important amongst them are the Byzantine writers Procopius, Agathias, Cedrenus, Zonaras, Anna Comnena, Cinnamus and others; whose works, contained in thirty-six folios, constituted the principal source from which Gibbon drew the materials for his history. These times possessed, too, poets, such as Quintus of Smyrna, and Nonnus-grammarians and philologists, as Hesychius, Suidas, Gregory of Corinth, and Eustathius— ingenious romancers; some of whom, as Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, and Xenophon of Ephesus, are distinguished even for the beauty of their style. One of the greatest men, and perhaps the most voluminous writer of this period, was St. John Chrysostom, the Demosthenes of the Greek church, as he has been styled by some, though critics think he should be compared rather with the Roman orator. Of him, and other fathers of the church, who lived in this age; as of those also, who, with the inspired writers of the New Testament, belong to the Roman age; and of the translation of the Seventy in the age preceding, I have declined all other mention, because of the extent and nature of the subject; which is not one to be dealt with in that hasty and superficial manner I of necessity adopt.

It may perhaps excite surprise, that those who treat this subject should descend in their conside

ration of it to so low a period; and speak of Grecian literature as that of a living tongue, so late even as the middle of the fifteenth century. But it is notwithstanding true, that the subjects of the Byzantine throne were, even to this time, and in their lowest servitude and depression, possessed, as the historian of this period observes, of a golden key that could unlock the treasures of antiquity. Philelphus, giving a picture of the state of society in Constantinople; where he lived but thirty years before its fall; a picture somewhat highly colored we may suppose, by his Italian imagination, says, that those who had preserved their language free from the corruption of the vulgar tongue, spoke in ordinary discourse, even at that day, as the comic Aristophanes, the tragic Euripides, the orators, philosophers and historians of classic Greece -that all persons about the Imperial Court, and especially the noble matrons, had retained the dignity and elegance of the ancient tongue.

LECTURE III.

HISTORY OF

THE GREEK LANGUAGE.

HAVING in the preceding lecture glanced our eye over the wide field of Grecian Literature; in such way as to become sensible, perhaps, of its extent, rather than to form a true estimate of its rich and various productions; we shall now, according to our proposed plan, investigate the origin; trace the history; and consider the character of the Greek language, as spoken, or written in different ages, and by different states.

In regard to this language, if the Romaic be considered, as in fact it is, a separate tongue; there is less necessity than in the case of most others, to distinguish between different periods of its history, because of important changes in its form. The wonderful permanency of the Greek language is not the least remarkable of the fea

tures which characterize it. "A person," it has been observed, "from reading Xenophon may turn to Eustathius, who wrote in the twelfth century, that is, fifteen hundred years after, without being shocked with any corrupt alterations in the general manner of expression."

The varieties of this language depend less on time than they do on place and the nature of the composition; that is to say, the general language varies less from age to age than its several dialects do from place to place, in contemporary authors; or even from one writer to another, at the same place, but engaged in a different sort of composition, which had become appropriated to some one dialect.

We may, nevertheless, in our consideration of this subject, mark out three great periods; which are characterized, especially the first and second of them, by sufficiently distinctive features.

The first of these periods may be considered as comprehending those seven or eight centuries, that succeeded the earliest dawn of letters upon Greece, until the conclusion of the Trojan war. The second, contains that comparatively short interval between the conclusion of this war and the reign of Alexander the Great. The third, will extend from the age of Alexander even to our own times.

Persian