298 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 



continues, and we still make ourselves ridiculous by awkward endeavours to 

 prove that what is altogether unnatural and monstrous is justifiable and even 

 beautiful. How is this ? Not only, I believe, because the patient was self- 

 willed and obstinate, but because the physician who pronounced a most scien- 

 tific diagnosis of the disease had not the sagacity to discover the proper cure. 

 He suggested a cure more flattering to his own ingenuity than true to the 

 state of the case, or beneficial to the patient. He was as original as Dr 

 Gally, in a more subtle indeed, but not in a more practical way. Gally's 

 originality, as we have seen, consisted simply in calling everything on the doc- 

 trine of Greek accents irrational and absurd which was contrary to his 

 orthoepic habits or fancies, and nonsuiting it, without more ado, as a defaulter in 

 foro rationis. Horsley, with that respect for historical fact and erudite testimony 

 which became a bishop and a theologian, admitted the doctrine of accent in its 

 full weight, as an element of which no sane reasoner on the matter of Hellenic 

 orthoepy could get rid ; but, in order to explain its operation as part of the 

 harmony of Greek verse, he invented a theory altogether novel and altogether 

 arbitrary, which nobody had ever proposed before, and which nobody, we may 

 feel pretty certain, will ever propose again. This theory consists simply in 

 acknowledging the Greek accents, as we find them in the books, as the law for 

 the pronunciation of the separate words, but refusing to allow them their 

 natural force under certain rhythmical conditions. Thus, he says, that at the 

 end of a hexameter verse such a word as edrjKe must be pronounced i9t]Ke, 

 because the last syllable of a hexameter verse being long, the accent, according 

 to a well-known canon of Greek orthoepy, must fall on the penult ! Now, the 

 objection to this theory is threefold — (1.) It is not true that the last syllable of 

 hexameter verse, as idrjKe, is long ; it is short, and the time is filled up by the 

 pause which belongs to the end of the line, like a rest in music ; (2.) The theory 

 proceeds on a supposed connection between prose accent and rhythmical 

 emphasis, which is fundamentally false ; and (3.) The whole theory is a figment 

 spun out of the brain of the writer, without a shadow of authority from ancient 

 grammarians and metricians. This being so, the natural consequence fol- 

 lowed ; — the book explained nothing, and changed nothing. If everybody 

 could not answer it, nobody cared to understand it. 



Immediately upon the back of the learned Bishop's treatise, in 1797, appeared 

 a little book entitled " Metron Ariston; or, a neiv Pleasure Recommended," 

 with a ruffed and bearded effigy of Meetkerche fronting the title-page, and a 

 motto which sufficiently indicates the temper and direction of the writer— 



" Tollite barbarum 

 Morem. perpetttum, dulcia barbare 

 Laedentem metra, quoe Venus 

 Quintet parte sui nectaris imbuit." 



