PLACE AND POWER OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 293 



example of the truth of Goethe's remark, that truth is often disagreeable to us, 

 because it limits the despotic sweep of our one idea, while error is grateful for 

 this, above all other reasons, because it prostrates fact and thought and 

 history before the triumphant march of our infallible conceit. 



It was not to be supposed that the sweeping dictatorial dogmatism of this 

 book of Hennin, backed as it substantially was by the high authority of Voss, 

 would pass without comment from the learned of the Continent ; and accordingly 

 we find that in the year 1686 it received a long and able reply from John 

 Rudolph Wetstein, professor of Greek in the university of Basle. Wetstein's 

 book, by an overwhelming array of historical testimony, enforced by sound 

 argument, demonstrates the utter untenableness of the proposition of his 

 adversary, unwarrantable equally in the wholesale swamping of the Greek by 

 the Latin accent, and in the elevation of this latter into a rational norm of 

 accentuation, by which the excellence of all articulate speech is to be measured. 

 With regard to the main difficulty which had staggered Meetkeeche, the Basle 

 professor quietly reminds his antagonist, in the words of Quinctilian, that the 

 recitation of verse is in many respects different from the speaking of prose, 

 " imprimis lectio virilis et cum suavitate quddam gravis, et non quidem prosw 

 similis, quia carmen est." 



The infection of this notable dispute now comes to England, and the first 

 oracle to whom we feel inclined to propound the question for solution is, of 

 course, the great Bentley. This massive and masculine scholar, in the short 

 treatise on metres prefixed to his edition of " Terence," has the following 

 passage : — " Tarn vero id Latinis comicis, qui fabulas suas populo placere 

 cuperent magnopere cavendum erat ne contra linguae genium ictus seu accentus in 

 quoque versu syllabas verborum ultimas occuparent. Id in omni metro, quoad 

 limit, observabatur ; ut in his 



' Ar'rna vinimque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris, 

 Italiam fato profugus, Lavinia venit 

 Litora ; multum ille et terris jactatus et alto 

 Vi siiperum, saevae memorem Junonis ob iram.' 



Qui perite et modulatae hos versus leget sic eos, ut hie accentus notantur, pro- 

 nuntiabit, non ut piteri in scholis, ad singulorum pedum initia ; 



Italiam fat6 profugus, Lavinaque venit, sed ad rhythmum totius versus. " 

 Now, it in no wise concerns us to discuss the value of the remark here 

 made as to the practice of the Latin poets ; that is a delicate matter, we believe, 

 not so easily settled as the stout Cantab seems to have imagined. The only 

 significance of the passage for our present inquiry is, that the writer believed that 

 in some way or other the structure of Latin verse was regulated by a regard to 

 the spoken accent, and not simply by the law of quantity and the metrical beat, 



VOL. XXVI. PART II. 4 G 



