THE RELATIONS OF LATIN 179 



Standing some years ago in Norwich Cathedral, I had the greatness 

 of Rome brought forcibly home to my mind. In the aisles there 

 stretched out a series of groined vaults which carried one straight 

 back to the Colosseum; and at the extreme east end, behind the 

 altar, rose two stately Early English arches, once the entrance to 

 a Lady Chapel of the thirteenth century, but now standing isolated; 

 for the Lady Chapel itself was destroyed in the sixteenth century. 

 The groined vaults are Romanesque, but the Early English arches 

 are also Roman, only one degree further removed. Let two Roman 

 barrel vaults or two Romanesque arches intersect, and you get the 

 arch misnamed Gothic. A clear line of structural descent connects 

 the one with the other, and the genius of Rome may claim them 

 both as her own. 



The relations of Rome to the Greek and to the modern world may 

 be also illustrated by the history of verse. From Greece Rome 

 borrowed the system of strictly quantitative meter, and discarded 

 in favor of it the native Saturnian. But gradually she adapted it to 

 the conditions of the Latin language by grafting upon it the Italian 

 principle of accent, 1 the beginning of certain feet being marked by 

 the use of an accented syllable, just as in architecture she intro- 

 duced the feature of the arch. The effect is prominent in the verse of 

 the poetae novelli of the second century A.D.; but it is also visible 

 to some extent in much earlier forms of Latin verse. To quote 

 only one example, the second half of the dactylic pentameter of 

 Ovid is subject to the law that it must be as accentual as possible, 

 provided always that it does not end with a monosyllable. This 

 sounds like a paradox; but 1 believe I could, if not give it proof, at 

 any rate make it plausible. The dissyllabic ending is simply a 

 necessary sacrifice to secure coincidence of "ictus," as it is called, 

 with accent in the other places. Well, in the course of time this 

 accentual feature transformed the whole character of Latin verse, 

 yet without involving a return to the Saturnian. And just as 

 the pointed Gothic arch developed out of the Romanesque, so the 

 accentual principle received such further development in the modern 

 Teutonic verse based upon Latin models accent being of course 

 also a Teutonic principle as to throw the quantitative principle 

 completely in the shade ; so that we now employ a kind of verse which 

 seems at first sight comparable to Greek verse only by way of contrast. 

 But only at first sight. This, too, I have no time to discuss fully 

 to-day; but I will merely say that in my opinion the main difference 

 between English and Latinized Greek verse is that English is not 

 based upon any system of prosody, that is, that the quantities of 



1 The differentia of Latin verse as compared with Greek is that it is both quan- 

 titative or semi-quantitative in some cases, and at certain points accentual; nor 

 do I accept any purely accentual theory of the Saturnian. 



