Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 8.djvu/431

Rh Horace would have lain under the eternal reproach of making "a fox eat oats, had not the learned doctor, with great judgment and penetration, found out nitedula to be a blunder of the librarians for vulpecula; which nitedula, the doctor says, signifies a grass-mouse, and this clears up the whole matter, because it makes the story hang well together: for all the world knows, that weazles have a most tender regard and affection to grass-mice, whereas they hate foxes as they do firebrands. In short, all various lections are to be attributed to this Rule: so are all the Greek dialects; or Homer would have wanted the sonorous beauty of his oio's. But the greatest and best masters of this Rule, without dispute, were the Dorians, who made nothing of saying tin for soi, tenos for ekeinos, surisdomes for surizomen, &c. From this too we have our quasis in Lexicons. Was it not by Rule the 34th, that the Samaritan, Chaldee, Æthiopick, Syriac, Arabick, and Persian languages were formed from the original Hebrew? for which I appeal to the Polyglott. And among our modern languages, are not the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, derived and formed from the Latin by the same power? How much poets have been obliged to it, we need no farther proof than the figures prothesis, epenthesis, apocope, paragoge, and ellipsis, trimming and fitting of words to make them more agreeable to our ears, Dionysius Halicarnassensis has taken notice of, in his Book "De Compositione Vocum," where he pleasantly compares your polite reformers of words to masons with hammers, who break off rugged corners of stones, that they may become more even and firm in their places. Rh