380 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



bring the verbs together in contrast, but it is easy to overstate the better 

 adaptation of one word order than another for the understanding. The 

 plain church-going American seems to find no difficulty with the line 

 " Hangs my helpless soul on Thee " which, for rhythmic reasons, I 

 always want to sing in the form " Helpless hangs my soul on Thee " ; 

 and " departed this life " is a formula very like relinquit animus 

 Sextium. The desire to put the verb or other predicate forward has 

 given rise to English turns like " There comes a stranger " or, in Ger- 

 man, with wider reach, " Es klingelt die Glocke," " Es sperren die 

 Eiesen den einsamen Weg." Our American newspaper headlines are 

 particularly given to this sort of striving for emphasis. I have seen 

 examples of it occasionally in such carefully edited papers as The 

 Evening Post or The Courier Journal. It runs riot in the text as well 

 as the headlines of our local daily. Precious instances I recall are 

 " Singing were " — A, B, C, — " Tyro is he " — who didn't enjoy so and so. 

 And even in the high literary realm our now " Englished " minds still 

 retain a great flexibility for word order, as for instance in parenthetic 

 interruptions of the stream of thought, such as we find in the following : 

 " No one else can feel the same interest in them [the boys], and no one 

 else (I am not speaking of myself personally, but merely by virtue of 

 my situation) can speak to them with so much influence." 5 



Shall Professor Hill assess Cassar's feeling for the natural order of 

 thought? Then he must take Echegaray, and many a Spanish author 

 besides, to task, and ask them to make their stream of thought flow 

 Englishly. He must ask the Germans to think more naturally. I can 

 not think Caesar was less natural than an Englishman and the natural 

 order for Caesar's thought was the order bequeathed to him by his 

 untutored savage ancestors who spoke Latin; for the order of words in 

 any given language is, I suppose, conformed to the order of thought — 

 but hardly to the extent American Latinists were asserting a decade or 

 more ago; as though every Latin sentence were arranged for emphasis 

 in a diminuendo, beginning with a scream and ending in a whisper. 



Professor Hill's rethinking of gravibus acceptis vulneribus — "by 

 or to grave, by or to received, by or to wounds " — is scarcely less than 

 grotesque, though I believe there is a recommendation abroad in the 

 land to use as one reads Latin some sliding slotted card which shall 

 reveal to the reader gravibus alone, leaving him to ponder the " from," 

 " to," " by," relations before he passes on to acceptis, where, another 

 wait, and so on to vulneribus. The propriety of this method may be 

 tested by reading, with long, reflective pauses, as indicated, the follow- 

 ing English sentence : " The chief made his son ... a present ... to the 

 king." Here, stopping short, with false phrasing, ruins the sense. The 

 truth is, the sentence is not " connected up " by consciousness till the 

 last word, king, is reached. The mind, if not the ear, hears the whole 



Stanley's "Life of Dr. Arnold," v. 1, p. 152. 



