810 WILLIAM WATSON GOODWIN. 



sophical abstractions; and with equal sagacity and discernment he 

 refused to trust himself upon the shifting sands of comparative syntax. 

 The metaphysical syntax that held sway when Goodwin began his 

 career is largely a thing of the past ; but historical syntax, both in the 

 wider area of the Indo-European languages and on Greek territory, 

 has immeasurably increased its influence as it has steadily built upon 

 securer foundations. 



The wonder is that after thirty years the large increments of scien- 

 tific research should have found themselves easily at home and should 

 have worked no disturbance to the principles laid down in a book, of 

 which its author, in his revision of 1890, said that it had appeared " in 

 the enthusiasm of youth as an ephemeral production." The truth 

 is that the "Moods and Tenses" of 1890 is at bottom the "Moods and 

 Tenses" of 1860; for, though there was much to add in a work de- 

 signed to fill a larger compass, there was astonishingly little to curtail, 

 to modify in important particulars, or to reject out-right. I know of 

 no book of like character that piossesses the quality of prescience in 

 equal degree. The "Moods and Tenses," like every other piece of 

 work done by its author, is marked by perfect sanity, displays the 

 working of an independent and resourceful thinker, who with steadied 

 purpose aimed at presenting the vital principles and the essential 

 facts, freed from the entanglements of specious and shifting theories. 

 It is the expression of a cautious scholar who possessed a varied and 

 exact knowledge of English speech, which he wielded with precision 

 in setting forth the fine distinctions of the delicate Greek idiom. To 

 its judicious presentation of the facts, to its lucidity and exactness of 

 statement, perhaps even to its very refusal to enter at all points and 

 at all hazards upon the treacherous ground of absolute definition, the 

 book owes its fame as a standard work, still indispensable, despite the 

 subsequent mass of treatises, both large and small, that traverse the 

 whole or some part of the same field. And it has had a wider and more 

 salutary influence than any American or English book in its province 

 for more than half a century. 



Apart from its virtues of lucidity and orderliness, there are certain 

 special features of the "Moods and Tenses" that have commanded 

 most attention : the distinction between the time of an action and the 

 character of an action, the,distinction between absolute and relative 

 time, the division of conditional sentences (and in particular the treat- 

 ment of shall and icill and should and ivould conditions, which Goodwin 

 discussed at some length in the Transactions of the American Philological 

 Association, Vol. 7 (1876), anfl in the Journal of Philology, Vol. 8 



