PLACE AND POWER OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 299 



This book was not written by a scholar, but by a man of taste and 

 vivacity, and a gay self-reliance which stands him in good stead against a 

 whole host of scholastic cuirassiers. In point of tendency and contents, this 

 book is nothing more than a repetition of Meetkerche and Voss, and 

 those writers who have maintained the right of rhythmical as opposed to the 

 accentual recitation of Greek and Latin verse ; but the striking fact which 

 the title of the book suggests is, that the masters and teachers of the great 

 English schools, who certainly could not be accused of paying any partial 

 attention to accent, were the very persons who had so thoroughly ignored the 

 practice of rhythm in their teaching, that it was a discovery to the author of 

 the book to find that there was such a thing as rhythmical reading of classic 

 verse ; and this discovery, with a prompt philanthropy, he hastens to com- 

 municate to the ingenuous youth of the nation under the inviting name of " a 

 new pleasure." This entirely agrees with the complaint which we have just 

 heard the right reverend Bishop make with regard to the absurdity of reading 

 Greek poetry with Latin accents and calling it reading by quantity. No wonder 

 that clever schoolboys on occasions should begin to dream that the learned and 

 reverend doctors, by whom their ears had been indoctrinated in the unpleasant 

 mysteries of long and short syllables, at bottom knew less about the matter 

 than they might have known themselves with the help of a little unsophisticated 

 juvenile instinct. And accordingly the writer of " Metron Ariston " tells us 

 that " he always indeed had an idea that our very anomalous and irrational 

 way of reading Greek and Latin poetry was founded on error ; yet, from indo- 

 lence, he had conformed, though reluctantly, to the general practice, because it 

 was not his business to examine the error and seek its remedy." But what he 

 did not seek for, he goes on to tell us, like Worcester's rebellion, came in his 

 way, and he found it ; and the good Hermes, on whom he stumbled to direct 

 him in his rhythmical wanderings one day, was a learned Italian ecclesiastic, 

 while they were walking together in the Campo Vaccino at Rome one morning, 

 and talking of Horace, and quoting the well-known line — 



" Ibam forte via sacra sicut mens est nws." 



The full musical weight with which the learned Italian recited this verse struck 

 the Englishman with a pleasant surprise ; whereupon the priest, divining the 

 cause of his satisfaction, began to expound to him the correct theory of classical 

 recitation according to Meetkerche, "the great ambassador of a little state." 

 Against this true doctrine, without which verse had no meaning, and lost more 

 than half of its suavity, the English scholars and schoolmasters were in the 

 systematic habit of sinning, by pronouncing equities, for instance, a horse, as if it 

 were aequus, equitable — by shortening the final syllables of all words, and pro- 

 nouncing dom'inos as if it were dominos and sacra, the ablative singular, like 



