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 Greek and Latin than
in English. Generally French, German, and English have an advantage over
the classical languages in point of accuracy. The three concords are more
accurately observed in English than in either Greek or Latin. On the other
hand, the extension of the familiar use of the masculine and feminine
gender to objects of sense and abstract ideas as well as to men and animals
no doubt lends a nameless grace to style which we have a difficulty in
appreciating, and the possible variety in the order of words gives more
flexibility and also a kind of dignity to the period. Of the comparative