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Hymns of any class of Christians, the common proverbs, the popular savings,—which strike deep into the hearts of men and flow over in their common spontaneous utterances; and he will see everywhere these features of force, perspicuity, and directness. Nor is it wanting in beauty, elegance, and majesty; for, to a considerable extent, this same Saxon element furnishes these qualities; but the English, being a composite language, these attractive and commanding elements are bestowed upon it, in fulness, by those other affluent streams which contribute to its wealth, and which go to make up its "well of English undefiled." (b) Again, the English language is characteristically the language of freedom. I know that there is a sense in which this love of liberty is inwrought in the very fibre and substance of the body and blood of all people; but the flame burns dimly in some races; it is a fitful fire in some others; and in many inferior people it is the flickering light of a dying candle. But in the English races it is an ardent, healthy, vital, irrepressible flame; and withal normal and orderly in its development. Go back to the early periods of this people's history, to the times when the whole of Europe seemed lost in the night of ignorance, and dead to the faintest pulses of liberty;—trace the stream of their descent from the days of Alfred to the present time, and mark how they have ever, in law, legislation and religion, in poetry and oratory, in philosophy and literature, assumed that oppression was an abnormal and a monstrous thing! How, when borne down by tyrannous restraint, or lawless, arbitrary rule, discontent and resistance have—