liberty of position than is now practised. It is an interesting observation, that the modern Italian has inherited from its Latin mother a great freedom of periodic arrangement, though with a marked inferiority in power of inflection. It has an immense advantage over the French, in variety of admissible collocations of words in a given sentence, as well as in the greater number of allied forms of expression. The French inflections, indeed, as has been before observed, are much less complicated and complete to the ear than to the eye; and if we strip the accidence of the flectional syllables or letters which in the spoken tongue are silent, the distinct variations in the forms of words are far fewer than they appear in the written language. But the difference between French and Italian in flexibility of syntax does not depend upon this circumstance alone, for Italian has nearly as great a superiority in liberty of syntactical order over the Spanish, which possesses full and distinctly marked inflections. The freedom of the Italian syntax is to be ascribed in part to the fact that it is both an aboriginal and, to a great extent, an unmixed tongue, spoken by the descendants of those to whom the maternal Latin was native, and retaining the radical forms and grammatical capabilities of that language, whereas French and Spanish are strangers to the soil, corrupted by a large infusion of foreign ingredients, and spoken by nations alien in descent from those who employed the common source of both, as their mother-tongue. The wretched servitude, under which Italy has for centuries alternately struggled and slumbered, has prevented the free employment of its language on such themes as to bring out fully its great capacities, and make it known to intellectual Europe as an intellectual speech; but its many-sidedness and catholicity of ex

pression, its rhetorical facility of presenting a thought in so many different aspects, render it valuable as a linguistie study, independently of the claims of its literature.

In general it may be said, that in inflected languages, the point of view in which the subject presents itself to the mind of the speaker, is the determining principle of the collocation of words in periods, but at the same time, they allow such an arrangement as to enable the speaker to suit the structure of the sentence to the supposed condition of the mind of the hearer, or the impression which he wishes to produce upon him. The natural order in which thought develops itself in the mind of one already cognizant of the facts, agitated with the emotion, or possessed of the conclusions which he wishes to communicate to another, is not by any means necessarily that which would be most readily intelligible to a mind ignorant of the facts, or most impressive to one intellectually or morally otherwise affected towards the subject. Hence the power of diversified arrangement of words in inflected. languages is valuable, not merely because it permits a speaker to follow what is to him a logical order of sequence, but because a master of language, who knows the human heart also, may thereby accommodate the forms of his speech to the endless variety of characters, conditions, passions and intelligences, of which our discordant humanity is made up.

There is another point which must not be overlooked. An inflected language, with periods compacted of words knit each to each in unbroken succession, is eminently favorable to continuity of thought. A parenthetical qualification interrupts the chain of discourse much less abruptly, if it is syntactically connected with the period, than if it is, as is usual in English, interjectionally thrown in. It is said to be one

of the tests of a perfect style, that you cannot change, omit, or even transpose, a word in a period, without weakening or perverting the meaning of the author. Although this may be true of English, I do not think it by any means applicable to inflected languages like the Greek or Latin, so far at least as the order of words is concerned, for there seem to be many constructions in which position is not only grammatically, but logically and rhetorically, indifferent. In the rough draft of one of Plato's works, the first few words were written by way of experiment in half a dozen different arrangements, and the famous stanza in the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, descriptive of a storm at sea:

Stendon le nubi un tenebroso velo, &c.

is said to have been composed by the poet in ten times as many forms. Doubtless, in such a wide variety of sequences, there were some discoverable differences of meaning; but in the main, both the philosopher and the poet were aiming in all this nicety at a sensuous, as much as at an intellectual effect upon the reader, however logically important a particular succession of words may have been in other passages of their writings.

LECTURE XVII.

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS.

III.

It is a remarkable fact that the modern languages known in literature are, perhaps without exception, poorer in grammatical inflections than the ancient tongues from which they are respectively derived; and that, consequently, the syntactical relations of important words are made to depend much more on auxiliaries, determinative particles and position. In fact, the change in this respect is so great as to have given a new linguistic character to the tongues which now constitute the speech of civilized man. I alluded on a former occasion to a doctrine advanced by very eminent philologists, that grammatical structure is a surer test of linguistic affinity than comparison of vocabularies. But though this doctrine, as limited and understood by the ablest linguists, is true in its application to the primary distinctions between great classes of languages, as, for example, the Semitic and Indo-European; yet it properly relates to remote and generic, not specific affinities, and is not capable of such extension as to be of much practical value in comparing the mixed and deriva

tive languages of Europe with those from which they are immediately descended

We know, with historical certainty, that what are called the Romance languages, and their many local dialects, are derived from the Latin; but what coincidence of syntactical structure do we find between them and the common mother of them all? The Italian resembles the Latin in independence of fixed laws of periodic arrangement, but here the grammatical likeness ends, and if we apply that test alone, it would be quite as easy to make out a linguistic affinity between the Italian and the Greek, as between the Italian and the Latin. The Latin has no article, definite or indefinite; its noun, adjective, pronoun and participle, have not only the distinction of number, but of three genders also, and a full system of inflected cases; its adjectives admit of degrees of comparison; and its verbs have a passive voice. The Italian, on the contrary, has two articles; its nouns, adjectives, pronouns and participles, though varied for number, have no distinction of case; its adjectives are compared only by the aid of particles; it has no neuter gender, and its verbs are without a passive voice. All this is true, also, of the Spanish, French and Portuguese. These diversities of grammar would have been held to disprove a linguistic relationship between the Latin and its descendants, were not such relationship established both by identity of vocabulary and by positive historical evidence. So, with respect to the Greek, we know that more closely literal, more exactly wordfor-word translations, (and this is certainly one of the best tests of grammatical resemblance,) can be made from it into German, than into any of the languages of Southern Europe, which, through the Latin, are more nearly related to it. An