294 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 



What truth there may be in this notion will appear in the sequel ; meanwhile 

 it is quite plain that it leaves the matter in a state of considerable uncertainty, 

 an uncertainty which is not at all diminished by the unquestionably rash 

 assertion in the letter to Mill, that Greek accents were an invention of later 

 times, which could only mislead the accurate scholar.""" An obiter dictum of 

 this kind, even from a Bentley, on a confessedly difficult question, cannot be 

 regarded as having any real weight. It may, however, along with other causes, 

 have contributed to produce that strange aversion to Greek accentuation so 

 characteristic of English scholarship. 



We now advance by a long stride into the middle of the great battle of 

 accent and quantity that was fought in this country about the middle of the 

 last century. The protagonist of this warfare is the Rev. Henry Gally, a 

 Kentish Doctor of Divinity, and chaplain to His Majesty King George IT. 

 His dissertation against Greek accents was first published in the year 1754, 

 seventy years after the famous works of Henninius and Wetstein ; and quite 

 recently on the back of two treatises on the same subject, which had appeared 

 in Rome.t Dr Gally wrote, quite aware of the achievements of his predecessors, 

 but convinced that their attempts to untie the Gordian knot were unsatisfactory, 

 and that his own method was altogether new and original ; and so it is, no 

 doubt, in some things, but novel only in the daringness of its assertions and the 

 glaringness of its absurdity. Its absurdity consists mainly in the writer's 

 belief that he can overturn the whole principles and practice of the Greek 

 accentuation, by simply saying that it is irrational and absurd, as if some 

 famous philosopher, some thousand years after this, when the English orthoepy 

 may have become a field for learned debate, were to say that Macintosh and 

 Mac'Intyre could not have been pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, 

 because it is irrational to place the accent on the common element of the Mac, 

 instead of on the distinguishing element, the clan; which rational method of pro- 

 nunciation, as above remarked, exists not only in all the other Macs, but in all 

 the Saxon names ending in son, as An'derson, Peterson, not Anderson , Peterson. 

 A writer belonging to a people whose pronunciation is in all points so various, 

 so arbitrary, and so dependent on fashionable caprice as the English, might 

 surely have spared himself the inconsistency of such an argument. In the 

 other parts of this learned divine's book we find merely a repetition of what had 

 been said by Meetkerche, Henninius, Vossius, and others. Accents, we are told, 

 were entirely musical, and had nothing to do with the intonation of colloquial 

 speech : then it is broadly asserted that accent necessarily constitutes quantity, 



* " Eotse accentuum quorum omnis hodierna ratio prsepostera est atque perversa." Works by 

 Dyce, vol. ii. p. 362, 



f (1) Sarpedonii dissertatio de vera Atticorum pronunciatione. Romae, 1750. (2) Velaste disser- 

 tatio de literarum Grsecarum pronunciatione. Romae, 1751. 



