22 
and alone quantity and accent coincide, for the a and o are 
both long vowels. In butter it is not so, for the wu in butter 
is a short vowel. But English pronunciation is inferior to 
Greek in precision. We slur consonants and can make a 
svllable short even though it is divided by two or three 
consonants from the next. Thus we give very little time to 
the first syllable of construction, and in the lines quoted 
above we find no difficulty in pronouncing the second 
syllable of stretches quickly though the next word begins 
with another consonant. But the Greek sounded every 
consonant distinctly, and to him strétchés the would 
contain a ‘‘ false quantity.’’ Perhaps the Greek was not so 
particular in ordinary conversation, and we pronounce more 
carefully than usual when we read poetry or make a speech. 
Perhaps this occasional carefulness of ours may justify Mr. 
Robert Bridges in the English hexameters he writes, in 
which he does attempt to go entirely by quantity and ignores 
accent. It is part and parcel with the reform he wishes to 
make in our modern English pronunciation, which is indeed 
becoming more and more slipshod. His hexameters are 
most interesting, and in some other classical metres he and 
his followers have produced a good deal of liquid verse. But 
I doubt if he has really achieved what he intended. His 
quantities seem to be in some cases fixed arbitrarily ; they 
do not represent the time we take to pronounce the 
syllables if we speak naturally. And he is perhaps experi- 
menting with dead matter. In English speech, the best and 
most careful, there is no fixed quantity for separate syllables. 
The same syllable of the same word may be long in one 
place, short in another. Our speeches and our poems move 
in sweeps of rythm. ‘The ancient delicate ‘‘pattern-music’’ 
of the Greeks is a lovely thing that we can no more 
reproduce than we can that exquisite lucidity of syntax 
which they attained by means of their elaborate system of 
case-endings, participle-forms, &c. He who would rightly 
convey the spirit of Greek metre must regretfully allow that 
one kind of beauty has run its course and finished, and that 
the true life goes on with loss and gain, that is by natural 
development. Then he will gladly find that there are 
capabilities in the free movement of modern speech of which 
the Greeks had never felt the need, and that obedience to 
the peculiar demands of English is wise, even in the 
academic cult of the hexameter. 
On that principle Kingsley has composed his hexa- 
meters. Whether it is loyal to the genius of language to 
write English hexameters at all is a question which cannot 
be discussed here. ‘To me, if I may confess my own taste, 
English hexameters give a great deal of pleasure, whether 
they be purely accentual, as in Clough’s ‘‘ Bothie of Tober- 
