Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/368

Rh lawyers, doctors, huntsmen, architects, and cooks owe to France, has been fairly acknowledged. Italy has given us the words ever in the mouths of our painters, sculptors, and musicians. The Portuguese traders, three hundred years ago, helped us to many terms well known to our merchants. Germany, the parent of long-winded sentences, has sent us very few words; and these remind us of the Thirty Years' War, when English and Scotch soldiers were fighting on the right side. To make amends for all this borrowing, England supplies foreigners (too long enslaved) with her own staple — namely, the diction of free political life. In this she has had many hundred years' start of almost every nation but the Hungarians; she has, it is true, no home-born word for coup d'état; but she may well take pride in being the mother of Parliaments, even as old Rome was the source of civil law.