social developments made the languages, and which may be as untransferable into a given Semitic or Aryan speech as certain barbarous notes of music into our European system of musical notation. Moreover, this Chinese example is only adopted because it is peculiarly striking. The same relativity of linguistic sounds to the group by which the language is spoken may be illustrated by contrasting, say, Arabic sounds and metres with Sanskrit, or Italian with English, or Russian with German, or by observing the loss of the hexameter and the appearance of a new form of verse with the rise of modern Greek in the eleventh century. We may, indeed, gauge to some degree the progress of discrimination in sounds by contrasting the ruder forms and metres in a given people's language with the more advanced—the confused union of syllabic and metrical scansion in Plautus with the Pope-like smoothness of Vergil, a similar confusion in Chaucer with the machine-like regularity of the ten-syllable couplet, the monotonous repetition of rimes in the Chansons de Geste[1] with the Alexandrine of modern France, or (to take two examples from prose) the harsh antitheses of Thucydides with the delicate perceptions of sound in Isokrates, and the clumsy sentences of Milton with the modulated harmony of Ruskin. Such progress
- ↑ The rudeness of this versification, says M. Géruzez (Hist. de la Litt. Fran. vol. i. p. 27), is marked by monorimes, of indeterminate length, which only stop when the trouvère, having exhausted his final consonants or assonants, thinks fit to continue his psalmody on another rime till it, too, is in its turn exhausted. In the Kasida of the Arabs (to which we shall elsewhere refer) the same rime is, likewise, repeated, only in this case at the end of every verse throughout the entire poem, and the râwi, or "bindfast" letter, which remains the same throughout, may be compared to a rivet driven through the verses and holding them together. (Cf. Wright's Arabic Grammar, vol. ii. pp. 378, 379, and the European and Arab authorities cited by Dr. Wright on p. 377.) In ages when writing was either unknown or the monopoly of a few, it is clear that this repetition of the same rime would have supplied a powerful prop for the memory. But on this subject we shall have something to say presently.
