Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/49

 mind in its own German language. With the exception of Luther's translation of the Bible, little or nothing had been written before the 18th century for the German people in the German tongue. That beautiful language itself had become so Latinised by the use and application of Latin in all business and intellectual production—a circumstance which both Goethe and Jean Paul Richter, its greatest masters, deplore—that it was, and to a considerable degree remains in the present times, a different language in writing from the spoken vernacular tongue of the people of Germany. They have to acquire it, as, in some sort, a dead language to them, to understand and enter into the meaning and spirit of their own best writers. Their Plat Deutch, the spoken tongue of the mass of the people, does not merely differ as our Scotch, Yorkshire, or Somersetshire dialects differ from English, only in tone of voice, pronunciation, and in the use of a few obsolete words; but in construction and elements, from the too great admixture of foreign elements from the Latin into the cultivated German. A striking proof of this is, that no sentiment, phrase, popular idea, or expression from the writings of Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Richter, or any other great German writer, is ever heard among the lower classes in Germany, the peasants, labouring people, and uneducated masses; while, with us, sentiments, expressions, phrases, from Shakspeare, Pope, Burns, Swift, De Poe, Cobbett,—from Cervantes, Le Sage, Moliere,—have crept into common use and application, as proverbial sayings circulating among our totally uneducated classes, who certainly never read those authors, but have caught up from others what is good and natural, because the thought is expressed in language which they are as familiar with as the writer was himself. In our branch of the Saxon race, the intellectuality of the educated