398: Mr munro, on a metrical 



regular dactylic cadence, because accent and quantity are here in agreement ; Itdliam faW 

 was quite another thing. Cdno, Tr6jae, primus, quoque had all the same quantity to him> 

 and therefore the same force in verse; just as they would have to an Englishman know- 

 ing the language but ignorant of its prosody : so that it quite depended on the general 

 structure of the verse whether they should be long or short. The same is to be said 

 of profugus, Ittora, superum, conderet etc. Again Italiam fdto had to him precisely the 

 same rhythm as his own Sequimini tales, or Praefatio nostra with which Commodian 

 opens one of his poems. Virgil could commence a verse with Arcebat Unge; why should 

 he not do the same with CirtSnsi Idre? Where they came conveniently to hand, he seems 

 to have preferred dactylic openings, speaking of course accentually ; but finding as many 

 of Virgil's lines without this movement as with it, he did not trouble himself to avoid 

 a different rhythm when it suggested itself to him. 



Another leading peculiarity of his versification should be noticed : he did not acknow- 

 ledge the synaloepha, and in reading Virgil never elided a vowel. Of course Virgil did 

 not altogether suppress the elided vowel ; that would have ruined his harmony ; he allowed 

 the one to run into the other and produce a composite sound. This absence of elision 

 is characteristic of all the later accentual poems, church hymns and such like, in striking 

 contrast by the way to the frequency with which it is employed in Italian poetry. Prae- 

 cilius accordingly must have recited many of VirgiFs verses with a singular kind of trochaic 

 jumping cadence which has had a powerful influence on the structure of his own poetry. 

 He must have read Litora multiim ille et terns jactatus et alto, Trq^'ano a sanguine duct, 

 Spretaequi injuria formae, TeucrorUm avertere regem, etc. He had no feeling for such 

 lines as Aggerihus socer Alpinis atque arce Monoeci Descendens gener adversis instructus 

 Ems, read as Virgil read them. He preferred Descendens gener adversis instructus Eois, 

 which sounded as gratefully to his ear as his own Cirtensi Idre, argSntariam ix'ibui 

 artem. And similar conceptions, I presume, of the harmony of Virgil and Homer will 

 be entertained by the youth of England, when the advancing intelligence of the age shall 

 have completely sacrificed the ornamental to the useful and proscribed at Eton and Cam- 

 bridge the practice of writing Greek and Latin verses. 



Praecilius could have known no distinction between the circumflex and the acute ; 

 both must have been to him one and the same stress. For obvious reasons however I 

 have printed his words with the accents which Cicero and Virgil would have employed ; 

 and, in order to prevent confusion, I have not for instance given to inveni the circumflex 

 which of course it would have had, if the final i had become short in classical times. 



I have already given the epitaph as copied by Mr Blakesley, subjoining first his version 

 and then my own arrangement of it into verses, in which the faults of orthography com- 

 mitted by the stonecutter are corrected; but those are left which I conceive to be due 

 to Praecilius himself, as being characteristic of the Latin pronunciation of his time. It 

 will be seen for the reasons already so often alluded to that the harmony of the verses 

 such as it is depends mainly on the caesura in the middle and the accentual dactylic 

 cadence at the conclusion of the verse. * 



1. Taceo, if not a mistake for the usual jaceo, is a play on it to contrast with versibus 



