The vernacular or oral language is never taught, but is universally spoken. It has been evolved from the ancient language by a natural and regular process, similar to that which has produced the Romance languages from the Latin, or the Russian, Bulgarian and Servian from the old Slavonic. It has developed on parallel lines with the modern European languages, and in obedience to the same laws; like them, it might have grown into a literary language had any great writers arisen in the middle ages to do for it what Dante and his successors of the _trecento_ did for Italian. But the effort to adapt it to the requirements of modern literature could hardly prove successful. In the first place, the national sentiment of the Greeks prompts them to imitate the classical writers, and so far as possible to appropriate their diction. The beauty and dignity of the ancient tongue possesses such an attraction for cultivated writers that they are led insensibly to adopt its forms and borrow from its wealth of phrase and idiom. In the next place, a certain literary tradition and usage has already been formed which cannot easily be broken down. For more than half a century the generally accepted written language, half modern half ancient, has been in use in the schools, the university, the parliament, the state departments and the pulpit, and its influence upon the speech of the more educated classes is already noticeable. It largely owes its present form--though a fixed standard is still lacking--to the influence and teaching of Coraes. As in the time of the decadence a [Greek: koine dialektos] stood midway between the classical language and the popular speech, so at the beginning of the 19th century there existed a common literary dialect, largely influenced by the vernacular, but retaining the characteristics of the old Hellenistic, from which it was derived by an unbroken literary tradition. This written language Coraes took as the basis of his reforms, purging it of foreign elements, preserving its classical remnants and enlarging its vocabulary with words borrowed from the ancient lexicon or, in case of need, invented in accordance with a fixed principle. He thus adopted a middle course, discountenancing alike the pedantry of the purists and the over-confident optimism of the vulgarists, who found in the uncouth popular speech all the material for a _langue savante_. The language which he thus endeavoured to shape and reconstruct is, of course, conventional and artificial. In course of time it will probably tend to approach the vernacular, while the latter will gradually be modified by the spread of education. The spoken and written languages, however, will always be separated by a wide interval. Poetical writers in the vernacular.