ON LATIN PRONUNCIATION. 467 



along with the acute accent, it is not a necessary concomitant. The 

 concurrence is merely accidental, and the accent is usually expressed 

 in all the modern languages without any accompanying change of time. 

 In Latin, on the contrary, the enunciation of syllables occupied times 

 materially different, but the longer syllables were not necessarily those 

 marked with the acute, as they sometimes are in English. 



Since the versification of the Latins depended entirely upon the 

 quantity of the syllables — in other words, upon the relative time occu- 

 pied in their utterance — it is of the utmost importance that this element 

 should be well understood, and, as far as possible, clearly defined in any 

 modern system of pronunciation. There is, however, a great and per- 

 haps insuperable difficulty in the way of any fitting expression of it. 

 Quantity in the ancient sense of the term, has ceased to be essential to 

 what may be styled the mechanical department of poetry; in the 

 rhythm of the modern languages it is absolutely wanting. So com- 

 pletely has this element disappeared, in the progress of time, that in 

 music, living and fresh as that " divine art" is and must ever be, most 

 people are unable to judge with accuracy of duration, even after con- 

 siderable training. Whether, therefore, the attempt in our day to 

 discriminate quantities be futile, or the systems framed to accomplish 

 the object fail from ignorance of the true principles of pronunciation, 

 it is certain that our methods afford no assistance in expressing this 

 chief element in Latin pronunciation. It seems probable that the idea 

 of pronouncing according to accent owes its origin to the manner in 

 which the liturgy of the Church of Rome is read or intoned, and that, 

 by a mis-conception of the system, people have been led to confound 

 accent and quantity. That some error of this description lies at the 

 bottom of modern mistakes regarding pronunciation seems clear when 

 we find that according to prevailing systems it is proposed to indicate 

 quantity, (1) by accent, (2) by giving the vowels different sounds 

 according to their length. From the clear and easily defined distinction 

 already pointed out between quantity and accent, the success of any 

 method of this kind is antecedently improbable. It would not be more 

 unreasonable to assert that time in music can be represented by varia- 

 tions in the pitch. Taking the first of these schemes, it is plain from 

 an examination of the laws of accents, even supposing them to be 

 invariably true (and they are not), that it is only possible to infer the 

 quantity of the penults in words containing at least three syllables. 

 Such a system. is evidently worthless as an exposition of quantity, but 



