in the twelfth century A. D.; then Wales was in a fervor of national life.  She had not the resources, or perhaps the will, for outside conquest.  But her Authurian legend went forth, and drove Beowulf and Child Horn out of the memory of the English, Charlemagne out of the memory of the French; invaded Germany, Italy, even Spain:  absolutely installed Welsh King Arthur as the national hero of the people his people were fighting; and infused chivalry with a certain uplift and mysticism through-out western Europe.  Or again, in the Cinquecento and earlier, the Italian center quickened; and learning and culture flowed up from Italy through France and England; and these countries, with Spain, become the leaders in power and civilization.

England since that Teutonic expansion which made her English was spent, has grown less and less Teutonic, more and more Latin; the Italian impulse of the Renaissance drove her far along that path.  In the middle of the eleventh century, her language was purely Teutonic; you could count on the fingers of your hand the words derived from Latin or Celtic.  And now?  Sixty percent of all English words are Latin.  At the beginning of the fifth century, after nearly three hundred years of Roman occupation, one can hardly doubt that Latin was the language of what is now England.  Celtic, even then I imagine, was mainly to be heard among the mountains.  See how that situation is slowly coming back.  And the tendency is all in the same direction.  You have taken, indeed, a good few words from Dutch; and some two dozen from German, in all these centuries; but a Latin word has only to knock, to be admitted and made welcome.  Teachers of composition must sweat blood and tears for it, alas, to get their pupils to write English and shun Latin.  In a thousand years’ time, will English be as much a Latin language as French is?  Quite likely.  The Saxon words grow obsolete; French ones come pouring in.  And Americans are even more prone to Latinisms than Englishmen are:  they ‘locate’ at such and such a place, where an English man would just go and live there.

Before Latin, Celtic was the language of Britain.  Finally, says W.Q.  Judge, Sanskrit will become the universal language.  That would mean simply that the Fifth Root Race will swing back slowly through all the linguistic changes that it has known in the past, till it reaches its primitive language condition.  Then the descendants of Latins, Slavs, Celts, and Teutons will proudly boast their unadulterated Aryan-Sanscrit heredity, and exult over their racial superiority to those barbarous Teutons, Celts, Slavs, and Latins of old, of whom their histories will lie profusely.

II.  Homer

When the Law designs to get tremendous things out of a race of men, it goes to work this way and that, making straight the road for an inrush of important and awakened souls.  Having in mind to get from Greece a startling harvest presently, it called one Homer, surnamed Maeonides, into incarnation, and endowed him with high poetic genius.  Or he had in many past lives so endowed himself; and therefore the Law called him in.  This evening I shall work up to him, and try to tell you a few things about him, some of which you may know already, but some of which may be new to you.