Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/186

 ing everything, minding little though when Germanized it should cease to be intelligible;—as if a word needed any better act of naturalization than that which universal unintelligibility imparts to it. In itself it is the same—the rather as all languages, like all men, are cognate, intermarried and intermixed—whether a word was invented by a savage or a foreigner; whether it grew up like moss amid the German forests, or like street-grass, in the pavement of the Roman Forum. The Lawyer, on the other hand, contended that it was different; and accordingly he hid not from any of his clients that Tagefarth (Day-turn) meant Term, and that Appealing was Berufen (Becalling). On this principle, he dressed the word Subrector in the new livery of School-undergovernor. And this version further converted the Schoolmaster into Parson; to such a degree does our civic fortune—not our personal well-being, which supports itself on our own internal soil and resources—grow merely on the drift-mould of accidents, connections, acquaintances, and Heaven or the Devil knows what! —

By the by, from a Lawyer, at the same time a Country Judge, I should certainly have looked for more sense; I should (I may be mistaken) have presumed he knew that the Acts, or Reports, which in former times (see Hoffmann's German or un-German Law-practice) were written in Latin, as before the times of Joseph the Hun-