147 





Tl.l:i:XTIAN MKTRES. 



of oxide in gadolinite, orUiite, Ac., associated with y ttria, and 

 i oxide "I erbium, another new metal 



The oxide of terbium ha* uot yet been reduced to the state of 

 metal ; it is diatinguiahed from that of erbium iii pot becoming of a 

 dark orange-yellow colour when heated in the air. The oxide of 

 terbium in insoluble in water and in the caustic alkalie* ; it i* soluble 

 even after heating to redness in a boiling solution of carbonate of soda, 

 but after a few days it separates from solution in the state of a double 

 alt; the carbonate of terbium u soluble in solution of carbonate of 

 uumonia, and after saturation forms with it in a few hours a double 

 salt, which separates in such quantity that very little of the oxide 

 remains in solution ; the salts of this oxide are colourless and have a 

 sweetish taste. The sulphate is more soluble in cold water than in 

 hot; the nitrate yields by evaporation a crystalline mass which 

 ' leliqufeces in a moist atmosphere. 



The oxide of terbium has hitherto been obtained in small quantity 

 <mlr, and its properties are but little known. 



TKUKHKXE. [Triii'i'.ynXK.] 

 KBBENTHIN. [TcRwurrnre.] 



TKRKHKN2IC. [TrRPESTisi:.] 



TKKEBIC ACID. [TURPENTINE.] 



TKKKIUI.IX. [TfRPEKTIKE.] 



TKUF.i HKYsn Arm. [TuBPEsrniE.] 



TT.lir.XTlAX METRES. Few subjects connected with Latin 

 literature have been treated with lees success than the principles and 

 laws which govern the metres of Latin comedy. The majority of 

 ma ilnn seem to look upon the writings of Plautus and Terence as 

 mere humble prose arbitrarily distributed BO as to present to the eye 

 the appearance of verse without ita realities. For them it would be 

 better if the whole were printed consecutively, and such an arrange- 

 ment would in fact be supported by not a few of the existing manu- 

 scripts. On the other hand .there have been writers who have laboured 

 to remove the difficulties that obscure the subject, among whom none 

 before Bentley and Hermann appear to have had any success. Since 

 their time, Bothe, Hitachi, and Fleckeiaen have done good service, 

 although the first and second of these recent critics have too frequently 

 been rash in their innovations. Even the writer of the Life of Terence, 

 in the ' Biographic rniversclle' (published in 1826), gave the following 

 extraordinary criticism upon the metres of Terence : " The solo rule 

 which he observes with tolerable regularity is to end each verse with 

 an iamb ; and even this limitation he often disregards, as, for instance, 

 in the terminations Ai contact ; ri vii, mine jam ; audio rivlaitrr ; hue 

 adducam ; hanc renturam, Ac. With regard to the other feet, he 

 freely substitutes for the iamb or spondee, a trochee, anapest, dactyl, 

 double pyrrhic, or four short syllables, and a cretic or short between 

 two longs," Ac. This writer thus started with the false impression 

 that all the verses of Terence are reduced by critics to the single 

 metre, called trimeter iambic ; whereas in fact all who have dealt with 

 the subject, except himself, are aware that the poet has at least three 

 forms of verse which end trochaically ; and his second exception is 

 disposed of by the more correct orthography nuncio ro. In England, 

 again, so late as the year 1837, we had a scheme of the Terentian 

 meters, which for the commonest of those metres, the trimeter-iambic, 

 gave us the following scale : 



with the additional remarks that quo quid /tune may be a dactyl, that 

 We ijuiden ttt, ttudtt par, and the three first syllables of ro/uptaii, m;iy 

 pass for anapeata, Ac., Ac. All this is exceedingly unsatisfactory, and 

 it would be better to abandon the problem as insoluble, than to give 

 currency to extravagancies which would enable us to find in any given 

 chapter of C'icsar a series of trimeter-iambics. 



It must be admitted that the metres of the Greek dramatists, and 

 more particularly of the tragedians, gratify the ear with rhythms 

 which, comparatively speaking, are smooth and appreciable. Hut it 

 hould be recollected, in the first place, that the Greek language is 

 distinguished from among other languages by its abundance of words 

 which end in a short syllable, and the advantage to the poet is increased 

 by the Urge number of instances where these short final syllables have 

 a vowel ending. Compare, for instance, the accusatives singular itouaar, 

 JovAor, wo\u>, tatfiora, with the Latin mtimm, wrrom, narim , Uontm ; 

 the nominative and accusative plural Stufiort%, Saifumt, with the Latin 

 Ifoxet; the numerals 4via, Ja, with the Latin xpiem, decem ; the 

 verbs tvrrtrt, rvrrovot, with the Latin tenbitit, tcrUnmt; the pro- 

 nouns >u, at, t, with mi, if, m. In fact the Latin language exceeds the 

 i Jrri'k in the number of long syllables, as much as the English and 

 Oennan languages exceed the Latin. 



