52 EMERITUS PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 



the best models of classical antiquity. Nor was this by any means difficult to do ; for, 

 as we have already stated, alongside of the vulgar there had always been practised, from 

 the last of the Byzantine historians, a literary Greek, only in the very slightest degree, or 

 scarcely at all, infected with the vulgarities of the unlettered speech.* The success of 

 this movement was certain ; but, as in all changes of great social forces, there were 

 adverse elements at work which required to be considered. Influential as the traditions 

 of the literary platform were, it could not be denied that the inspiration which had nerved 

 the national arm for victory, had come from the mass of the common people as much 

 as from the exertions of the cultivated few ; the praises of the popular heroes of the war 

 had been sung in the language of the popular ballads, commonly known as Eomaic, and 

 had a most righteous claim not to be ignored in the linguistic presentation of the restored 

 nationality. Besides, it could not be the object of patriotic men of culture to separate 

 themselves, by a rigidly drawn line, from the language of the common people, whom it 

 was their mission to elevate and to improve ; so the advocates of the contending types 

 came to a philological compromise, pretty much in the same fashion that political com- 

 promises are managed between the reforming and the conservative forces in our parlia- 

 mentary debates. The result of this compromise is what we see daily in the Greek organs 

 of public opinion, and in other works which issue from the press, of a people who at no 

 period proved themselves destitute of that intellectual acuteness and that literary dex- 

 terity which was the boast of their forefathers ; and the principles on which this successful 

 compromise was made, say as much for the good sense and practical judgment of the 

 leaders of literary opinion as its original conception did for their patriotism. These 

 principles are four — (1) the absolute exclusion of all foreign words as unnecessary and 

 unseemly in a language which has, through so many centuries, retained the luxuriant 

 vitality of its native growth ; (2) a free exercise of the formative power of the language 

 when new words have to be introduced for new facts and new ideas ; (3) such a moderate 

 restoration of classical forms as slides easily and without any felt exertion into the popular 

 ear ; (4) such a sparing adoption of the peculiarities of the vulgar Greek as leaves the style 

 of modern literary prose much more near to the style of ancient classical prose than the 

 style of JEschylus is to that of Homer, or the style of Lord Byron to that of Geoffrey 

 Chaucer. And, in fact, the current style now used by the Greeks in their literary pro- 

 ductions, their mercantile correspondence, and their political debates, is differentiated 

 from the Greek of Polybius and Diodorus by a few characteristic turns, which any intel- 

 ligent school-boy may master in ten minutes. This, however, does not imply that the 

 language of the peasants is to be allowed to fall into total disuse ; on the contrary, we 

 agree with the principles and the practice of an accomplished Corcyrean gentleman, who has 

 translated not only Shakespeare's plays but the Odyssey of his own Homer into a style 

 of expression more or less approximating to the vulgar dialect,t viz., that the language 



* See as a striking proof of this the Neo-JAXwxij <bfoohoylx from 1453 to 1821, by Satha, Athens, 1868 ; or let any 

 one take up Phuanzes, the historian of the last age of Byzantine Hellenism, and judge for himself. 



t 'O/ayjoov Ooiiautix, by Jacobus Polylas, Athens, 1875. 'H t^kv^io. tov 1tix.o%Y\t(>, Corcyra, 1855. k/thtr, Athens, 



