e rejected
entirely, yet their signification is sometimes so very arbitrary, that
they are put for one another through all tenses." Lancelot himself
seems to have had a glimmering of the essential incredibility of this
statement; for, though he attempts to substantiate it by citing from
Greek authors a number of passages in which the Greek idiom happens to
differ from the Latin,--passages, however, which Mr. Goodwin would have
been glad to use, had they fallen in his way, to illustrate the regular
constructions of the language,--he feels it necessary to appeal to
the authority of the learned Budaeus, the greatest of the early Greek
scholars. Strange as it seems that really accomplished Greek scholars
should have charged Plato and Demosthenes, speaking the most perfect of
tongues, with arbitrary interchanges of moods and tenses, yet the same
views continued to be presented in grammatical works down to the close
of the last century. The transition to the new school of grammarians was
made in 1792, by the publication of a Greek Grammar by Philip Buttmann,
which, in the greatly improved form which it afterwards received from
his hands, is familiar to all Greek scholars. In our frequent boasts of
the great strides that knowledge has taken in the present century, we
commonly have in mind the physical sciences; but we doubt whether in any
department of physical science the manuals in use seventy-five years
ago are so utterly inferior to those of the present day as are, for
instance, the remarks of Viger, and his commentators before Hermann, on
the syntax of the Greek verb, to the philosophical treatment of the same
points by Professor Goodwin.

This work is entitled, we think, to rank with the best grammars of the
Greek language that have appeared in German or English, in all the
points that constitute grammatical excellence; while its monographic
character justified and required an exhaustive treatment of its
particular topic, not to be found even in the huge grammars of Matthiae
and Kuehner. Indeed, not the least of its merits is this, that, in
addition to the excellent matter which is original with Professor
Goodwin, it furnishes to the student, American or English,--for we hope
to see its merits recognized on the other side of the Atlantic,--a
digest, as it were, of all that is most valuable on the subject of the
syntax of the Greek verb in the best German grammars, from Buttmann
to Madvig, enhanced, too, in value by being