most of the counties of England there is still a provincial style, which
has been sometimes made by a great poet the vehicle of his fancies. When a
book sinks into the mind of a nation, such as Luther's Bible or the
Authorized English Translation of the Bible, or again great classical works
like Shakspere or Milton, not only have new powers of expression been
diffused through a whole nation, but a great step towards uniformity has
been made. The instinct of language demands regular grammar and correct
spelling: these are imprinted deeply on the tablets of a nation's memory
by a common use of classical and popular writers. In our own day we have
attained to a point at which nearly every printed book is spelt correctly
and written grammatically.

(9) Proceeding further to trace the influence of literature on language we
note some other causes which have affected the higher use of it: such as
(1) the necessity of clearness and connexion; (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