36 PROFESSOR BLACKiE ON THE 
national poet, or the affectation of some fashionable writer, may readily achieve 
this ; but we must bear in mind also, that what we would justly mark as poetic 
in an Attic writer may, in some of the widely scattered provinces occupied by 
the Greek race, have been a word which was generally current in the mouth 
of the people. That Homer himself, as bemg a popular minstrel, addressed 
the inhabitants of the eastern shores of the AXgean, to which country he be- 
longed, not in a peculiarly and distinctly marked so-called poetical style, but, 
like our own Burns, in a style familiar to the common people, we cannot 
for a moment doubt; and in this view any Homeric element in the existing 
Romaic may have come down by direct descent from the pre-Homeric popular 
dialect, not by degradation from the peculiar poetic and epic style used by 
literary Greece. 
Proposition XX XI. In conclusion, it seems not improper, in the case of a 
famous language of such remarkable longevity, to cast an eye into the future, 
and calculate the chances of its permanence. And in this divination past ex- 
perience certainly entitles us to say with confidence, that a language which has 
survived so many changes, and resisted such a succession of destructive forces, 
will maintain its vitality unimpaired, so long as the moral motive power of 
the world is mainly’ Christian, and the science of the world is proud to 
root itself in Greek traditions. For whether thé present little Greek kingdom 
shall have strength enough to grow into an independent political integer, or 
whether, which seems its more probable destiny, it shall at no distant day be 
attached to the great Russian Empire in the manner of an outlying principality, 
as Cymric Wales was attached to Saxon England, it does not appear that it 
will have to contend with any disintegrating or exterminating force in any way 
so strong as those which it successfully resisted when under Turkish and 
Venetian ‘supremacy. The conservative force of the Welsh language in the 
south-western corner of our insular triangle, is a fact of such potency, as to 
have been deemed worthy of special notice and wise concession by our admin- 
istrative council in London ;* but if Cymric, which is no doubt as old a lan- 
guage as Greek, with its scanty stores of literary tradition, still flourishes in a 
green old age, the extinction of Greek, with its immense momentum of intel- 
lectual and moral force, not less intense in kind than extensive in operation, 
is not a thing to be looked for within any assignable period. If the Greek 
kingdom should unfortunately not be able to maintain its position against the 
* In the winter of 1872 a representation was made to the British Government on the evils arising 
from the appointment to judicial situations in Wales of barristers unacquainted with the language of 
the natives ; and the Government pledged themselves to have respect to the representation in future, 
in so far as it might be possible to do so with a due regard to the legal knowledge of the persons 
appointed, z.e., that a Welsh-speaking barrister should in future be preferred, if his abilities and learn- 
ing were equal. 
