248 Whether Music is necessary to the Orator,— 
10th. In reading both the Greek and Latin languages, (but 
especially the latter,) do you regularly attend to the due exten- 
sion; or in your own phraseology, do you give the long sound 
to all those vowels which are ly nature long, regardless of their 
nominal length by position,? And are you certain that the Grecian 
language with respect to its emphatic syllables (especially in its 
poetry, to which almost every license was extended) is regulated 
like the Roman*? ° . 
These are the great outlines of time or quantity (as well as 
forte), without the understanding and observance of which it is 
in my mind an impossibility to form an adequate opinion of the 
prosody of the ancient languages ; and consequently of the ef- 
fects of the various combinations which with most advantage 
may be introduced into our own. The idea of barring in the 
modern way, must however, to all appearance, be set down not 
only as destructive to oratorical delivery; but, in addition, as ne- 
cessarily excluding (even by the confession of Rousseau himself) 
every species of combination, except that isolated onet, which, 
for the facility of keeping time in concert, such limited system 
would impose. Even in their music, the ancient latitude in the 
collocation of long and short was much greater than ours: and 
hence, for want of experience, the almost insuperable difficulty, 
with modern musicians, of executing with precision certain frag- 
ments which accident has preserved; such, for example, as that 
portion of a Pindaric ode with which we have been favoured in 
the Musical Dictionary of the before-mentioned writer. 
some oe ea a 
xXoU—Te— 900 — wire A-roA—Aw—vos &e. 
seal rag omits pa FI aE 
But in the critical way of Dionysius 
of Halicarnassus it would scan thus 
-~v-|--|v-- 
_ * Our present conception of the Romaw stress or accent is in my opinion 
invariably correct: huwever, in neither Greek nor Roman language does 
it appear in general so decisively marked as in our own. 
1 “* Cette maniere d’exprimer le tems ou la mesure des notes changea 
entiérement durant le cours du dernier siécle. Des qu’on eut pris l'habi- 
tude de renfermer chaque mesure entre deux barres, il fallut nécessairement 
proscrire toutes les espéces de notes qui renfermoient plusieurs mesures.” 
See Rousseau’s Musical Dictionary, article Mesure. . 
The opinion of Vossitis too, upon this subject, has been respectfully 
quoted by Rousseau in the following words: ‘* I] dit, qu’un rhythme dé- 
taché comme le notre qui ne représeute aucune image des choses, ne peut 
avoir aucun effet; et que les ancicus nombres poétiques n’avoient été in- 
ventés que pour cette fin que nous névligeons.” 
constituting 
