Whoever would read a profound political pamphlet under the guise of a brilliant novel may find it in “Sibyl, or The Two Nations.”  The gay overture of “The Eve of the Derby,” at a London club, with which the curtain rises, contrasts with the evening amusements of the proletaire in the gin-palaces of Manchester in a more than operatic effectiveness, and yet falls rather below than rises above the sober truth of present history.  And we are often tempted to bind up the novel of the dashing Parliamenteer with our copy of “Ivanhoe,” that we may thus have, side by side, from the pens of the Right Honorable Benjamin Disraeli and Sir Walter Scott, the beginning and the end of these eight hundred years of struggle between Norman rule and Saxon endurance.  For let races and families change as they will, there have ever been in England two nations; and the old debate of Wamba and Gurth in the forest-glade by Rotherwood is illustrated by the unconscious satires of last week’s “Punch.”  In Chartism, Reform-Bills, and Strikes, in the etiquette which guards the Hesperides of West-End society, in the rigid training which stops many an adventurer midway in his career, are written the old characters of the forest-laws of Rufus and the Charter of John.  Races and families change, but the distinction endures, is stamped upon all things pertaining to both.

We in America, who boast our descent from this matrimony of Norman and Saxon, claim also that we have blent the features of the two into one homogeneous people.  In this country, where the old has become new, and the new is continually losing its raw lustre before the glitter of some fresher splendor, the traces of the contest are all but obliterated.  Only our language has come to us with the brand of the fatherland upon it.  In our mother-tongue prevails the same principle of dualism, the same conflict of elements, which not all the lethean baptism of the Atlantic could wash out.  The two nations of England survive in the two tongues of America.

We beg the reluctant reader not to prematurely pooh-pooh as a “miserable mouse” this conclusion, thinking that we are only serving up again that old story of Wamba and Gurth with an added sauce-piquante from Dean Trench.  We admit that we allude to that original composition of English past and present from a Latin and a Teutonic stock.  But that is to us not an ultimate, but a primal fact.  It is the premise from which we propose to trace out the principle now living and working in our present speech.  We commence our history with that strife of the tongues which had at the outset also their battle of Hastings, their field of Sanilac.  There began the feud which to-day continues to divide our language, though the descendants of the primitive stocks are inextricably mingled.