Argyropoulos is said to have exclaimed that Greece had taken her fight over the Alps—Τοιγαροῦν καὶ τὰς Αλπεις, ἡμῶν ἐξοικισθέντων, ὑπερέπτη ἡ Ἑλλάς !

A still more powerful impetus to the study of Greek in the West was given by the many illustrious scholars and ecclesiastics, Pletho, Bessario, Gennadius, and others, who accompanied the Emperor John Palæologus to the Council of Ferrara, better known as that of Florence (1439). The controversy in which they engaged, as to the rival merits of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, centred the attention of the learned world of that day, and the Platonic Academy, which Lorenzo the Magnificent established at Florence, was powerfully instrumental to the spread of Greek learning throughout Europe.

But it was the fall of Constantinople that drove to the West the flower of Greek intellect and culture. Although the ground had already been prepared by their predecessors, it is to the influx of those noble refugees, Janus and Constantine Lascaris, Mussurus, Callierges, Vlastos, Chalcocondylas, and their fellow-workers, that the enthusiasm for classic literature, which now pervaded the whole of Europe, must mainly be ascribed.25 They became centres of enlightenment in Italy, France, and Spain; they established the first libraries in the West; they prepared and annotated the first editions of the Greek classics, issued from the presses of Aldus, Alopa, Stephanus, and others; and they carried with them everywhere the Promethean spark which was to illuminate the West.

In imparting their language these Greek scholars taught it as it was then spoken by the entire Greek race-as a living tongue, in its traditional pronunciation. No one thought of disputing its authority, or of reading the writings of the ancients in any other way than that which those men had brought with them. No one dreamt, at that

well as in a letter to Bebel (1501), he insists, as Dr. Ludwig Geiger has shown (Johan Reuchlin, sein Leben und seine Werke, 1871, pp. 101, 102), on the authenticity of the traditional pronunciation. Reuchlin was one of the most learned and most eminent men of his age, and he is constantly referred to as trilingue miraculum, Phænix litterarum, Eruditorum "Aλpa, &c. Merle d'Aubigné (History of the Reformation, vol. i. pp. 101-3), who relates at length the incidents of his meeting with Argyropoulos at Rome, speaks of Reuchlin as the man chosen by God's providence for this task '—to secure the triumph of the faith, through the study of Greek and Hebrew sacred literature. He was certainly a man of a loftier character and of a more profound learning than Erasmus, who speaks of him in terms of the highest admiration, and who, on his death, heralded him as in heaven, in a dialogue entitled Apotheosis Capnionis. Considering the confusion which Erasmus wrought later on, it is amusing to notice how, in the Apotheosis, he prayed God to 'confound the tongues of the false apostles who are confederate to underprop the wicked tower of Babel.'

25 It may be affirmed that more books and more knowledge were included within the walls of Constantinople than could be dispersed over the extensive countries of the West.' 'The language of Constantinople was spread beyond the Alps, and the natives of France, Germany and England imparted to the country the sacred fire which they had kindled in the schools of Florence and Rome.'--Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. viii. pp. 106, 117 (Milman and Smith's edition).

time, of denying to the Greeks what was never refused to any other people—namely, the natural prerogative of determining the hereditary pronunciation of their own tongue. No one questioned their competence; for it was recognised, as Gibbon explains, that in their lowest servitude the subjects of the Byzantine throne were still possessed of a golden key that could unlock the treasury of antiquity-of a musical and prolific language that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.' Their pupils, therefore, transmitted to their followers the pronunciation they had received from their Greek masters. And Greek continued to be read and spoken as a living language, being universally so accepted in the West, for some three generations after the fall of Constantinople.

26

That event, however, had far-reaching consequences, in more than one sense. During the four succeeding centuries the Greeks seemed to have disappeared as a nation from among the peoples of the earth. They gave no sign of national life; the silence of death had come over Greece and her children. The very existence of such a nation was doubted; and with the extinction of political life, their very language was supposed to have died out. But for the effacement of the Greek State, doubts as to pronunciation of the Greek language would, in all probability, never have assumed a practical aspect.

With the gradual demise of the Greek scholars and the closing of the colleges and printing presses over which they presided in the West, the authority of their tradition vanished. Their precepts

began to be disregarded and, amid the political vicissitudes which followed in Europe, their very recollection was soon obliterated. The exponents of Greek thought and Greek speech were no longer the illustrious refugees of Byzantium; and those who continued to learn Greek did so no longer from the living word. There was no one to rectify and maintain the pure sounds of a pronunciation which, at best, presented peculiar difficulties and required considerable effort, if not from an Italian or a Spaniard, yet from a French, German, Dutch, or English tongue. The earlier enthusiasm for the Greek language gradually gave place to considerations of expediency. The embarrassment of keeping up a pronunciation strange and alien, beset with difficulties, and distasteful to those who now learnt Greek from books alone, engendered an opposition which sought justification in philological doubts as to the authenticity of the traditional sounds, and permitted the gradual adoption of a more or less arbitrary mode of giving voice to a language now generally considered dead.

Such was the evolution of feeling, and such were the physical causes which prepared the way leading up to the acceptance of the Erasmian theory, the birth of which they in fact had rendered

26 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. lxvi. vol. viii. p. 105.

