Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/67

 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 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