When A Language Begins To Teem With Books, It Is Tending To
Refinement; As Those Who Undertake To Teach Others
Must have
undergone some labour in improving themselves, they set a
proportionate value on their own thoughts, and wish to
Enforce them
by efficacious expressions; speech becomes embodied and permanent;
different modes and phrases are compared, and the best obtains an
establishment. By degrees one age improves upon another.
Exactness is first obtained, and afterwards elegance. But diction,
merely vocal, is always in its childhood. As no man leaves his
eloquence behind him, the new generations have all to learn. There
may possibly be books without a polished language, but there can be
no polished language without books.
That the Bards could not read more than the rest of their
countrymen, it is reasonable to suppose; because, if they had read,
they could probably have written; and how high their compositions
may reasonably be rated, an inquirer may best judge by considering
what stores of imagery, what principles of ratiocination, what
comprehension of knowledge, and what delicacy of elocution he has
known any man attain who cannot read. The state of the Bards was
yet more hopeless. He that cannot read, may now converse with
those that can; but the Bard was a barbarian among barbarians, who,
knowing nothing himself, lived with others that knew no more.
There has lately been in the Islands one of these illiterate poets,
who hearing the Bible read at church, is said to have turned the
sacred history into verse. I heard part of a dialogue, composed by
him, translated by a young lady in Mull, and thought it had more
meaning than I expected from a man totally uneducated; but he had
some opportunities of knowledge; he lived among a learned people.
After all that has been done for the instruction of the
Highlanders, the antipathy between their language and literature
still continues; and no man that has learned only Earse is, at this
time, able to read.
The Earse has many dialects, and the words used in some Islands are
not always known in others. In literate nations, though the
pronunciation, and sometimes the words of common speech may differ,
as now in England, compared with the South of Scotland, yet there
is a written diction, which pervades all dialects, and is
understood in every province. But where the whole language is
colloquial, he that has only one part, never gets the rest, as he
cannot get it but by change of residence.
In an unwritten speech, nothing that is not very short is
transmitted from one generation to another. Few have opportunities
of hearing a long composition often enough to learn it, or have
inclination to repeat it so often as is necessary to retain it; and
what is once forgotten is lost for ever. I believe there cannot be
recovered, in the whole Earse language, five hundred lines of which
there is any evidence to prove them a hundred years old.
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