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IV.] offered too stubborn a resistance to the already waning forces of the empire; and Britain also, had not its remote situation and inferior value as a province caused the Roman hold upon it to be weak, and soon abandoned. Less considerable tracts of south-eastern Europe, stretching from the northern border of Italy to near the mouth of the Danube, yielded to the same influence: subdued by the arms, colonized from the population, organized by the policy, civilized by the culture, of the great city, they learned also to talk her language, forgetting their own. Thus arose the great and important group of the Romanic languages, as they are called; namely, the Italian, the French, the Spanish and Portuguese, the Rhæto-Romanic of southern Switzerland, and the Wallachian—each including a host of varying dialects, all lineal descendants of the Latin, all spoken by populations only in small part of Latin race.

We must not suppose, however, that a pure and classical Latin was ever the popular dialect of this wide-extended region of Europe, any more than of Italy after its first Romanization. The same counteracting causes, acting on a grander scale and with an intensified force, prevented correctness and homogeneity of speech. The populace got their Latin rather from the army and its followers, the colonists and low officials, than from educated Romans and the works of great authors. Doubtless there was not at first such a difference between the dialect of the highest and of the lowest that they could not understand one another. But, whatever it was, it rapidly became wider: while study and the imitation of unchanging models kept the scholars and ecclesiastics in possession of the classical Latin, only a little barbarized by the irresistible intrusion into it of words and constructions borrowed from vernacular use, the language of the masses grew rapidly away from it, breaking up at the same time into those innumerable local forms to whose existence we have already referred. There was no conserving and assimilating influence at work among the millions who had taken for their own the language of Rome, capable either of binding them fast to its established usages or of keeping their lines of linguistic growth parallel. Special disturbing