LATIN INSCRIPTION AT CIRTA. 387 



I came to tlie first instance of a cadence like Nicomedes Caesarem; and here too Labdacua is a 

 Greek word. Now such cadences must from the nature of the Latin language have pre- 

 sented themselves to him in almost every line, had he not purposely avoided them. When he 

 ends a verse with a word like aetheris, he keeps ictus and accent separate by most violent 

 elisions. Deserui aetheris, promissa occupet, imperia excipit, devicH intuens, all occur in the 

 first few lines of one play. This is the more striking, since in the other parts of the 

 verse he but rarely elides long vowels. Very striking too it is, when we think of the 

 following fact. The older poets were free in their elision of long vowels; and Virgil 

 produces many of his most exquisite efltcts of harmony by its judicious employment. 

 But when we examine Ovid's Metamorphoses, we find that he confines such elisions within 

 very narrow limits, and so does Seneca's contemporary Lucan ; and the philosopher Seneca 

 (and I see no reason why he and the Tragedian should not be one and the same person) 

 in the few hexameters which he scatters through his prose works entirely abstains from 

 the elision of long vowels, 



I cannot help comparing the mode in which Seneca sought to avoid in his iambics 

 the favourite popular movements, with the course pursued by two greater poets than himself. 

 Euripides adopted in his later plays a style entirely different from that of his earlier, seeking 

 no doubt by a freer use of trisyllabic feet and a less ornate diction to approach nearer to 

 the style of conversation of .the educated, and avoid the cadences loved by the vulgar. 

 Aristotle approves of this in the third book of his Rhetoric, and says that the uneducated 

 only prefer the more highly coloured poetical language. No less remarkable is the con- 

 trast between the unbroken flow of Shakespeare's earlier versification in which the sense 

 generally terminates with the verse, and the broken style of his latest versification in which 

 the line perpetually ends on a weak monosyllable, such as and, if, etc. Thus in the 

 Tempest we have verses like the following : 



Had I been any god of power, I would 



Have sunk the sea within the earth, or e'er 



It should the good ship so have swallowed, and 



The fraughting souls within her. 



Thy father was the Duke of Milan, and 



A prince of power. 



Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and 



She said, thou wast my daughter, and thy father 



Was Duke of Milan. 



Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, all alike sought in different ways, suitably to the genius 

 of their different languages, to avoid the monotony of movement, dear to the vulgar, not 

 unwelcome perhaps to the educated ear. 



We may derive similar lessons from the history of the Latin hexameter. In it, as 

 I have said, the caesura in the middle of the verse is the central force which binds its two 

 halves into one organical whole; without which it would be no verse at all. Now as 

 the ictus metricus or arsis of the dactyl is on the first syllable, while in the iambic it is 

 on the last, we have the opposite result in the hexameter to what we found to be the 

 case in the iambic. In the iambic ictus and accent are generally in agreement in the 



