PLACE AND POWER OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 287 



many distinct vowels and diphthongs. Signs of different vowels were certainly 

 not made originally to confound, but to distinguish. The confusion in this case 

 is always of a later birth. What Erasmus, however, failed in here, and what, 

 from want of materials, he could not but fail in, was to show at what period 

 this confusion commenced ; for, as the most polished nations in modern times 

 display in their speech abnormal tendencies and depravations of all kinds, 

 which are consecrated by usage and fashion, so there is no reason why the 

 itacism of the theologians of Byzantium should not have been practised by the 

 philosophers of Alexandria, and even, to a certain extent, by the orators of the 

 Periclean and Demosthenic age. However, this was not curiously looked into ; 

 and the result was that, by this assault of Erasmus, the faith of scholars in the 

 orthoepic traditions of the Byzantine elders was shaken in all the most learned 

 countries of Europe, and every nation set up vocalizing Greek according to 

 what seemed good in its own eyes. Hence the motley babblement of Greek 

 which now prevails. The old foundations were removed before the ground was 

 opened, or the materials ready, to make new ones. And thus it has happened 

 that an orthoepic reform, well intended, and in so far conducted on rational 

 principles, has issued in an extremely irrational and altogether unsatisfactory 

 result. So much for Greek vocalisation. With regard to that other matter 

 with which we are specially concerned here, we do not find, what we might per- 

 haps have expected to find, that the great modern innovation of disowning Greek 

 accents in reading Greek, receives the slightest countenance from Erasmus. 

 On the contrary, part of the bad pronunciation which it was his object to reform 

 was precisely the ignorance or loose observance of the proper accents in Greek 

 and Latin, according to the characteristic laws of each language. He saw also 

 everywhere amongst careless, tasteless, or ignorant speakers, that confusion of 

 things so distinct as accent and quantity, which from the same causes prevails 

 so largely at the present day. Scholars still tell you that accent and quantity 

 annihilate each other, and cannot both be observed, meaning only, in fact, that 

 for their particular ill-tutored and perverted auricular organs, it has become 

 difficult, and is perhaps impossible. It certainly is impossible for a sharp, hard 

 Aberdonian to speak with the rich silvery mellowness of a high-bred English 

 lady ; but the difficulty lies in bad habit, not in Scottish nature. On the super- 

 induced habitude which erudite ears have so often displayed in not being able 

 to distinguish accent from quantity, there is a passage in the Erasmian tractate, 

 which we shall be excused for inserting at length : — 



" Sunt quidam adeo crassi, ut non distinguant accentum a quantitate, quum sit 

 longe diver sa ratio. Aliud est enim acutum, aliud diu tinnire: sicut aliud in- 

 tendi, aliud extendi: quanquam nihil vetat eandem syllabam et acutum habere 

 tonum, et productum tempus, velut in vidi, et legi prwteritis. At eruditos novi, qui, 

 quumpronunciarent Mud avexpv koX anexpv, mediam syllabam, quoniam tonum habet 



