Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/229

attributed to the Greek Verb, 219 with regard to it : and from a double kind of litotes^ the one belonging to human nature generally, the other imposed by goodbreeding on the individual and urging him to veil the manifestations of his will, we are induced to frame all sorts of shifts for the sake of speaking with becoming modesty. An- other method, as we know, frequently adopted by the Greeks was the use of the conditional moods : and as sentiments of this kind always imply some degree of intellectual refinement, and strengthen with its increase, this is called an Attic usage. The same name too has often been given to the abovemen- tioned middle forms of the future : not that in either case the practice was peculiar to the Attic dialect, but that it was more general where the feelings which produced it were stronger and more distinct. Here again our own language supplies us with an exact parallel : indeed this is the only way of accounting for the singular mixture of the two verbs shall and will^ by which, as we have no auxiliary answering to the German werde^ we express the futvire tense. Our future, or at least what answers to it, is, / shall^ thou ivilt^ he will. When speaking in the first person, we speak sub- missively : when speaking to or of another, we speak court- eously. In our older writers, for instance in our translation of the Bible, shall is applied to all three persons : we had not then reacht that stage of politeness which shrinks from the appearance even of speaking compulsorily of another. On the other hand the Scotch use will in the first person : that is, as a nation they have not acquired that particular shade of goodbreeding which shrinks from thrusting itself forward. It is rather characteristic, that Cobbett in his Grammar en- tirely passes over the distinction between shall and will^ saying that their uses ^'are as well known to us all as the uses of our teeth and our noses ; and to misapply them argues not only a deficiency in the reasoning faculties, but ahnost a deficiency in instinctive discrimination :'" for assuredly there never was a man more abhorrent from every kind of Zi^o^e^, which, to judge from the interpretations he gives of such Greek words as he is compelled to make use of, he would probably say meant sheepishness. Nor is Cobbett the only grammarian who tries to cover his evasion of this difficulty by having recourse to a little blustering: Mr Gilchrist'^s