380 Mk MUNRO, ON A METRICAL 



composed accentual verses in contradistinction to the quantitative poetry of the learned, is a 

 delusion, a chimera, borrowed not from the fresh youth of the language, but from its anile 

 decrepitude. That in one sense there was a people's language, that peer and peasant did not 

 speak precisely alike, is a truism. But in that sense the language of Cicero's orations is 

 different from that of his letters, and both from that of Plautus. There was not even a 

 lingua rustica to the same extent that there must have been in Greece, when Attic became pre- 

 dominant and the other dialects sank into patois ; or that now prevails in England where 

 among many different dialects one has been for centuries the universal language of literature 

 and refinement. As in the present day the ploughmen and herdboys of the Alban and 

 Tusculan hills, the head-quarters of the old Latin race, speak the pure lingua Toscana with 

 the pure bocca Romana, so in old times the whole ' Latinum nomen' spoke the Latin unde- 

 fiied of Plautus and Terence and Cicero and Caesar. In historical times the closely allied 

 Umbrian and Oscan and Sabellian always remained distinct languages, and never degenerated 

 into mere patois of the Latin. An accentual verse without quantity could have had no mean- 

 ing to an old Latin ear ; for the accent was no stress. Ennius did much for the artificial 

 Roman verse ; but that he invented quantity is as true as that Dante invented the Italian 

 language. We still possess many fragments of Livius Andronicus who represented his first 

 play before Ennius was born. I believe indeed that accent had a greater, I will not say 

 direct, but indirect influence on the verses of Lucretius and Virgil than on those of Livius 

 Andronicus and Naevius. 



While the language was uncorrupted, the accent had no power, no tendency to lengthen a 

 syllable. To give a single illustration of this : The highest authorities declare that in the 

 whole of the old dramatic poetry there is no instance of a short vowel being lengthened before 

 a mute and liquid ; thus patres, patrihus, patrius, lacrimae, agros, indugredi, have the 

 accentuated syllable always and necessarily short. The learned poets in imitation of the 

 Greeks allowed these syllables to be common ; and they used indifferently tenehrae or tenebrae, 

 latebrae or latebrae, changing the accent with the quantity. Nay Ovid even ventures, though 

 only once, to write nunc similis volucri, nunc vera volucris in the same line. 



Most languages when allowed their free development have shewn a tendency towards con- 

 traction. This was seen for instance in the passing of Ionic into Attic. It was eminently 

 characteristic however of the Latin. The author of the Varronianus well observes ' that one 

 could not better describe the genius of the Latin language than by defining it as a language 

 which is always yearning after contraction.' The various modes in which this tendency 

 developed itself may be seen in that and other learned works. When we first become histori- 

 cally acquainted with the Latin Language in the oldest extant inscriptions, this tendency, 

 especially in regard to the suppression of final letters and syllables, had been carried to such an 

 extent as to endanger the conjugations, declensions, and consequently the syntax, nay the very 

 existence of the language. Thus we find dedro, for dederunt : first the final t, then the n 

 having fallen away. Nay Mommsen, one of the highest authorities on such a subject, has 

 lately proved the existence of deda (for 3rd pers. plur. perf. ind.) ; that is to say dedanti, 

 the same form as the Greek -TretpvKavrt, had become successively dedant, dedan, deda. Then 

 as to the declensions, we find many instances in the oldest inscriptions where the final s or m 



