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222 Oil certain Tenses more definite, manifested itself in assigning one form of the future and aorist to the passive voice, another to the middle; the preference being perhaps determined by the affinity of the latter to the corresponding active tenses, of the former to the perfect passive. Instances however remain to shew that, at the time when the Greek language comes first into view, the line of demarcation was not deemed quite impassable: and the passive voice would not unfrequently assert its rights to its cast-off future, and now and then, though very rarely, even to the aorist. If we wish to understand the true na- ture of the Greek verb, to appreciate the delicacy of its or- ganization and the consistency of all its parts with each other, we must bear in mind what was the true state of the case ; that for instance the use of the future middle in a passive sense, which is so common in Attic writers, was not an arbitrary licence, but was in perfect accord with the ori- ginal force of that tense, a force which it had not yet entirely lost. It was not that the Attic writers multa futura media ponehant pro passivism as Pierson says in a note on Moeris, p. 13 : but that form, which in the later ages of the Greek language, in the ages when the grammarians wrote, seems to have been used exclusively in a middle sense, had pre- viously had a wider range legitimately belonging to it. To call such things licences implies an oblivion of seasons and circumstances : it is like taxing Shakspeare and Chaucer with taking liberties with the English language, because they often use words in a different meaning from that we now attach to them ; a charge which might be deemed inconceivably silly and absurd, if so many of our grammarians and commen- tators on our old writers were not perpetually bringing it forward. In like manner the misnomer mven to what is commonly called the perfect middle has led us to mischarge the Greek verb with a double anomaly, and to regard what is the regular and legitimate usage in two cases as a licen- tious exception. When a scholar trained in our school Greek grammars, which, little as they teach, contrive that much of that little shovild be wrong, falls in with such a tense as eKTova^ eairopa, XeXoiira, he pronounces, either im- mediately, or after vainly trying to discover what he would deem an appropriate meaning for it^ that it is the perfect