Cornell Studies in Classical Philology Author:Cornell University Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I. VOLITIVE AND OPTATIVE EXPRESSIONS. Perfect Tense. In many of the passages cited below, the emotion of the speaker will be perfectly evident. Where this... more » is not the case, however, I have added such comments as seemed desirable, for the purpose of refreshing the reader's memory regarding the context in which the passage is found, the character of the person speaking, etc., etc. It should be noticed—and this is a point which I wish particularly to emphasize—that the verbs used in these expressions are, in nearly every case, such as may be naturally associated with quick or energetic action. The importance of noticing this fact will become more apparent later on (see discussion at the end of Part I). It will be seen that the perfect is almost exclusively confined to earnest prayers for something of importance to the speaker, or to some one who has thoroughly aroused the speaker's sympathy. If the prayer is not answered, the result will be disastrous to his safety or happiness. Its use in angry curses is of course but a slight modification of this idea. In the list of passages about to be cited, it will not be necessary to discuss those in which ne, or caue, is used with the second person of the perfect subjunctive. All such passages have been fully treated in my papers on The Latin Prohibitive (American Journal of Philology, Vol. XV), where I have shown that the only important distinction to be made between the two tenses is that the perfect tense is impatient and emotional, while the present tense is common-place. This distinction has been accepted by two Latin grammars that have appeared in America since the publication of the articles referred to (Bennett, § 276 ; Gildersleeve—I/jdge, § 272, 2, Remark, which recognizesthe passionate character of the perfect),1 and also ...« less