Page:Essays on the Chinese Language (1889).djvu/115

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The Cultivation of their Language by the Chinese.
101

that it wanteth not grammar: for Grammar it might have, but it needes it not: beeing so easie of itself, and so voyd of those cumbersome differences of Cases, Genders, Moodes, and Tenses, which I think was a peece of the Tower of Babilon's curse, that a man should be put to schoole to learne his mother-tongue."[1] The primæval Chinese, as we know from several excellent authorities, left their original seat in Mesopotamia before the "second general curse" passed on the human race, and so their descendants have not to "reintegrate" themselves in the divine benediction.

  1. An Apologie for Poetrie, p. 70 (Arbeir's reprint).