stinct from that which was vernacular, ten archaian
glottan huper ten idioten meletousi. Du Cange, ibid. p. 11. It is well
known that the popular, or _political_ verses of Tzetzes, a writer of
the twelfth century, are accentual; that is, are to be read, as the
modern Greeks do, by treating every acute or circumflex syllable as
long, without regard to its original quantity. This innovation, which
must have produced still greater confusion of metrical rules than it did
in Latin, is much older than the age of Tzetzes; if, at least, the
editor of some notes subjoined to Meursius's edition of the Themata of
Constantine Porphyrogenitus (Lugduni, 1617) is right in ascribing
certain political verses to that emperor, who died in 959. These verses
are regular accentual trochaics. But I believe they have since been
given to Constantine Manasses, a writer of the eleventh century.

According to the opinion of a modern traveller (Hobhouse's Travels in
Albania, letter 33) the chief corruptions which distinguish the Romaic
from its parent stock, especially the auxiliary verbs, are not older
than the capture of Constantinople by Mahomet II. But it seems difficult
to obtain any satisfactory proof of this; and the auxiliary verb is so
natural and convenient, that the ancient Greeks may probably, in some of
their local idioms, have fallen into the use of it; as Mr. H. admits
they did with respect to the future auxiliary thelo. See some instances
of this in Lesbonax, peri schematon, ad finem Ammonii, cura Valckenaer.

[924] Photius (I write on the authority of M. Heeren) quotes Theopompus,
Arrian's History of Alexander's Successors, and of Parthia, Ctesias,
Agatharcides, the whole of Diodorus Siculus, Polybius, and Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, twenty lost orations of Demosthenes, almost two hundred
of Lycias, sixty-four of Isaeus, about fifty of Hyperides. Heeren
ascribes the loss of these works altogether to the Latin capture of
Constantinople, no writer subsequent to that time having quoted them.
Essai sur les Croisades, p. 413. It is difficult however not to suppose
that some part, of the destruction was left for the Ottomans to perform.
AEneas Sylvius bemoans, in his speech before the diet of Frankfort, the
vast losses of literature by the recent subversion of the Greek empire.
Quid de libris dicam, qui illic erant innumerabiles, nondum Latinis
cogniti!... Nunc ergo, et Homero et Pindaro et _Menandro_ et omnibus
illustrioribus poetis, se