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GREAT MARLOW. 



GREECE, ANCIENT. 



a Teutonic toncfue, identical with or nearly reaemblinc; the Anglo- 

 Saxon, to have been bro;ight over to the south of Britain by the 

 Belgic coloniata that had settled in the country before the arrival of 

 Caesai- [England], the period during which the Anglo-Saxon waa the 

 spoken language of that part of the island, or rather indeed of the 

 whole island from the Channel to the Forth, with the exception of the 

 stripe along the west coast, which continued to be occupied by the 

 Welsh and other apparently cognate tribes, may be rudely defined as 

 extending from the settlement of the Angles and Saxons about the 

 beginning of the 6th century to the close of the 12th century. We 

 possess a series of Anglo-Saxon literary compositions in prose and 

 verse, from at least the latter part of the 7th century ; and although 

 the earlier specimens are both scanty and, in all probability, consider- 

 ably corrupted, those of later times have come down to ua in ample 

 quantity, and to a great extent in perfect preservation. 



8. The English language. We cannot here attempt any detailed 

 account of the formation and progress of the English language ; but 

 we may note the great epochs of its history, from its rise out of the 

 Saxon in the 12th century to its settlement into the form in which it 

 now exists. 



For the first century after the Conquest, as already observed, the 

 language of the body of the nation continued to be Saxon, substan- 

 tially of the same character with that which had for i^es before been 

 spoken by their ancestors. The transmutation of the Saxon into 

 English appears to have been principally effected by the intermixture 

 of the conquered people and their conquerors, which began to take 

 place in the 12th century. Had the English been left to themselves, 

 there seems to be no reason to suppose that they would ever have 

 either abandoned or corrupted the tongiie of their forefathers. The 

 corruption of the .Saxon, a language of a pure Teutonic lineage an<l 

 character, and refined to a high degree of grammatical complication and 

 artifice, into the inarticulate chaotic jumble which about this time 

 began to take its place, must have been the work, not of those to 

 whom it was vernacular, but of the foreigners who, in endeavouring to 

 speak it, naturally mixed it with the vocables, and metamorphosed 

 it by the imposition of the grammatical forms of their native tongue. 

 In other words, it must have been the Normans that broke down the 

 Saxon into English. This view is confirmed by three remarkable 

 facta : first, that the change took place at the very time when, accord- 

 ing to the testimony of contemporary writers, the two races that had 

 till now had little association with each other, began to intermix ; 

 secondly, that one of the accompanimenta or cbaracteri.itics of the 

 change was the iufuiion into the old Saxon of many Norman or 

 French vocables ; thirdly, that ito other characteristic or constituting 

 circumstance waa the substitution of the very grammatical forms 

 which were already in use in the French language, namely, the method 

 of separate particles and auxiliaries, for that of inflection. No reason 

 can bo assigned why the Saxons themselves should have adopted 

 either of these innovations ; they could only have come from the 

 Norraana. To tixem therefore we must attribute the creation of our 

 modem English tongne, which, although to a great extent founded 

 upon the Saxon, and also retaining much of its genius and character, 

 yet wholly differs from it in two important respects ; first, that in its 

 Tocabulai7 it is a very mixed inatead of a comparatively pure lan- 

 guage ; secondly, that its grammatical structure proceeds, as just 

 explaine<l, upon a wholly opposite principle to that which prevailed 

 in the Saxon. The ancient forms of the language however were by 

 no means at once thrown off, and in some respects what may be called 

 its transition-state from Saxon to English may be said to have lasted 

 till the middle of the 15th century ; but although down to that com- 

 paratively recent date it still rxtained in ita general structure various 

 Saxonisms which are now obsolete, these remnants of its pre-existing 

 shape and constitution had been gradually dropping off for at least a 

 hundred years preceding. Dating then the dissolution of the Saxon 

 and the birth of the English from the middle of the 12th century, 

 we may say that the language continued still as much Saxon as 

 English to the middle of the 14th century. It was nearly two centu- 

 ries more before the Saxon peculiarities that refused to assimilate with 

 the new forms bad altogether disappeared. Before the middle of the 

 16th century, however, the language had assumed throughout very 

 nearly the structural character which it still retains ; it has been con- 

 stantly indeed receiving acce.'wions to its vocabulary down to the 

 present hour, but in other respects the variations it has undergone 

 from that date amount properly only to changes of style, not of struc- 

 ture. It was in all its essential characteristics the same language in 

 the reign of Henry VIII. that it is now. 



The details of English literature will be found in the biographies of 

 the principal writer*. [Eno. Cto., Bioo. Div.] 

 GREAT MARLOW. TMablow.] 

 GREAT MI3SENDEN. [BocKrNOHAMsaiHB.] 

 OREATHAM. [Durham.] 



GREECE, ANCIENT, lay between 35" and 40° N. lat., and was 

 bounded N. by Illyria and Macedonia, from which countries it was 

 (pparated by an extensive range of mountains, which extend from 

 Mount Olympus, in the north-eastern comer of Thessaly, to the 

 Acrooeraunian Mountains, in the north-western comer of Epirus. 

 This country waa divided into a number of independent states, the 

 history and description of which are given in separate articles, as 



OEOO. DIV. TOL. Ul. 