A still more important matter is the question whether, and how far, 

 the written language of the Romans is an exact representative of the 

 spoken language. It seems to be a condition of language in general 

 that ita pronunciation should always be passing through a series of 

 changes, and that those changes should consist for the most part in the 



gradual omission of letters and even syllables. Thus the I 

 phrase men domiaa is in Italian matluima ; in French, madam. ; in 

 English, madam, ma'am, and even m and num. Meanwhile, for thn 

 most part, the changes in orthography are alow, and consequently 

 nearly always in arrow of the orthoepy. Thus it will be found that 

 the sounds of Knglih and German words which appear to the eye so 

 weighed down with consonants, are in the mouth of a native tolerably 

 harmonious. Was such the case with the Roman also t We answer 

 with little hesitation in the affirmative, partly because the laws which 

 now govern language can scarcely have been wanting in anciont Italy, 

 and partly because we find the point established by several incidental 

 remarks in Latin writers. Thus Suetonius says, in his ' 1 

 Augustus (c. 88), "Orthography that is, the laws and principles of 

 writing laid down by grammarians he was not very observant of, but 

 seems rather to follow the opinion of those who hold that we should 

 write as we speak. For as to hia habit of changing or omitting uot 

 merely single letters, but even whole syllables, that is a coin 

 It should be observed, too, that Suetonius had himself seen the hand- 

 writing of the emperor. (Ibid, c. 87.) Again, Quintilian (' Iut.,' xi. 

 3, 33) says, "As, on the one hand, it is essential that eyory word 

 should be clearly articulated, so, on the other hand, to reckon up, if 

 we may so speak, every separate letter, is painful and weari- .MM ." lu 

 the same chapter he further observes, " Not only is a coalition of 

 vowels very common, but tome too of the consonants are disguised 

 (dMmtUuttur), when a vowel follows ; " where he must refer to some 

 other letter than , probably the final generally and the final d of 

 neuter pronouns. Moreover, I'riscian, who by the way appears to have 

 written when the Latin language had ceased to be spoken aa a living 

 tongue, at times throws out such conjectures an the following : " I 

 think that vi</il, viytiix, should rather be pronounced per tynonpam." 

 We might appeal to Cicero's authority for the fact that a final was 

 frequently omitted in pronunciation. But there are still other argu- 

 ments in support of the principle for which we are contending. 

 Within the limits of the Latin language ituelf we find such changes 

 actually in progess as, magit, *in, ipau, neque, atque, tilt, nerc, viderit, 

 ridcnmt, provide**, miht, Hitiil, quibut, popului, tegumen, opera, pvteue, 

 mania, noverit, novitti, corentio, becoming severally magt, ni, ipte, nee, 

 ac, te, xeu, ruiere, v'tdere, prudent, mi, nil, quit, poplut (compare also 

 im/,licui), trymtn, opra, poue, mala, norit, HOiti, couth. Principles 

 ."logy would enable us to carry the list out to a vast extent, 

 ami this still more, if we employed the analogies of the Greek tongue. 



Again, the languages which are acknowledged to be derived from the 

 Latin, such as that of the Troubadours, the Italian, French, Spanish, 

 Portuguese, and one portion of the English, by their shortened i 

 confirm our views. And this will be found to be specially the case 

 with the French. To those who may express their surprise that the- 

 French should thus take precedence in our argument of the Italian, 

 the answer is, that the French is probably derived from the Latin more 

 completely than even the Italian ; for the Celtic, Teutonic, and I boric 

 languages spoken in France before the Roman conquest of that country 

 were of too foreign a character to mix with the language of con<| 

 or to supply the place of it in the intercourse of the provincial.- 

 their masters ; whereas -in Italy there already existed dialects which 

 were intelligible to those who came from Rome, and for that very 

 reason were not supplanted by that particular form of the Italian lan- 

 guage which happened to prevail in the metropolitan city. In tho 

 same way the authorised dialect of our own tongue is more likely to 

 become the current language of Calcutta than of Yorkshire. Add to 

 this that the language now called Italian belongs to Tuscany, not to 

 Rome. 



Lastly, we find much to strengthen our present argument in the 

 abbreviated forms of writing which were in use among the Romans, 

 and are still found in manuscripts. Thus the word rotund is written 

 cot, because the n was not pronounced before , as Diomedes expressly 

 tells us. (Putsch. ,'428.) Again, the word modo not unfraquently occupies 

 such a position in the verses of Terence as to seem to require a mono- 

 nyll.-ibio pronunciation, such indeed as seems also more consistent with 

 ita enclitic character. This very word enters into the composition of 

 the Latin qwmodo, which again in the languages derived from Latin 

 assumes various forms : in the Romance, com ; in Spanish, cento . in 

 Italian, ctmu ; and in French, com me. To this we now add the fact 

 that the Romans themselves represented the simple word by the abbre- 

 viation mo. Again, is the manuscript mode of denoting the con- 

 junction enim, a word which must often be pronounced like rn to fulfil 

 the conditions of Terence's metre. We may observe of this word, as 

 of modo, that an enclitic should not attract the attention of the ear. 

 A third example shall be a third enclitic, namely, quidmt. Bnntley 

 himself observed the trouble caused by this word in the verses of 

 Terence (' Amir.,' i. 3, 20), and his remedy is to drop the final m, 

 which however still leaves the verse encumbered with a superabundance 

 of syllables. We contend that this also is commonly a monosyllable, 

 and on the following grounds : First) the metre of Terence requires 

 it. Secondly, if iitiiem has a reduced form, item, analogy will give us 

 quern for i/widrm. Thirdly, the Romans, like the French, did not 

 pronounce the vowel M after >/ (otherwise such words Hqua, or nHque, 

 for instance would have hail the first syllable long), and they also 

 disguised the final M, as Quintilian implies in the passage to which we 

 have already referred. Thus we have arrived at a sound ke. Now the 



