B.C.31. or if some more ambitious aspirant arose, his 330. efforts bore all the evidence of incipient decay. A.D. in usu variantur, aliis densiorem, aliis tenuiorem sonum affingentibus, utriusque pronuntiationis modum discito, ne aut horum aut illorum aures offendas, neve de sonis litem inutiliter excites: cæterum qui in his sonus à pluribus receptus est, illum frequentato. "B literam ad exemplum nostri b, ne inspissato, sed ad imitationem consonantis mollius proferto. "Literaset, item y et x, pro loco et situ alios atque alios sonos admittere memento: Itaque ret tum demum 6 quum proxime locantur, hæc post μ, illa post v, his locis videlicet litera 7 referat nostrum d, verò b nostrum ex primat. "Litera porrò y cum proxima sedem occupet ante x, x, aut aliud y, huic tu non suum, sed sonum v literæ accommodato; x autem post y positæ sonum y affingito. "Ne multa. In sonis omnino ne philosophator, sed utitor præsentibus. In his si quid emendandum sit, id omne auctoritati permittito. Publicè verò profiteri quod ab auctoritate sancita diversum, et consuetudine loquendi recepta alienum sit, nefas esto. "Quod hic exprimitur, id consuetudini consentaneum ducito, hactenusque pareto. "Si quis autem, quod abominor, secus fecerit, et de sonis (re sanè, si ipsam spectes, levicula; si contentionis inde natæ indignitatem, non ferenda) controversiam publicè moverit, aut obstinato animi proposito receptum à plerisque omnibus sonorum modum abrogare aut improbare perrexerit, quive sciens prudens ad hoc data opera, quod hic sancitum est, verbo factove publicè palàm contempserit, hunc hominem, quisquis is erit, ineptum omnes habēnto: et à senatu, siquidem ex eo numero jam fuerit, is qui auctoritati præest, nisi At this period, the taste for Grecian literature B.C.31. at Rome amounted almost to a mania; her 330. resipuerit, expellito. Inter candidatos verò si sit, ab omni gradu honoris arceto. Ex plebe autem scholarium si fuerit, quum ita haberi id ei commodo esse possit, pro scholari ne censeto. Puerilem denique temeritatem, si quid publicè ausa fuerit, domi apud suos castigari curato. Postremò Vicecancellarius et Procuratores quæ hic præscripta sunt ne contemnantur, neve edicto fraus aliqua fiat, pro modo jurisdictionis singuli providento. Ab his si quid adversum hæc admissum sit, aut omissum, mulcta est quam dixerit Cancellarius. In summa, hoc edictum omnes sacrosanctum ita habento, ut nec contumacibus remissum, nec resipiscentibus severum esse videatur. Datum Londini 18 Calend. Junias, anno Domini 1542." Cheke appealed from the dogmatic Chancellor to the learned men of Europe, and published a series of epistles between the Bishop and himself, in which the gentle spirit of the latter appears to but little advantage. "I have read," commences the Prelate, in an address to the professor, "the treatise which you have transmitted to me, in which I find a copious stream of words, and a redundancy of speech; much reading, too, do I discern, and happiness of memory, besides industry and diligence in the pursuit of common and trivial matters. But know, Sir, that in a professor I look also for judgment and erudition, and condemn 'that arrogance, presumption, and insolence, which so frequently flow from your pen." In spite, however, of the opposition of the Bishop, the efforts of Cheke and his colleague Smith were successful. The reformation proceeded slowly, but steadily; the pronunciation, as introduced by Chrysoloras and his country • Stephanus Wintonus Episcopus, Acad. Cantab. Cancell. Joh. Cheko, p. 5. A.D. A.D. B.C.31. theatres had already been adorned with the 330. brightest productions of Euripides and Sophocles, of Menander, Epicharmus, and Diphilus, communicated through the medium of her native dramatists, Ennius and Afranius, Plautus, Terence, and others ;* and although in the reign men was abandoned, and that suggested by Erasmus and his imitators became the universal practice of Britain and the rest of Europe.t * Serus enim Græcis admovit acumina chartis ;- Hor. Ep. L. ii. 1. v, 161. A copy of the grammar of Ecolampadius (or John Haukschein,) printed at Paris in 1528, directs the alphabet to be pronounced, alpha, vita, gamma, delta, epsilon, zita, ita, thita, iota, cappa, lambda, my, ny, xi, omikron, pi, rho, sigma, taf, ypsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega. "B," says he, "profertur per v leniter ut Taßpm Gafriil non Gabriel, (observe here the confounding of and .) H per semper legitur," and so forth. As to the diphthongs, as he pronounces æ; av, af; e, i; eu, ef; o, i; "ov u latinum, quia non habent aliud u Græci nisi diphthongum ou."