Some idea of the positive extent of our debts to Greek is necessary to this history, though a _résumé_ of them is no easy thing to give. In the first place has to be reckoned the laying of the foundations of mere grammar—the preliminary to every kind of _graphica lexis_. This must have been done pretty early, and there is no language in the literary record with which it could be done for the first time to so much advantage as with Greek. Some languages, as Latin and its daughter French, have a sort of peddling tendency to purely arbitrary rule, and to enforced observance of it. Others, the chief example of which is English, have had too haphazard a history, and are too much of ingrained rebels to strict convention, to admit of elaborate grammar, despite the athletic attempts which are sometimes made to discover it in them. Between these two, Greek presents not so much the happy mean as the consummate union of all the best qualities. It evidently possessed, from the remotest time at which we have any traces of literature, an innate sense of proportion and grammatical symmetry to guide it, first into unconscious and then into conscious symmetry of accidence and syntax, besides a native melody at once sweet, vigorous, and disciplined, which made it the ideal raw material for prosody. On the other hand, the intense philosophical spirit of the Greeks, and their love of liberty, saved them from the hard and fast irrationality of the grammars of some languages, and from the tendency, not merely to make arbitrary rules, but to insist on their observance with absolute rigidity. The result was a grammar which to this day is the pattern grammar of the world—as flexible as it is symmetrical, as intelligently free as it is philosophically policed,—an eternal harmony of idiom and rule. We have glanced in the above paragraph at Prosody, but something more must be said on this head, for the debt of literary criticism to Greek in this respect is almost the mightiest item of the total account. The mathematical element, which distinguishes this part of Grammar, enables a people with a suitable language, and a sufficient stock of experiments in it, to discover something much more like a universal calculus than is possible in Accidence and Syntax; and the Greeks discovered this. Prosody is a science which, in its pure, though of course not in its applied, divisions, as regards strictly metrical writing, they practically found out once for all.