On the Doric Dialect.

1. The ancient grammarians divided the Greek language into four distinct branches–the Doric, Ionic, Attic, and Æolic; the latter including all dialects not comprised under the other three heads, because only one branch of it, the Lesbian, was the written language of one species of poetry: and yet this latter division must unquestionably have contained different species less connected with each other than with some branches of the other three dialects. It is, however, pretty well agreed that the several Æolic dialects together contained more remains of the primitive Grecian or (if we will so call it) Pelasgic language, than either the Doric, Ionic, or Attic; and that at the same time many forms of the latter were preserved with great fidelity in the Latin tongue; partly because the life of the Italian husbandmen bore a nearer resemblance to that of the ancient Greeks than that of the later Greeks themselves, and because neither their literature, nor any fastidious sense of euphony and rhythm, induced them to soften and refine their language. But of the more polished dialects, that of Homer, though differing in many points, yet in others doubtless closely resembled the original language, which must once have been spoken from Thessaly to the Peloponnese, and was variously metamorphosed in the Doric, Ionic, and Attic dialects.