η

inevitable. Referring to this period of transition, J. Mich. Langius in his Philologia Barbaro-Græca, Exercit. Philolog. (Norimberg. 1707) says: 'People now began, contrary to the custom of the ancients, to pronounce the letter B as b in the Latin language is commonly sounded; the letter ʼn they made equivalent to e long; the diphthongs al, ɛ, ol they twisted, in an execrable manner and with a harsh sound, almost into two distinct vowels; with many other conceits of the kind.' From this it is clear that the gradual assimilation of the sounds of Greek letters to the alphabets of the several countries where Greek was taught, was the result, not of conviction arising out of philological research, but rather of supineness seeking expediency, and of a falling off in the manner of teaching Greek.

The advocates of the Erasmian system, anxious to show that that theory existed from the first, make much of the circumstance that Aldus in his little Tápeрyov,' as Dr. Blass (p. 2) puts it, had expressed some doubts as to the probable sound of certain vowels in classic times. The exact facts of the case, however, minimise the importance of those doubts. To his edition of Lascaris' Greek Grammar, issued in 1512, Aldus added the IIɛpì ▲ɩaλékтwv of Joannes Grammaticus, with a Latin version and some notes of his own. Towards the end of those notes he makes a short digression, as to the probable dialectic sound of some of the vowels and diphthongs. He begins with the words, Hoc loco non videtur silentio,' &c., but he soon reverts to his main purpose: Sed ad propositum.' Thus, in its original form, this short note does not constitute anything like a treatise with a special purpose. It was only later, and after the promulgation of Erasmus's theory, that this note was extracted from Lascaris' Grammar and published in a separate form, for the first time, in the pirated Cologne Edition (1529) of the famous 'Dialogue.' And it was then also furnished by the editor with a title, which it had never before possessed, Aldi Manutii de vitiata vocalium ac diphthongorum prolatatione Πάρεργον.

It is thus manifest that in writing an annotation, which does not exceed 650 words in all, Aldus had not a subversive or even a reforming object in view. He merely indulged in an academic speculation, a philological inquiry. Else Aldus would not have adopted Greek, as it was then pronounced by his Greek friends and fellow-workers, not only as the exclusive and obligatory language of the New Academy 27 which he had founded, but also as the prescribed medium of daily intercourse in his own household and printing office. Moreover, neither in the Grammatica Institutiones Græcæ (1515), of which he was the author and publisher, nor in his edition of Craston's Dictionarium Græcum, to which he added a preface, does Aldus show the

27 Dr. Thomas Linacre, physician to Henry VIII., founder and first President of the College of Physicians, and Erasmus himself, were members of Aldus's Academy. VOL. XXXVIII-No. 224 Ꮓ Ꮓ

least disposition to call into question or to modify the accepted pronunciation; for both he and Scaliger the elder, Melanchthon, Ecolampadius, and the other contemporary scholars admitted it as legitimate and normal.

The achievement of disturbing that venerable tradition, by inventing a new-fangled pronunciation for Greek and Latin, and presenting it as ancient and genuine, was reserved for Erasmus, the renowned Rotterdam scholar, who startled his contemporaries with the publication, in 1528, of his De Recta latini græcique sermonis pronunciatione Dialogus. The controversy which it provoked, and which was waged with exceptional stubbornness in the University of Cambridge, has lasted, with but short intermissions, ever since. It constitutes the history of this question of the pronunciation of Greek more especially; and in a second article we shall follow its varying phases from that time to the present day.

J. GENNADIUS.

A GREAT UNIVERSITY FOR LONDON

WHEN the London University was founded in 1836 it was a question whether it should be a teaching or examining university, and it was determined in the latter sense by a comparatively small majority of the House of Commons. Ever since its foundation, many lovers of education regretted that this opportunity of having a complete university in London had been lost. The university, as a board of examination and graduation, has now been in operation for fifty-nine years, and has fulfilled its mission with dignity and ability. So far as mere examining functions can influence the education of a nation, the London University has justified the expectations of its founders. Two Royal Commissions and one Committee of the Privy Council have made inquiries as to its working, and all three have come to the conclusion that a mere examining university is not sufficient for London, and that a teaching university is absolutely indispensable.

The existing London University has no doubt stimulated and directed the studies of many persons untouched by the older universities, and has held up a high standard of attainment, which has influenced higher education in all parts of the empire. No onehas ever accused the London University of being lax or perfunctory in the discharge of its functions. But it labours under the cardinal defect of being only an examining board, which necessarily forceseducation into fixed grooves. A real university should rather be the index of the teaching ability of its constituent colleges in relation to graduation, and should also be the promoter of the sciences taught. in them.

Graduation is not the end of university education, or even the beginning of intellectual productivity. It is simply the outward and visible sign that the graduate has a certain amount of knowledge, being like the Mint stamp, which does not add value to the gold, though it certifies that a given quantity of gold is in the coin.

'I am glad to bear this testimony, because I have criticised the university as being a mere examining board in a pamphlet called Teaching Universities and Examining Boards, which passed through four editions, and was reprinted and circulated by Trinity College, Dublin.