King, Creator,

In bliss returns to reign.-HEBER.

LESSON II.

SKETCH OF THE CHIEF LANGUAGES EITHER SPOKEN OR STUDIED IN GREAT BRITAIN.

"That every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the father."

1. BEFORE we go farther into the subject of the last lesson, it may be advantageous to improve our know

ledge of the languages already brought under notice, languages which it has been convenient to refer to, and which have supplied us with examples and illustrations. Nevertheless, they are languages which may be more or less unfamiliar to us. It may also be useful to prepare ourselves for three or four more languages. which will have to be introduced for the same purpose. By doing this we shall get our facts, as well as our reasonings; we shall learn (so to say) the handling of our tools, as well as the names of them. The more we know about such tongues as the Gipsy, the Welsh, and the Gaelic, the easier it will be to remember the principles they exhibit. Now, the languages of the whole world amount to some hundreds, of which there is no occasion to make a list. The greater part of them are known only to the missionary and the professed grammarian. It is only a few of them that are of general importance. Of these, what are the languages of which we hear the most in England, and with which an Englishman has most to do? This, though at first sight an easy question, depends a great deal upon circumstances, for its answer. In one part of England we hear more of one language, in another, of another. Then there are certain parts of Great Britain which are Welsh, Scotch, and Irish, rather than truly and properly English. Hence a language that one reader may hear a good deal about may be comparatively unknown to another.

2. The French.-Take, for instance, a person living at Dover or Folkestone, with the white and chalky shore of France within sight, with Calais and Boulogne within a few hours' sail, and with steamer after steamer, either making for the harbour or leaving it. Then, add to this the number of Frenchmen that are to be seen in the streets, on the pier, in the inns, and lodginghouses. There is no doubt as to their being foreigners, as to their own language being a foreign one, as to their English, when they speak it, bearing all the signs of a tongue to which they were originally strange. There is the French accent, and that unmistakably conspicuous in all they say. The foreign language most

known here is the French, all the world over, just as the foreign language best known at Calais and Boulogne is the English.

3. The German.-But change the scene from Kent and Sussex to Lincolnshire or Yorkshire; from Dover and Folkestone to Grimsby and Hull. In these lastnamed ports, though the French is still an important foreign tongue, there are others that are more somore generally spoken by the foreign crews, and more necessary to the Hull or Grimsby trader. The Dutch is one of these, the German another, the Danish a third, the Swedish a fourth; nay, when we get to the cargoes of hemp, tallow, and linseed, we may be struck with the peculiar sounds of the Russian.

4. The Welsh.-Now all these are languages absolutely foreign to the soil of Great Britain, and languages which no Briton or Englishman ever learns naturally, and in the way he learns his own mothertongue. He may find it, indeed, useful to study them, and having done so, he may speak them to his own satisfaction, and in a manner intelligible to his hearers-but this is not to speak one's mother-tongue.

But let us move westwards to the counties of Hereford, Shropshire, and Cheshire. There is a fresh language that claims our attention here, though not spoken within the borders of the four counties above mentioned. There is the Welsh. The chances are that the boys and girls of these parts hear as much about the Welsh as the Dover and Folkestone children hear about the French. They know, at any rate, that if a Welshman talk his language, and they (the Englishmen) talk theirs, there is no understanding one another. Again, although the Englishman calls himself English, the Welshman designates him differently, calling him a Saeson. In like manner the Welshman does not call himself by the name which the Englishman gives him (Welsh), but by the term Cymro. So that the very names by which each denotes the other are strange. The Welshman (as we call him) is only Welsh in the eyes of the Englishman, whereas the Englishman is only English in his own; being in those of his neigh

bour a Saeson. Ask one of the peasants of Caernarvonshire or Merionethshire a question in English, and it is highly probable that he will say Dym Sassenach. A French would say, Je n'entends pas. Both mean the same thing, though in a different manner. Dym Saesneg means No English, whilst Je n'entends pas is I do not understand.

5. This much about the Welsh, concerning which there is much more which may be advantageously known. In the first place, we may explain the words Saeson and Welsh, and show how the two words got the present application. It may be remembered, as a piece of history, that the three nations who are said to have landed from Germany and conquered Britain, under Hengist and Horsa, Ella and Cerdic, and several other redoubtable chieftains, were the Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons. This is not the exact history, but is near enough to explain the term under notice. The ancestors of the Welsh were the ancient Britons, once the occupants of all South Britain-of Lincolnshire and Kent, as truly as of Denbighshire or Cardiganshire. Now, when these were attacked by their enemies from Germany, they made no distinction between the Angles, the Jutes, and the Saxons, but treated them all as one people-just as we did, in the course of time, when, from the particular name Angle, we gave the whole island the name of Angla-land, the Land of the Angles, or England. The Britons did the same; except that of the three names they chose the word Saxon, instead of Angle, a name which we allowed to fall into disuse; a name which is now nearly foreign to our language; a name, which, when applied to an Englishman, is, nevertheless, a Welsh word.

6. As to the words Welsh and Wales, they are English; though, like many others, they are not to be found in the present language. They are common enough, however, in the old English-in the language as it was spoken by Ecbert, and Alfred, and Edward the Confessor, and the other kings before the Norman conquest. In this stage of our tongue the word wealh meant foreigner, also slave, inasmuch as when foreign

countries were conquered, the slavery of their inhabitants too often followed as a matter of course. Of this word wealh, the plural number was wealh-as, from whence has come the present word Wales, which was, originally, the name of the people rather than the country. However it, eventually, came to mean the country instead of the people. Meanwhile, the adjective wealh-isc, wealish, wal-ish, took form, from which we get the present word wel-sh, a word sometimes, but most incorrectly, spelt wel-ch. The sh, however, is the same as the -sh in such words as self-ish, &c. This, however, is a remark by the way.

7. The Cornish.-In the Welsh, then, we get a fresh language, spoken within and belonging to the British Islands, a language which, at one time, was extended far beyond its present boundaries. So late as the beginning of the last century it was spoken in Cornwall, and called the Cornish. Practically, however, the Cornish and Welsh were the same language, though the likeness between them was disguised by the fact of each having certain peculiarities of spelling. Let us, however, designate the two by the general name of British.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the people of Devonshire spoke of the Cornish as a strange language, just as the present people of Hereford and Cheshire speak of the Welsh. At present, they hear nothing about it, because the last old fishwoman who spoke it has been dead more than sixty years, so that it has become what is called a dead language, or a language that no living person speaks as his native mother-tongue. At the same time there are a few Cornish works-they can scarcely be called books-which have come down to us, having been composed when the language was spoken (was alive so to say), committed to writing, and, by that means, preserved to the present time. Finally, it should be added, that several words of the old Cornish are to be found in the present provincial dialect of the county of Cornwall, fragments of the original British, and foreigners in the present English.

8. The Irish Gaelic.-We are now prepared to leave England, and to cross the channel for Ireland, where