PLACE AND POWER OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 297 



transfer to prose the laws of quantitative rhythm, which belong to poetry. But 

 in this second proposition unfortunately, he is only half right, and entangles 

 himself and the whole subject in a network of the most hopeless confusion ; 

 for, in defining accent, besides asserting with Fostee, that there is an over- 

 bearing tendency in English to lengthen all accented syllables, and an invariable 

 rule in Latin to accentuate long penults, he lays it down in the strongest terms 

 that the acute accent necessarily lengthens the syllable on which it falls, 

 and that, in fact, when properly read, every accented syllable in Greek prose is 

 long. Nay, more, so confused are his ideas on the whole terminology of the 

 subject which he treats, that he actually tells us "we can hardly read a verse 

 in Viegil or Homee in which the rhythm does not more than once break in upon 

 the quantity" (p. 157), a sentence which, according to the usage of all who 

 write intelligibly on such subjects, is pure nonsense, or true only of such 

 accented verse as we have in English and other modern languages. This ex- 

 traordinary confusion of two things by the ancient grammarians, kept so 

 distinct as accent and quantity, rendered his whole discourse nugatory. To 

 accept accent according to this theory was to make a formal transference of 

 quantity from one syllable to another, and to acquire a habit of reading prose, 

 which, in the point of quantity, would require to be reversed the moment a 

 scholar threw down Plato, and took up Sophocles. In a country where the 

 most elegant scholars, under the guidance of such a Titan as Bentley, had 

 already begun to look with a curious preference on everything connected with 

 metrical composition, such a startling doctrine could not be expected to make 

 converts. 



After these violent but practically ineffective efforts, the great strife about 

 accents in England stopped for thirty years, when in the year 1796 another re- 

 markable combatant entered the lists in the person of Samuel Hoesley, one of 

 the most notable of the singular army of erudite polemical bishops of which 

 the Anglican Church has been so fertile.'" Into the weakness and utter mi- 

 tenableness of the received method of reading Greek in this country the Bishop 

 casts a piercing eye, and with an outspoken emphasis calls black black, and 

 white white in the matter, after a fashion to which it might have been expected 

 that in a country where the Church has so much to say in the school, some 

 serious attention might have been given. " A practice" he says, " is adopted 

 in this country of reading Greek verse with the Latin accent, and this is most 

 absurdly called reading by quantity ; and having adopted this strange practice of 

 reading one language by the rules of another, it is not unnatural that we should 

 wish to prove the practice right" (pp. 26, 27). This is indeed hitting the nail on 

 the head ; but the strange practice, like many strange things in England, still 



* On the Prosodies of the Greek and Latin Languages. Lond. 1796. The author's name was 

 not given on the title page. 



VOL. XXVI. PART II. 4 H 



