in their dialect or expressions, as the whole Attic race are barbarous to a proverb:—
"Ὦ Ἀθῆναι, πρώτε χώρα,
Τί γαϊδάρους τρέφεις τώρα;"[1]
In Gibbon, vol. x. p. 161, is the following sentence:—"The vulgar dialect of the city was gross and barbarous, though the compositions of the church and palace sometimes affected to copy the purity of the Attic models." Whatever may be asserted on the subject, it is difficult to conceive that the "ladies of Constantinople," in the reign of the last Cæsar, spoke a purer dialect than Anna Comnena[2] wrote, three centuries before: and those royal pages are not esteemed the best models of composition, although the princess γλῶτταν εἶχεν ἈΚΡΙΒΩ̃Σ Ἀττικιζούσαν.[3] In the Fanal, and in Yanina, the best Greek is spoken: in the latter there is a flourishing school under the direction of Psalida.
There is now in Athens a pupil of Psalida's, who is making a tour of observation through Greece: he is intelligent, and better educated than a fellow-commoner of most colleges. I mention this as a proof that the spirit of inquiry is not dormant among the Greeks.
The Reviewer mentions Mr. Wright,[4] the author of the beautiful poem Horæ Ionicæ, as qualified to give details of these nominal Romans and degenerate Greeks; and also of their language: but Mr. Wright, though a good poet and an able man, has made a mistake where he states the Albanian dialect of the Romaic to approximate nearest to the Hellenic; for the Albanians speak a Romaic as notoriously corrupt as the Scotch of Aberdeenshire, or the Italian of Naples. Yanina, (where, next to the Fanal, the Greek is purest,) although the capital of Ali Pacha's dominions, is not in Albania, but Epirus; and beyond Delvinachi in Albania Proper up to Argyrocastro and Tepaleen (beyond which I did not advance) they speak worse Greek than even the Athenians. I was attended for a year and a half by two of these singular mountaineers, whose mother tongue is
- ↑ ["O Athens, first of all lands, why in these latter days dost thou nourish asses?"]
- ↑ [Anna Comnena (1083-1148), daughter of Alexis I., wrote the Alexiad, a history of her father's reign.]
- ↑ [Zonaras (Annales, B 240), lib. viii. cap. 26, A 4. Venice, 1729.]
- ↑ [See English Bards, etc., line 877: Poems, 1898, i. 366, note 1.]
