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IV.] if the kingdom of Toulouse had maintained itself, would the latter ever have yielded to the former: but the sceptre of political supremacy over all France passed into the keeping of the northern provinces, and their speech became the rule of good usage throughout the land, while the langue d'oc lost by degrees its character as a cultivated dialect, and survives only in rude and insignificant provincial patois. The Italian was, in like manner, the popular idiom only of Tuscany, one of the innumerable local dialects which crowd and jostle one another between the Alps and Sicily, and its currency among the educated classes of the whole peninsula is the effect of literary influence and of instruction.

An illustration of a somewhat different character is afforded us by the history of the Latin, a history in many respects more remarkable than that of any other language which has ever existed. This conquering tongue—whose descendants now occupy so large and fair a part of Europe, and, along with their half-sister, the English, fill nearly all the New World, and numerous scattered tracts, coasts, and islands, on every continent and in every ocean, while its material has leavened and enriched the speech of all enlightened nations—was the vernacular idiom, not twenty-five centuries ago, of a little isolated district in middle Italy, a region which, on any map of the world not drawn upon a scale truly gigantic, one might easily cover with the end of a finger. How and when it came there, we know not; but it was one of a group of related dialects, descendants and joint representatives of an older tongue, spoken by the first immigrants, which had grown apart by the effect of the usual dissimilating processes. Remains of at least two of these sister dialects, the Oscan and the Umbrian, are still left in existence, to exercise the ingenuity of the learned, and to illustrate the ante-historic period of Italic speech. The Latin was pressed on the north by the Etruscan, and threatened from the south by the Greek, languages of much more powerful races, and the latter of them possessing a higher intrinsic character, and an infinitely superior cultivation: no one could then have dared to guess that its after career