-The directions of Nicolas Clenardus, another grammarian of the same period, differ but in slight particulars from those of Ecolampadius, as do all those systems which, like theirs, were founded on the practice introduced by Lascaris, Gaza, Bolzanio, and the Greek grammarians of the fifteenth century. The grammar of Theodore Beza, the Alphabetum Græcum, A.D. 330. of Augustus literal translations were aban- B.C.31. doned, still their writings for the stage were Greek, as well in style as subject.* Their poetry, in like manner, was founded on the same models: that of Lucretius is no more than a metrical embodiment of the philosophy of Epicurus; Theocritus and Hesiod, Aratus and Homer, were followed by the imitative genius of Virgil; Anacreon and Pindar, Alcæus and Sappho, were copied by Horace; Callimachus, Philetas, and the writers of the Alexandrian school, afforded examples to Propertius; Parthenius and Euphronion, to Ovid and Gallus; and even in the elegies of Tibullus, one of the most original of the Roman poets, * Dunlop, v. iii. p. 453. printed by Stephens, the Spicilegium Græcum of Edward Grant, and a variety of others, all which appeared subsequent to those mentioned above, and whilst the controversy was still undecided, print both systems, but denominate the one the vulgar, and, as they think, corrupt method; but towards the close of the seventeenth century, or even earlier, the evil was completely abolished, and the class books of both England and the Continent presented merely the reformed alphabet of Erasmus. I have omitted here a detail, which must have been necessarily tedious, of the arguments adduced by the modern Greeks and their early partisans in support of their system; but for an ingenious essay on the subject by one of themselves, the reader is referred to the "Grecian Antiquities," which I have already quoted, by Γρηγόριος Ιερομόναχος Παλι OuρITns, printed at Venice in 1815. (Vol. ii. p. 309.) .A.D. B.C.31. may be traced an adoption of the ideas of Euri330. pides and Sophocles. But amongst the Greeks themselves the age of poetry was gone, her epics+ and her lyrics were extinct, the spirit of her drama was no more, the genius of her writers aspired no higher than an epigram; and henceforward so barren were her powers of imagination or invention, that geography and chronology,§ • Dunlop, v. iii. p. 311. + Nestor of Laranda, in Lycaonia, composed, in the beginning of the third century, his Ιλιὰς λειπογράμματος, an epic in twenty-four cantos, so arranged that a letter of the alphabet was successively proscribed from each, A from the 1st, B from the 2nd, and so forth; to such puerilities was Grecian genius reduced. Tryphiodorus, an Egyptian, (according to Suidas,) composed, in the fifth century, a Leipogrammatic Odyssey, in imitation of the poem of Nestor; but as the work is lost, it is doubtful whether he accurately followed the frivolous example of his original, with regard to all the letters, or, as Eustathius asserts, omitted only Σ throughout the poem. "But how," says M. Schoell, "could he, in this case, spell the name of his hero." Of these there remain some portions of the works of Polystrates, who flourished at the period of the sack of Corinth; of Archias, the tutor and celebrated client of Cicero; of Asinius Quadratus, who sung the wars of Sylla; of Demetrius, who lived during the Mithridatic insurrection; of Antipater of Thessalonica, in the reign of Tiberius; of Lucillius, in that of Nero; of Leonidas of Alexandria, who, about the close of the first century, composed his ironpa epigrams, in which the number of letters in the various distichs were to be equal; and of others less distinguished, whose fragments are preserved in the various Anthologia of the early ages. § About 138 B. C. Apollodorus of Athens wrote his |