114 TRANSACTIONS iSqQ-'oO 



Milton, there can be little doubt, had a sense for physical, as 

 well as for spiritual beauty ; in other words he was a man as well 

 as a poet. The diminutive form most commonly used in Greek 

 — let us keep to our point — is " ion," lengthened frequently to 

 "idion," as in " encheiridion," handbook, "oikidion," a cottage, 

 and so on. In the "Clouds" of Aristophanes, an idea strikes 

 old Strepsiades, who is learning, or trying to learn, from Socrates 

 to be a sophist, and he cries out, " O Sokratidion philtaton," 

 O, my dearest little Socrates I One reason why Greek did not 

 stand so much in need of diminutives as Latin, was that it was 

 freer in its construction and fuller in its forms. Another reason 

 was that its dialects constituted a great resource for its poets. 

 The dramatists in their lyrical passages often dropped into Doric 

 — to adopt a phrase from Dickens — and Theocritus, who wrote 

 wholly in that dialect, found, as Burns did in the lowland 

 Scotch, a vocabulary teeming, if I may use ^"^" expression, with 

 emotional values. 



Innumerable are the paths which language has made for 

 itself, innumerable as the moods and necessities of the human 

 mind. Some of these paths we can trace, but others are past 

 finding out. As a neat piece of word-making, I do not know of 

 anything better — now that it is all over and our own nerves are 

 not required to stand the shock — than the device the Latins re- 

 sorted to in order to obtain a word for " all . " Was there ever a 

 time, it may be asked, when there was no word for " all " in the 

 Latin language? Yes, there seems to have been, and there must 

 have been a time in the history of ever}? language when no such 

 word existed, for the simple reason that the idea of " all " is a 

 general and abstract one, only to be arrived at by the spiritualiz- 

 ation, if we may so call it, of some concrete term. Any one who 

 has ever looked into a Latin dictionary knows that the word for 

 "all," is in the singular, omriis, masculine and feminine, and oni7ie, 

 neuter, and in the plural omnes masculine and feminine, and 

 077i7iia neuter. Now the starting point of this well developed 

 adjective was the nominative plural masculine omnes, and this 

 was a contraction of the word homines, "men," with "h" 

 dropped in true Cockney fashion. The letter "h" was a 

 stumbling block to not a few in ancient times, just as it is to-day, 

 though the error of using it where it was not wanted was 



