In the two papers which I had the honour of reading to the Society in the spring of 1890, my object was, in the first place, to combat the vulgar idea that modern Greek is a corrupt and barbarous language, almost as far removed from classical Greek as Italian is from the dialect used by Horace and Virgil; and, secondly, to show that, between the two distinct strata in which Greek had flowed down continuously from Constantinople in A.D. 333 to the present day,—the literary structure used by educated men, and the Greek of the popular ballads used by the uneducated masses,—a compromise had been achieved by that great scholar and patriot, Adamantius Coraes. This compromise was made on the principle that the unity of action on which Greek nationality depends, requires that the learned classes should cheerfully adopt those few idiomatic peculiarities which had asserted themselves in the thought and expression of the great mass of the people; while the great body of the language bore visibly the stamp of those whose genius in Church and State had shaped it forth in the Attic and Byzantine periods. On this basis the modern Greek language was left at the death of Coraes in 1833. But it is not to be imagined that a formative rule of this kind, in the mode of national speech, could be established at a stroke.