APPENDIX. 407' 



that aetSe with the accent on the first and the second long was only a 'lame gosling.' 

 Was it in tliis way that Homer's verse was invented and handed down to him ? Luckily 

 the stifTnecked Muse was too strong for Spenser's logic, as she had been for Dante's, 

 when he wished to discard the vulgar jargon for the sounding heroic of Virgil. 



Italian too much resembles Latin not to have always entertained a pious horrour of so 

 ghastly a parody on its poor dead mother. In France such hexameters were once common 

 enough ; and at first sight it might appear that quantity was more possible in French 

 than in most modern languages. The accent such as it is is very variable and is rather 

 a heightening of the voice than an emphatic stress. The Latin accent, having become 

 all-powerful by the destruction of quantity, must have displayed especial energy in creating 

 the langue d'oil ; so that after performing such feats as gathering up semetijmssimum into 

 meme, it would seem to have perished by its own intensity. The following is not a bad 

 specimen of French quantity : 



Rien ne me plait sinon de te clianter at servir et orner; 



Rien ne te plait, mon bien, rien ne te plait que ma mort. 

 Plus je requiers et plus je me tiens seur d'estre refuse, 



Et ce refus pourtant point ne me semble refus. 



The clear precision of the French intellect however soon recognised the truth and repudiated 

 all such pedantic frivolities. ■ ,. 



But the main object of the writer I am criticising is to put to shame the accentual 

 English hexameter. He quotes from Virgil Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem, 

 and the following verses, and then triumphantly asks, 'Can anybody produce me an English 

 hexameter resembling, in the succession of sounds, any one of these three lines ? I think not. 

 But if I shift the accents a little and write, 



Incipe, parve puercule, rIsu noscere matrem. '■ 



Matri longa tulcrunt s6x fastidia menses : 

 Incipe, parve pu6rcule, fac ridere parentes, — 



do we not all recognise at once the movement of our new friend .'' ■ 



Why dost thou prophesy so my death to me, Xanthus? It needs not, &c.' 



It is not I maintain the shifting of the accents, but the abolition of the caesura that changes 

 each of these verses into two lumbering unrhythmical masses. Some of the most harmo- 

 nioiis Latin verses have ictus and accent agreeing throughout. The most unrhythmical 

 un-Virgilian verses in Ennius, Lucretius and the like, as I have remarked above, are not 

 those where the accent is so arranged, but where it is distributed in such a manner that 

 according to the laws laid down by J. S. we ought to have good symmetrical hexameters. 

 Nay by slightly changing the verses just quoted I will make them quite rhythmical again, 

 and yet the accents shall be precisely the same: 



Incipe, parve, vidcn, sine risu noscere matrem. 

 Matri semper abhinc per sex fastidia menses : 

 Effice, parve, vidin, sine t6 ridere parentes. 



The accents are identical in both sets ; for we know that viden and abhinc are oxyton, 

 Vol. X. Part II. 52 