Attica, Arcadia, Ach^a, Bceotia, Cobinth, kc. It was called 



' Greece by the Romans, whence the name has descended to us. The 



Graeei however were only one of the ancient tribes of Epirus (Aristot., 



'Meteor.' L 14), and never became of any historical importance, 



though their name must at some period have been extensively apread 



I on the western coast, since the inhabitants of Italy appear to have 



; known the country at firat under this name. In the Greek authors 



j the country comprehended within the above limits ia called Hellas, 



though it must be remarked that Hellas had a more extensive 



signification than we attach to the word, and was uaed in general to 



denote the coumtry of the Hellenea wherever they might happen to 



be settled ; thus the Grecian colonies of Cyrene in Africa, of Miletus 



in Asia, and of Syracuse in Sicily, formed as essential parte of Hellas 



as Attica, Arcadia, or Bceotia. Thus Herodotua tella ua (ii. 182) that 



Amasis, king of Egypt, sent many presents to Hellas ; and the places 



enumerated are Cyrene, Lindus in Rhodes, and the island Samua. 



Greece is usually divided by geographers into two parts, which 

 are united by the isthmus of Corinth. The northern part contained 

 Thessaly; Epirds; Acabnania ; .iEtolia; Locris, divided into 

 Opuntian and Epicnemidian Locris, and Ozolian Locris; DoBis; 

 Phocis ; BtEOTiA ; Meoabis ; and Attica. The southern part, called 

 Peloponnesus, contained Laconia ; Messenia ; Aecadia ; Elis ; 

 Aboolis ; Ach.ea ; Sictonia ; and Cobinth. In addition to these 

 states, we must reckon the numerous islands on the eastern and 

 western coasts, which were all inhabited by the Greek race. 



Greece, in the flourishing perioda of its hiatory, was in all probability 

 densely populated. According to a calculation of Mr. Clinton (' Fasti 

 Hellenic!,' vol. ii., p. 386), in which he includes the population of 

 the islands of Euboea, Corcyra, Leuoadia, Ithaca, Cephallenia, 

 Zacynthus, Cythera, .£i^na, and Salamis, it contained a population 

 of more than 3,500,000 inhabitants, from the time of the Persian 

 wars to the death of Alexander the Great. Greece, including the 

 islands already named, contains about 22,121 square miles; con- 

 sequently there were rather more than 158 persons to the square 

 mile, a rate of population very little inferior to that of Great Britain 

 in 1821, which contained 165 persons to the square mile. But it 

 must bo remarked, that Mr. Clinton's calculation of positive numbers 

 rests on a basis which, for any country or age, cannot be depended on 

 as giving trustworthy results. 



HUtory. First Period : — From the earliest times to the Trojan war. 

 — The people whom we call Greeks (the Hellenes) were not the 

 earlie.it inhabitants of the country. Among the names of the many 

 tribes which are said to have occupied the land prtvious to the 

 Hellenes, the most celebrated is that of the Pelaagi, who appear to 

 have been settled in most parts of Greece, and from whom a consider- 

 able part of the Greek population waa probably descended. The 

 Caucones, Leleges, and other barbarous tribes, who also inhabited 

 Greece, have all been regarded by some modern writera as parts of 

 the Pelasgic nation. All these tribes however were obliged to submit 

 to the power of the Hellenes, who eventually spread over the greater 

 part of Greece. Their original seat waa, according to Aristotle 

 (' Meteor.', i. 14), near Dodona, in Epirus, but they first appeared in 

 the south of Thessaly about B.C. 1384, according to the common 

 chronology. In accordance with the common method of the Greeks, 

 of inventing names to account for the origin of nations, the Hellenes 

 are repi-esented as descended from Helleo, who had three sons, Dorus, 

 Xuthus, and .lEolus. AchoDus and Ion are represented as the sons of 

 Xuthus; and from these four — Dorus, -lEolus, Achseus, and Ion, the 

 Dorians, iEolians, Achaeans, and lonians were descended, who formed 

 the four tribes into which the Helleuio nation was for many centuries 

 divided, and who were distinguished from each other by many pecu- 

 liarities in language and institutions. At the same time that the 

 Hellenic race was spreading itself over the whole land, numerous 

 colonies from the east are said to have settled in Greece, and to their 

 influence many writers have attributed the civilisation of the inhabit- 

 ants. Thus we read of Egyptian colonies in Argos and Attica, of a 

 Phoenician colony at Thebes in Boeotia, and of a Myaian colony led 

 by Pelops, from whom the southern part of Greece derived its name 

 of Peloponnesus. The very existence of these colonies has been 

 doubted by some writers; and though the evidence for each one 

 individually is perhaps not sufficient to satisfy the critical inquirer, 

 yet the uniform tradition of the Greeks authorises us in the belief 

 that Greece did in early times receive colonies from the East — a 

 supposition which is not in itself improbable, considering the 

 proximity of the Asiatic coast. 



The time which elapsed from the appearance of the Hellenes in 

 Thessaly to the siege of Troy is usually known by the name of the 

 ' heroic age.' Whatever opinion we may form of the Homeric poems, 

 it can hardly be doubted that they present a correct picture of the 

 manners and customs of the age in which the poet lived, which in all 

 probability differed little from the manners and customs of the 

 heroic age. The state of society described by Homer very much 

 resembles that which existed in Europe in the feudal ages. No 

 great power had yet arisen in Greece ; it waa divided into a number 

 of small states, governed by hereditary chiefs, whose power was 

 limited by a martial aristocracy. Piracy was an honourable occu- 

 pation, and war the delight of noble souls. Thucydides informs us 

 (i. 4) that the commencement of Grecian civilisation is to be dated 



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