APPENDIX. 



When this paper was prepared in the early part of last year, I was not aware that the 

 inscription had been copied by any one except Mr Blakesley. I afterwards found that 

 it was inserted in the collection of Algerian inscriptions published by the French govern- 

 ment ; where references are given to various French Journals, none of which I have seen. 

 My paper, as the reader will perceive, was more adapted for oral delivery than for the press ; 

 and soon after it had been read, I received the second volume of Corrsen's elaborate work 

 on the Aussprache Vokalismus und Betonungder Lateinischen Sprache: in which volume the 

 subject of Latin accentuation is treated at very great length. For these and other reasons 

 I had quite given up the thought of publication, when my attention was lately called to 

 an article in Fraser's Magazine of last month written by a most able and accomplished 

 critic who signs himself J. S. It is headed ' Arnold on translating Homer.' Its main 

 purpose is to prove that the movement of the best English hexameters which the writer has 

 seen is so very unlike the movement of any Greek or Latin hexameters, that the thing is 

 an absurdity and a translation of Homer in such a metre altogether out of the question. 

 With much of his elegant criticism every reader will agree. Some of his principal positions 

 however are so contrary to all that I have attempted to prove above and appear to me to 

 be so wide of the mark, that I have been mainly induced to print my paper in order to 

 make public this difference of opinion. 



The evidence to my mind is so overwhelming, I hold it to be an axiom that the old 

 Greeks and Romans had an instinctive feeling for and knowledge of quantity ; that upon 

 this instinct depended the whole force and meaning of their rhythmical measured verse ; 

 that their accent resembled our accent only in name, in reality was essentially different ; that 

 the internal decay of those languages occasioned the ruin of quantity, that consequently the 

 accent, before an intonation, now became a mere stress like the Italian, Romaic, English or 

 German accent ; and that if the English hexameter has been or ever is to be successful, 

 that success has been or is to be attained by following out the analogy of other modern 

 metres and making accent replace the ancient rhythmical beat. 



The critic in question looks on all this as a mere delusion ; maintains that Virgil's 

 accent was the same s our accent ; that, though we cannot tell what Homer's accent was 

 to Homer, to us it is the same as Virgil's, that is to say as our own ; and that in English 

 quantity is as distinguishable as in Latin or Greek by any ear that will attend to it. 

 Then after defining the English hexameter accurately enough ; and also the Virgilian so 

 far as quantity is concerned, he goes on to say with regard to the latter, that quantity 

 is not the only condition of the metre. ' The accent also must be distributed according 



