The extension of the English language over the civilised world is a curiosity of the age.  French, German, Italian, and other continental tongues, seem to have attained their limits as vernaculars.  Each is spoken in its own country, and by a few fashionables and scholars beyond.  But the language which pushes abroad is the English; and it may be said to be rooting out colonised French and Spanish, and becoming almost everywhere, beyond continental Europe, the spoken and written tongue.  Long the Spanish enjoyed the supremacy in Central America; but it has followed the fate of the idle, proud, combative, and good-for-nothing people who carried it across the Atlantic, and is disappearing like snow before the sun of a genial spring.  The sooner it is extinct the better.  Already the English is the vernacular from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific, wherever civilised settlements are formed.  As large a population now speaks this nervous language in America as in Great Britain; and this is only an indication of its progress.  By means of a rapidly-increasing population, the English language will in twenty years be spoken by upwards of fifty million Americans; and if to these we add all within the home and colonial dominion, the number speaking it at that period will not be short of a hundred millions.  What an amount of letter-writing and printing will this produce!  And, after all, how small that amount in comparison with what will be seen a hundred years hence, when many hundred millions of men are on the earth, English in speech and feeling, whatever may be their local and political distinctions!  The gratification which one experiences in contemplating facts of this kind, transcends the power of language.  To all appearance, our English tongue is the expression of civil and religious freedom—­in fact, of common sense; and its spread over the globe surely indicates the progress of civilised habits and institutions.

In referring to the qualities which are usually found in connection with the prevalence of English as a vernacular, we are led to anticipate prodigious strides in the popularising of literature during the next twenty years.  What, also, may we not expect to see done for the extension of epistolary correspondence?  Intercourse by letter has advanced only one step of its progress, by the system of inland penny-postage.  Another step remains to be effected:  the system of carrying letters oversea on the same easy terms.  That this Ocean Penny-Postage, as it is termed, will be carried out, at least as regards the larger British colonies, within a period much under twenty years, is exceedingly probable.  When this grand achievement is accomplished, there will ensue a stream of intercommunication with distant lands, of which we can at present form no proper conception, and which will go far towards binding all parts of the earth in a general bond of brotherhood.