306 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 



easily perceive that the interference of Greek accents with the laws of Greek 

 metre is a pure hallucination ; inasmuch as — 



1. It has been amply proved that in the case of individual words the pre- 

 dominance given to one syllable by the stretch, stress, or emphasis of the voice 

 with which the acute accent is naturally accompanied, has no necessary tendency 

 to lengthen the syllable on which it is laid. Through the whole argument of 

 those who oppose Greek accents a confusion runs between two things, which 

 in this matter must be kept carefully apart — a confusion between a short sylla- 

 ble unaccented compared with the same syllable accented, and a short accented 

 syllable with a long syllable accented. When the three terms rjpipa, r)p.l'pa, 

 and r) fir)' pa are compared, the middle syllable of the middle term, while it is more 

 prominent, and may be in some degree longer than the same syllable of the 

 first term, is decidedly short when compared with the same syllable of the 

 third term. If, therefore, any short syllable, whether in Greek or English, on 

 which the accent falls, is in danger of being pronounced long, it arises not 

 from the nature of the case, but from the ignorance, carelessness, or stupidity 

 of the teacher ; and, in fact, a great part of the strange confusion which has so 

 long prevailed on this subject may not unreasonably be traced to the want of the 

 directing presence of a living rhetorical and musical culture in our great English 

 schools and colleges. 



2. The second great element of confusion which has been introduced into 

 this matter is the gratuitous and altogether unauthorised assumption, that 

 because our metrical composition follows the laws of spoken accent, therefore 

 in Greek and Latin the same law was necessarily observed. In the writings of 

 Hyphaestion and of those who lay down the canons of classical verse, there is 

 not a single word said about the spoken accents ; and the sure inference is, that 

 in metrical composition they were, as Professor Munro justly remarks, systema- 

 tically ignored, or, if attended to at all, only in a subordinate, exceptional, inci- 

 dental, and even accidental way. Nothing, therefore, could be more mistaken 

 than the attempt of Horsley to give a new theory of Homeric scansion, founded 

 on the doctrine of the spoken accents. On what principle, then, it will be 

 asked, was the v Greek poetry written % Can it be supposed that a nation of 

 refined taste and high culture could be delighted with the barbarism of pronounc- 

 ing words, one way in prose, and another way in verse % We answer, there is 

 nothing at all strange in this supposition ; and that, whether it appear strange 

 or not, it was certainly the fact. To understand this, instead of transferring 

 the laws of our modern poetry wholesale to the poetry of the Greeks, let us 

 rather transfer ourselves from an age of books, reviews, newspapers, and read- 

 ing-rooms into an age where there was no such thing as books or reading at 

 all, where prose composition was altogether unknown, and where every com- 

 position, not purely ephemeral, was made to be sung, and had its existence 



