nnexion; (2) the fear
of tautology; (3) the influence of metre, rhythm, rhyme, and of the
language of prose and verse upon one another; (4) the power of idiom and
quotation; (5) the relativeness of words to one another.

It has been usual to depreciate modern languages when compared with
ancient. The latter are regarded as furnishing a type of excellence to
which the former cannot attain. But the truth seems to be that modern
languages, if through the loss of inflections and genders they lack some
power or beauty or expressiveness or precision which is possessed by
the ancient, are in many other respects superior to them: the thought is
generally clearer, the connexion closer, the sentence and paragraph are
better distributed. The best modern languages, for example English or
French, possess as great a power of self-improvement as the Latin, if
not as the Greek. Nor does there seem to be any reason why they should
ever decline or decay. It is a popular remark that our great writers are
beginning to disappear: it may also be remarked that whenever a great
writer appears in the future he will find the English language as
perfect and as ready for use as in the days of Shakspere or Milton.
There is no reason to suppose that English or French will ever be
reduced to the low level of Modern Greek or of Mediaeval Latin. The wide
diffusion of great authors would make such a decline impossible. Nor
will modern languages be easily broken up by amalgamation with each
other. The distance between them is too wide to be spanned, the
differences are too great to be overcome, and the use of printing makes
it impossible that one of them should ever be lost in another.

The structure of the English language differs greatly from that of
either Latin or Greek. In the two latter, especially in Greek, sentences
are joined together by connecting particles. They are distributed on
the right hand and on the left by men, de, alla, kaitoi, kai de and the
like, or deduced from one another by ara, de, oun, toinun and the like.
In English the majority of sentences are independent and in apposition
to one another; they are laid side by side or slightly connected by the
copula. But within the sentence the expression of the logical relations
of the clauses is closer and more exact: there is less of apposition
and participial structure. The sentences thus laid side by side are also
constructed into paragraphs; these again are less distinctly marked in