1891-92. ] CELTIC PROSODY. 207 
words in praise of Celtic poetry: “The Celt’s quick feeling for what is 
noble and distinguished gives his poetry style, his indomitable person- 
ality gave it pride and passion, his sensibility and nervous exultation 
gave it a better gift still, the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity 
the magical influence of nature. Rhyme itself, all the weighty evidence 
tends to show, comes into our poetry from the Celts.” The Rev. 
Thomas Price, whose bardic name was Carnhuanawe, says of Aneurin one 
of the poets of his own country—Wales, “that English pcetry was greatly 
indebted to him.” Mr. Price further asserts not only that the admirers 
of poetry are under obligation to the ancient British bards, but that much 
of the refinement of civilized life is more intimately connected with the 
traditions and history preserved by them than may at first be apparent.”* 
It is certainly very gratifying to have the commendations of scholars of 
the erudition and critical ability of Zeuss, Arnold and Price, in favour of 
the value which attaches to Celtic versification in itself and in the peculiar 
characteristics of it, apart altogether from the claims which it has on the 
attentive study of the Celtic scholar. It is a mere truism to state that 
unlike Greek and Latin poetry where scansion depends upon the quantity 
of the syllable or syllables that form a word, scansion is regulated in 
the Celtic language by accent and not by quantity, by the stress of 
the voice and not by the length or shortness of the syllable or word. 
Such feet as the Iambic, and Trochee and Dactyl are common to Greek 
and Latin and to the Celtic languages. There must be some correspond- 
ence between those feet and the natural manner in which the human 
heart expresses its thoughts and feelings. Grote contends that “great: 
as the power of thought afterwards became among the Greeks, their 
power of expression was still greater. In the former, other nations have 
built upon their foundations and surpassed them, in the latter, they still 
remain unrivalled.” Horace expressed the truth very distinctly, when in 
reference to the influence which Greek poetry and Greek versification 
had on the poetry of his own nation, he wrote: 
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes 
Intulit agresti Latio. 
In his 7veatzse on Poetry, Aristotle says that the Iambic metre was so 
named, because it was the measure in which people used to satirize each 
other. The Iambic is of all metres, he contends, the most colloquial as 
appears from the fact that our common conversation frequently falls into 
Iambic verse. Miiller in his Literature of Greece thus writes (vol. I., p. 
181): “The Iambic by proceeding from the short to the long syllable 
* Price’s Literary Remains, Vol. 1, p. 107. 
