300 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 



sacrd the nominative plural ; and by turning anapests into clactyles, dactyles into 

 tribrachs, spondees into trochees, iambi into pyrrhics — in fact, doing everything 

 that could be clone systematically to turn order into disorder in this region, and 

 " by this most abominably absurd custom, destroying at once both sound and 

 sense, and seeming to sin from a love of the very ugliness of sinning." These 

 are hard words, but not, in fact, one whit more strong than those which we 

 have quoted from the English Bishop ; nor is it possible, indeed, to conceive 

 anything at once more unscientific, more tasteless, and more unpractical than 

 the way in which prosody and rhythm have been handled in the great English 

 classical schools up to the present hour. On this point, certainly, the author of 

 " Metron Ariston," a single light horseman, could triumphantly ride up and 

 attack without fear a whole army of big blundering and self-contradictory 

 hoplites. As to accents, however, about them he wisely said nothing ; but 

 allowed them quietly to lie in the state of suspended animation to which they 

 had been condemned by his patron-god Meetkerche. If these mute, mysterious, 

 little oblique and curved lines were ever to revive into speaking significance 

 at the touch of some philological wizard, the author of "Metron Ariston" 

 certainly did not possess the secret for their disenchantment ; nor, indeed, if he 

 had possessed it, would he have cared to use it ; for the accents, whatever 

 virtue they might possess, could add but little to the luxury of the new 

 rhythmical pleasure which he had discovered. 



But what were the great German scholars doing all this while, — the Heynes, 

 the Wolfs, and the Hermanns, the founders of that stable and splendid edifice of 

 philological learning which has placed Germany in the van of erudite and 

 thoughtful research during the whole of the present century ? In the preface 

 to the second edition of his Odyssey, Wolf remarks that in the matter of the 

 accents, " the editors of the previous centuries had shown a great laxness of 

 procedure, a fault which had commenced with so illustrious a name as Henry 

 Stephanus, who in this respect had declined from the accuracy of his prede- 

 cessors, Chalcondylus and Aldus." And after a few remarks on points of 

 detail, follows a remarkable witness to the practical disuse into which accents 

 had fallen in Germany just as in England towards the end of the last century. 

 " In fact, no person now-a-days — and for many centuries back — ever hears 

 a Greek accent ; and only a few, indeed, seem to believe that the doctrine of 

 the grammarians on this subject is a thing that belongs to a complete course of 

 teaching."* This passage is decided as to the general disuse of accents among 

 the Germans in Wolf's time; but the phrase seit vielen Jahrhunderten is certainly 

 too strong ; for the works of Meetkerche, Vossius, and Henninius, are sufficient 

 to prove the living predominance of the Byzantine tradition in respect to 



* These extracts are taken from an historical review of the opinions of scholars about accents in 

 Wagner's "Accent Lehre." Helrnstadt, 1807. 



