PLACE AND POWER OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 295 



and therefore must be wrong ; and that, whatever the advocates of accents 

 might preach in theory, in practice they never did, because they never could 

 observe the accents without destroying the quantity. This practical difficulty 

 is, in fact, the gist of his whole treatise, as is manifest from the very notable 

 words with which he concludes : — " If, therefore, we would observe uniformity, 

 and keep to what we can safely rely on, we must not admit of any use of 

 accents in the pronunciation of the ancient Greek language but what is con- 

 sistent with quantity ; and if we have lost the nicer part of the ancient pronun- 

 ciation, we have the more reason to adhere to the essential part which still 

 subsisteth." And this way of putting the case, viewed as an argumentum ad 

 hominem addressed to the great mass of the English scholars and teachers, is no 

 doubt perfectly just ; for these gentlemen had got into a monstrous and irrational 

 habit of writing Latin and Greek verses with much labour and wonderful 

 dexterity, by help of their understanding only, against the verdict of their 

 ears, and treated both accent and quantity as an affair of dead rules, not of 

 living vital action." 



But English scholarship — whatever might be the absurdities of professional 

 pedagogy — was not destined to surrender one of the strongholds of venerable 

 philological tradition at the trumpet-blast of such a windy dogmatist as Dr 

 Gally. In the year 1767, a reply to his pretentious heresy was sent forth from 

 Eton, by Foster, in which, so far as the learning of the subject is concerned, 

 he showed himself as superior to Gally as Wetstein was to Henninius. 

 He proved, beyond all possibility of denial, that accent had always been a 

 recognised element in Greek orthoepy, and was in no sense the barbarous 

 creation of a decadent age and a degraded taste. He stated also most distinctly 

 that, while elevation of tone was the most characteristic element in Greek 

 accent, it also necessarily included the element of stress — which Dr Gally also 

 saw clearly — but that this stress or emphasis was in no case to be confounded 

 with the length or duration of syllables. Hence, indeed, the great superiority 

 of his argument to that of the Kentish D.D. ; for he not only maintained that 

 accent was not to be confounded with quantity, but that, from the very nature 

 of the case, the intense energy of the acute accent might, in many cases, have a 

 tendency to shorten rather than to prolong the emission of breath by which it 

 was enunciated.t With regard to the main difficulty, however — the practice of 

 the theory, which, as we have seen, was the stumblingblock of Dr Gally — he 

 does not seem to advance the matter far. Hear his words : — 



" Nor let it be said, if we should retain these sounds, we can never apply 



* On this notable inconsistency of those champions of quantity who denounce accent, Mr Foster 

 is justly severe ; ch. x., on accent-quantity. 



\ On this point he produces a remarkable passage from Suidas, in voce o£u, vol. ii. p. 1136. 

 Bernhardt. 



