296 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 



them to their proper use in practice. Who can affirm that with certainty \ An 

 English voice was capable of doing this in the time of Henry VIII., and why 

 not now ? Sir John Cheke declares it not only practicable, but that it was 

 actually practised, and that he knew many persons who could express these 

 sounds consistently with accent and quantity perfectly well. I know one 

 person who, after a few trials, is now able to do the same." By this one 

 person, the reader will naturally suppose that he means himself, though it is a 

 pity he did not say so in a manner that could not admit of ambiguity. But who- 

 ever the individual might be who in the year of grace 1761 had solved this 

 easy vocal problem, curiously imagined to be so difficult, schoolmasters who 

 sinned against this high ideal of classical recitation might well reply, that to 

 attempt to indoctrinate the ears of schoolboys with such delicate distinctions 

 would prove as hopeless as to bring out the beautiful harmony of one of 

 Handel's operas from a hurdy-gurdy. On another point also, Foster's Essay, 

 though victorious against Gally, did perhaps more harm than good to the 

 question of orthoepic reform in the great schools. He does not always suffi- 

 ciently distinguish between the emphasis, or stress, or intensity of utterance, 

 which he rightly considers to belong essentially to accent, and the prolongation 

 of sound with which that intensity may sometimes be accompanied. Hence he 

 speaks of the effect of the accent in English being habitually to lengthen the 

 syllable ; whereas, if we attend to our ears, words like vdjy'id and rap'id, are just 

 as common in our language as po'tent and pa' tent, and no person feels himself 

 under any tendency or compulsion to assimilate the pronunciation of the first 

 two words to that of the other pair. 



Three years after the appearance of Mr Foster's Essay, the " Accentus 

 Redivivus" of Primatt appeared, the title of which seems sufficiently to indicate 

 that in England at least Meetkerche, and Voss, and Gally, had practically 

 won the day, and that accents had retired from the schools, and even from the 

 typographic theatre in Oxford ; for in the year 1759 an edition of Aristotle's 

 Rhetoric, without accentual marks, had appeared under the imprimatur of 

 Thomas Randolph, Vice-Chancellor of the University. How many more 

 Greek books, in the same nude fashion, may have issued from the same quarter 

 about the same time, I do not know ; but there was certainly just cause for the 

 champions of accents to take the alarm ; and so Mr Primatt marched forth, an 

 accentual cataphract, bristling all over with Alexandrian and Byzantine erudi- 

 tion, through which it was impossible to pierce him. In his learned work, he 

 first shakes himself free from the notion flung out by Vossius, and the extreme 

 men of the rhythmical party, that accents, however they might have been 

 observed afterwards, were originally a musical, and not an orthoepic notation. 

 He then shows, by a long historical deduction, that the reading of Greek prose 

 always was accentual, and that nothing can be more illegitimate than to 



