utus and Terence, translated and adapted Greek epics,
tragedies, and comedies. Several of the early writers, like Accius and
Lucilius, interested themselves in grammatical subjects, and did their
best to introduce system and regularity into their literary medium. Now,
Greek was a highly inflected, synthetical, regular, and logical medium of
literary expression, and it was inevitable that these qualities should be
introduced into Latin. But this influence affected the spoken language
very little, as we have already noticed. Its effect upon the speech of
the common people would be slight, because of the absence of the common
school which does so much to-day to hold together the spoken and written
languages.

The development then of preliterary Latin under the influence of this
systematizing, synthetical influence gave rise to literary Latin, while
its independent growth more nearly in accordance with its original genius
produced colloquial Latin. Consequently, we are not surprised to find that
the people's speech retained in a larger measure than literary Latin did
those qualities which we noticed in preliterary Latin. Those
characteristics are, in fact, to be expected in conversation. When a man
sets down his thoughts on paper he expresses himself with care and with a
certain reserve in his statements, and he usually has in mind exactly what
he wants to say. But in speaking he is not under this constraint. He is
likely to express himself in a tautological, careless, or even illogical
fashion. He rarely thinks out to the end what he has in mind, but loosely
adds clauses or sentences, as new ideas occur to him.

We have just been thinking mainly about the relation of words to one
another in a sentence. In the treatment of individual words, written and
spoken Latin developed along different lines. In English we make little
distinction between the quantity of vowels, but in Latin of course a given
vowel was either long or short, and literary tradition became so fixed in
this matter that the professional poets of the Augustan age do not
tolerate any deviation from it. There are indications, however, that the
common people did not observe the rules of quantity in their integrity. We
can readily understand why that may have been the case. The comparative
carelessness, which is characteristic of conversation, affects our
pronunciation of words. When there is a stress accent, as there was in
Latin, this is especially liable to be