Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/444

Rh “The fruits of that exhaustive research and that ripe and well-digested scholarship which its author brought to bear upon everything that he ''undertook are visible throughout. It is furnished with a complete'' apparatus of prolegomena, notes, and excursus; and for the use of veteran scholars it probably leaves nothing to be desired” —.

An attempt is here made to give students, after they have mastered ordinary syntactical rules, some idea of the characteristics of Latin Prose ''and the means to be employed to reproduce them. Some notion of the'' treatment of the subject may be gathered from the ‘Contents.’ — Characteristics of Classical Latin, Hints on turning English into Latin; — Arrangement of Words in a Sentence; — Unity in Latin Prose, Subject and Object; — On the Period in Latin Prose; — On the position of the Relative and Relative ''Clauses. The characterises it as “an admirable little book which'' teachers of Latin will find of very great service.”

This work is the result of an independent and careful study of the writers of the strictly classical period, the period embraced between the ''time of Plautus and that of Suetonius. The author's aim has been to give'' ''the facts of the language in as few words as possible. This is a Grammar'' strictly of the Latin language; not a Universal Grammar illustrated from Latin, nor the Latin section of a Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European languages, nor a Grammar of the group of Italian dialects, of ''which Latin is one. It will be found that the arrangement of the book and'' the treatment of the various divisions differ in many respects from those of ''previous grammars. Mr. Roby has given special prominence to the treatment'' of Sounds and Word-formation; and in the First Book he has done much towards settling a discussion which is at present largely engaging the attention of scholars, viz., the pronunciation of the classical languages.