58 EMERITUS PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON 



extremely poor, but not less remarkable for his independence of character than for the 

 slenderness of his purse. Though professionally a scholar, and a refurbisher of ancient 

 MSS., his grand object in life was, through the dissemination of the best pieces of their 

 ancient literature, to revive in the minds of his countrymen those aspirations for their 

 political liberty which at no distant period were destined to receive a glorious consumma- 

 tion. Accordingly, though his earliest works in the last decade of the century bear a 

 decidedly medical type, in the shape of translations from English and German medical 

 works, as also an edition of Hippocrates' treatise Tiepl 'Aepcuv koi YSutow Kal Tottwv, he 

 came before the French savans in 1802 as a translator of Beccaria's famous work on Crimes 

 and Punishments; and in 1803, before a French society of which Fourcroy was the 

 chairman, he read a memoir on the Etat actuel de la Civilisation dans la Grece, which may 

 be looked on as a sort of dim prophetic intimation of the Greece that now lies before us, 

 notably in the system of European States. But times, of course, were not yet ready for any 

 decided action in the political field ; neither had Koraes, from his previous acquaintance 

 with the Smyrniote Greeks, any reason to suspect the existence of the slumbering fire of 

 patriotism which in twenty years afterwards broke out with such substantial results in 

 the Peloponnesus. Accordingly, he continued to act in an exclusively literary field, 

 and had the good fortune, in this sphere of scholarly activity, to become the right-hand 

 man, so to speak, of the brothers Sosimades, patriotic Greeks, who with princely generosity 

 acted out what Andrew Carnegie calls the Gospel of Wealth, by endowing patriotic 

 institutions and furthering all sorts of Greek learning, with no regard to vulgar pecuniary 

 profit. Under the patronage of this distinguished brotherhood, the series of Greek works 

 that compose the 'EXX^w/c^ B//3\io0>/K>7, that takes a prominent place in all classical libraries, 

 was put forth from the press of Firmest Didot. The first volume of this series in 1805, 

 besides Aelian, Heraclides Ponticus, and Nicolaos Damascenus, with learned notes and 

 commentaries, contains a discourse entitled ^To^ao-pol avroxeSioi Trep\ rrjs 'EXX^w/ci?? 7raiSeias 

 kui TXwo-o-r)?, which, in the history of the Greek mind in this nineteenth century, may be 

 looked on as holding somewhat the same place that the theses of Martin Luther, in 1517, 

 did in the history of the Christian Church. The subsequent volumes of the BifiXioOnicri, em- 

 bracing Isocrates, Strabo, Plutarch, Polyaenus, Antoninus, Hierocles, and some others, 

 belong more to the special scholarship of those authors than to the general literary public ; 

 but the labours of this large-minded and patriotic Greek with regard to the regulation, 

 reformation, purification, or however it may be called, of the language which has been 

 the common organ of knowledge, both sacred and secular, for nearly three thousand years, 

 form a philological achievement in which the intellectual aristocracy of all countries 

 must feel a deep interest. To understand clearly the nature of this linguistic StopOwa-ig, 

 we must bear in mind that the Greek which Koraes found in his native Chios had flowed 

 down from B) T zantium in the fourth century, like two strata in geology, in a double 

 stream : an upper stream confined to the dignified churchmen, statesmen, and gentlemen 

 of high position and comparative leisure ; and a lower stream, being the language of the 

 less educated classes, of the peasantry, and of the popular ballad. As a scholar, the root 



