Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/258

of the sacred texts; just as the Sanskrit, in the course of likewise becoming a dead language, roused that spirit of grammatical criticism for which India from early times has been famous; so among Greeks, Romans, and Arabs deterioration in language was met by the rise of verbal criticism. The triumph of Islâm occasioned the corruption of Arabic by making it the official tongue of the conquered, and turned later Arab literature into a pedantic study of classical words which exactly reproduces the Alexandrian spirit. Magdâni, a contemporary of the famous Harîri, collected and explained Arab proverbs precisely in the manner of Suidas; and Harîri's Makâmât, in their forced display of erudition, deserve comparison with the Cassandra of Lycophron. . This development of linguistic criticism, among the Arabs, as a consequence of their world-wide conquests, illustrates the need of Alexandrian criticism, when the conquests of Alexander had made the Greek a world-language and proportionately increased the danger of its being corrupted into barbarous jargons. The corruption of Arabic in foreign lands also illustrates the necessity which Roman writers experienced of setting up a refined standard of speech, opposed at once to plebeian coarseness and to provincial barbarism. The need and value of grammatical studies at Rome may be estimated by the deterioration of language which set in after the Augustan age. "In the first century of the Imperial period," says Professor Teuffel, "prose begins already to decay by being mixed with poetical diction, and becoming estranged from natural expression. The decay of accidence and syntax begins also about this time. Later on the plebeian element found admission; and when the influence of provincial writers, who were not guided by a native sense of the language, and who mixed up the diction