But when the new stylograph has been used for some time, we will, no doubt, find men asserting this of the old-fashioned pen and ink. § 38. The school commentary, or explanation of the poems or other literature thus written out, was probably quite elementary. Grammar only began to be understood by the Sophists, and we have specimens of exercises on the use of the article, and on the question of genders, in a very comic dialogue in Aristophanes’ “Clouds,” where the pupil of the new school ridicules the ignorance of old Strepsiades. It is likely Protagoras’s work _on the correct use of language_ (ὀρθοέπεια) gave a great stimulus to this branch of education. But we cannot argue that these studies of the mother tongue which make our use of it more conscious than before, had any better effect on prose-writing or on conversation than the very parallel studies of English which have of late years invaded or infested all our schools. Good-breeding and natural refinement seem the natural (and are probably the only) safeguards of a mother tongue in its ordinary use, and there is even great danger that a conscious analysis of idioms may banish from the writing of a language many valuable and characteristic turns which are based upon a more subtle propriety than that of school logic. Fortunately, local dialects have a great power of resistance. The Warwick or the Galway peasant will speak his own accents, and even use his idioms, in spite of all compulsory teaching of English grammar in the schools; but the reducing of all written English to one standard (both in spelling and in idiom) is like the reducing of all written Greek to the _common dialect_--a very great loss and damage.[38]