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160 literature, sacred or heroic, tends effectively in the same direction. But of more account than all is a written literature, and an organized and pervading system of instruction, whereby the same expressions for thought, feeling, and experience are set as models before the eyes of all, and the most far-reaching and effective style of linguistic communication is established.

Moreover, that same necessity of mutual understanding which makes and preserves the identity of language throughout a community has power also to bring forth identity out of diversity. No necessary and indissoluble tie binds any human being to his own personal and local peculiarities of idiom, or even to his mother-tongue; habit and convenience alone make them his; he is ever ready to give them up for others, when circumstances make it worth his while to do so. The coarse and broad-mouthed rustic whom the force of inborn character and talent brings up to a position among cultivated men, wears off the rudeness of his native dialect, and learns to speak as correctly and elegantly, perhaps, as one who has been trained from his birth after the best models. Those who come up from among the dialects of every part of Britain to seek their fortune in the metropolis acquire some one of the forms of English speech which flourish there; and, even if they themselves are unable ever to rid themselves wholly of provincialisms, their children may grow up as thorough cockneys as if their families had never lived out of hearing of Bow bells. Any one of us who goes to a foreign land and settles there, identifying himself with a community of strange speech, learns to talk with them, as well as his previously formed habits will let him, and between his descendants and theirs there will be no difference of language, however unlike they may be in hue and feature. If adventurers of various race and tongue combine themselves together in a colony and take up their abode in some wild country, their speech at once begins to undergo a process of assimilation, which sooner or later makes it one and homogeneous: how rapidly this end shall be attained, and whether some one element shall absorb the rest, or whether all shall contribute equally to the resulting