Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/205

195 attributed to the Greek Verb. 195 be mere Quixotism, or they must be borrowed from those of the real tenses, and these will in consequence be robbed of a part of that range of use which in truth belongs to them. Hence will arise one or other of two extremes, and nothing is more common than to meet vrith both of them among Greek students. In the one case the sense of confusion is such that the student comes to regard three or four tenses as nearly, if not quite, equivalent, and such as it is but lost labour to attempt to discriminate. Thus he looks on the imperfect, the two aorists, and the perfect, to be all pretty much of the same meaning; as tenses that have in general a past signi- fication, but with little constancy of discrimination, and such as may be substituted for one another without material error. Yet what sorry scholarship is this ! Such a student would have perceived no impropriety had Pilate^s answer, instead of o yeypacpa, yeypa(ha^ been o eypa'^a^ eypa^j/a^ or o eypa-- 0oi/, eypacpov. Such a student will not be prepared to ob- serve that the common rendering of the words aireTrXvi^av to, ^iKTva^ (Luc. V. 2) " they ivere washing their nets,'' is plainly inadmissible. On the other hand the beautiful propriety, with which that tense, which is peculiar to the Greek verb, is selected in such a passage as the following, will be unper- ceived by him. KaJ CYj covpa crecrrjTre vecouy kul airapra XeXvi^Tai* Only the student who has been accustomed to discriminate the use of the tenses with accuracy, will observe that the poet could not. here with equal propriety have employed the aorist or imperfect, because he intends to describe the present condition of the spars and rigging ; and yet that he could not have used the present tense, because that would have repre- sented the decay as in progress, rather than as complete ; that they were rotting not rotten. Thus neither in inter- preting the sense, nor enjoying the beauty of Greek, will he possess either the discrimination or the relish of a sound scholar. But if such be the case when he is reading, how much worse will it be when he is writing Greek : then in- deed he makes rare work of it : he writes a Greek comedy without intending it, and gives us a new application for the old words tempora midantur^ such as he himself is little aware of.