on of their neighbours, or some of those indescribable
causes which dispose the organs of different nations to different
sounds. The French melted down the middle consonants; the Italians
omitted the final. Corruptions arising out of ignorance were mingled
with those of pronunciation. It would have been marvellous if illiterate
and semi-barbarous provincials had preserved that delicate precision in
using the inflections of tenses which our best scholars do not clearly
attain. The common speech of any people whose language is highly
complicated will be full of solecisms. The French inflections are not
comparable in number or delicacy to the Latin, and yet the vulgar
confuse their most ordinary forms.

But, in all probability, the variation of these derivative languages
from popular Latin has been considerably less than it appears. In the
purest ages of Latinity the citizens of Rome itself made use of many
terms which we deem barbarous, and of many idioms which we should reject
as modern. That highly complicated grammar, which the best writers
employed, was too elliptical and obscure, too deficient in the
connecting parts of speech, for general use. We cannot indeed ascertain
in what degree the vulgar Latin differed from that of Cicero or Seneca.
It would be highly absurd to imagine, as some are said to have done,
that modern Italian was spoken at Rome under Augustus.[487] But I
believe it may be asserted not only that much the greater part of those
words in the present language of Italy which strike us as incapable of a
Latin etymology are in fact derived from those current in the Augustan
age, but that very many phrases which offended nicer ears prevailed in
the same vernacular speech, and have passed from thence into the modern
French and Italian. Such, for example, was the frequent use of
prepositions to indicate a relation between two parts of a sentence
which a classical writer would have made to depend on mere
inflection.[488]

From the difficulty of retaining a right discrimination of tense seems
to have proceeded the active auxiliary verb. It is possible that this
was borrowed from the Teutonic languages of the barbarians, and
accommodated both by them and by the natives to words of Latin origin.
The passive auxiliary is obtained by a very ready resolution of any
tense in that mood, and has not been altogether dispensed with even in
Greek, while in Latin it is used much more frequently. It is not quite
so easy