+ PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 
and that principally from the action of THREE VERY POWERFUL FORCES. The 
system of government introduced by the conquering Turks was not such as to 
render a fusion of the dominant and subject races possible ; here was the first 
element of repulsion ; in the domain of religion the repellent force on the side 
of the vanquished was even stronger; and if we add to these two ‘influences 
the fact, that the accumulated intellectual forces of ages were all on the same 
side, we shall have no difficulty in perceiving how the taking of Byzantium by the 
Turks could have no such effect on the language of the Greeks, as the Lombard 
reign in Italy had on that of Rome, or the Norman invasion of England, in a 
much more decided way, on the speech of the Anglo-Saxons. Nor were 
matters much different in the south-western division of the Greek Empire, 
where the Venetians and other Franks had parcelled among themselves, in 
governments of greater or less permanency, the dismembered inheritance of 
the Byzantine Ceesars ; for the Greeks hated the Pope, who had on various 
occasions endeavoured to deprive them of their ecclesiastical liberties, scarcely 
with less intensity than they did the Turks, who had deprived them of all 
liberty; and thus, in Frankish Greece also, the new forces introduced by ex- 
ternal conquest were not strong enough to effect the disintegration of the old 
linguistic inheritance, and the construction of a new language, or even the 
general recognition of a new dialect. 
Proposition VIIJ.—But in spite of the strong and long-continued action 
of these retarding forces, nature would have her way ; a process of growth was 
slowly going on, which could not but issue in the formation either of an entirely 
new language, or of a well-marked species of an old language; and under 
the continued action of the strong conservative force indicated, the latter 
was the only result possible. The matter was brought to a practical decision, 
like so many other significant events in modern times, by the invention of 
printing and the diffusion of books. By means of these powerful engines, 
the great storehouses of knowledge were no longer confined to the few, but 
gradually, as by a well-organised system of irrigation, the refreshing waters 
were brought down from the far hills, and dispersed through the plains; and 
an essential part of such a machinery, of course, was the adoption of a language 
understood by the great mass of the people. Ifthe Greek people were to be 
raised from the state in which they were kept by their political oppressors, 
the great preparatory instrument, till an opportunity for physical resistance 
should present itself, was popular education ; and popular education remained 
impossible so long as the learned wrote in a dialect artificially fed from reservoirs 
of dead tradition not beating with the living pulses of the present. Under the 
influence of this patriotic necessity, books of various kinds, especially theo- 
logical and ecclesiastic, had been issued from the Greek press in a popular 
