of his 'observations' were factually correct. Yet the principal effect of Linguistic Observations ... was to create the impression that the Katharevousa in current use was somehow second-rate, and also impossibly hard to use correctly. Two years later it received an answer, in the form of A Censure of Pseudo-Atticism by Dimitrios Vernardakis, another professor (and aspiring neoclassical dramatist). In this long, rambling book Vernardakis defended the current version of Katharevousa, and criticized Kontos for archaistic nit-picking when he should have been addressing the problems of Greek education. In keeping with his general defence of the status quo, Vernardakis also attacked the language of the new demotic poets as inauthentic, and untrue to the actual rural demotic of the 'common people'. In this he was justified to some extent, because the New Athenian poets were more or less consciously working to create a de-regionalized demotic for national use; Vernardakis warned against this modern notion, claiming it would corrupt "the language of the people". In the same year (1884) the young Hatzidakis, now also a professor at Athens University, replied in turn with his Study on Modern Greek, or Trial of the Censure of Pseudo-Atticism in which he defended Kontos for insisting on grammatical correctness. As an outstanding linguist of the new generation, Hatzidakis was well aware of the evolutionary history of demotic and recognized that Katharevousa was an artificial construction, a Kunstsprache. But he maintained that since its use was now well established, it should be used correctly and consistently, in line with Ancient Greek models where possible. After all (as he would argue in a later work), Katharevousa "was no more difficult to learn than any foreign language". He was also well aware of the evolutionary history of the other European languages, and the parallels between Greek and Latin, in particular the part played by Dante Alighieri in transforming the 'demotic' Tuscan descendants of Vulgar Latin into literary Italian. Taking the long view, Hatzidakis recognized that the same thing could eventually happen in Greece; he looked forward to the adoption of demotic for all written purposes, but only after "a Shakespeare or a Dante" had appeared to erect an "outstanding literary edifice" to rank with the Divine Comedy and establish a standard. Hatzidakis maintained this position for the rest of his long life. While admitting the theoretical possibility of eventually using demotic as a written language, he would never