PLACE AND POWER OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 305 



circle of confusion and delusion in which English scholars are involved the 

 moment they approach this subject. Mr Geldart is a decided advocate for 

 accents, both in theory and practice, and he says roundly that " our prejudice 

 against accents is for the most part insular, and deepened, to boot, by the pecu- 

 liarities of our own insular pronunciation." He blows to the wind in a single 

 sentence the vulgar error of English scholars, so often noticed in these pages, 

 that accent has the necessary effect of lengthening the syllable on which it 

 falls, the accented syllable in English being, in fact, as often short as long, as in 

 get' -ting, plck'-ing, while a long syllable is often unaccented, as flndncial, fertile, 

 a priori, in which last the first syllable is nearly always pronounced long, in 

 spite of the fact that it is short in Latin. It is accordingly a complete delusion 

 to imagine " that the Latin accent is either an indispensable or an infallible 

 device for marking the right quantity of Greek syllables." With regard to 

 accent, he makes the just remark that the raising of the note, and the increase 

 of the stress generally go together. He farther denies altogether — and on this 

 point he is a witness of great authority — that the modern Greeks always, or 

 even in a majority of cases, lengthen the syllable on which the accent falls ; 

 and in regard to the relation of accent and quantity, he shows that neither is 

 modern poetry always governed by the mere spoken accent, nor is ancient poetry 

 altogether regardless of it, but that the real regulator, both of ancient and of 

 modern poetry, though in very different ways, is Rhythm, which is determined 

 by the musical beat. How far the spoken accent was heard, as it were, through 

 the rhythmical movement, depended principally upon whether the verse was 

 sung or recited. In pure singing there might be heard only a faint glimmer of 

 the spoken accent ; in prose it was the prominent element, and directed the 

 flow of the period ; while between these two extremes there might be several 

 intermediate styles of utterance in which the spoken accent was more or less 

 prominent, according to the greater or less approach of the style of recitation 

 to colloquial prose. 



It will not be difficult, after this long and strange historical survey, to sum 

 up the conclusions to which, by the consideration of the various facts and argu- 

 ments, we are inevitably led. We find ourselves, in fact, after more than three 

 centuries of confusion, one-sidedness, and hallucination, arrived at a point of 

 view where no fact or principle, necessary to a just conclusion, is concealed, 

 and all apparent contradictions find a happy conciliation. In particular, the 

 whole history of the controversy displays the fact that in one form or another 

 quantity is the bugbear, and that from Voss and Meetkerche, to Munro, 

 Chandler, and Clark, a sacred regard for the rights of metre is the apology 

 for the monstrous invasion of the province of Greek by Roman accents. But 

 those who have attended to the course of our argument and historic survey will 



VOL. XXVI. PART II. 4 K 



