PLACE AND POWER OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 309 



emphasis which subordinates rhythm only to aid expression, and to prevent 

 monotony. 



4. It will now be evident how entirely Professor Munro was mistaken when 

 he expressed surprise at the fact, that, while the rudest boor in the days of 

 Plautus was familiar with the exact laws of quantitative metre, even well- 

 educated gentlemen of the middle class before the time of Constantine were 

 apparently unable to write anything but accentual metre, constructed on the 

 same principle as the Byzantine 0-1-9(01 tto\ltlkoL The rudest boor, no doubt, 

 could distinguish a long syllable from a short, and could discriminate the penul- 

 timate vowel in pat'er and mater in a way that seems impossible to the gross 

 ears of some of our English teachers. Our own peasants will distinguish gdt 

 from goat, or god from goad, exactly in the same way ; but it will require more 

 than a rhetorical flourish from Cicero to prove that the peasants of Italy, or 

 even Attica, at any time were perfectly master of the complete doctrine of 

 quantity as taught in the musical schools. For it must always be borne in 

 mind that the practice of these schools was to a certain extent artificial ; it 

 was founded on certain concessions which the currency of common life had 

 made to the necessities of art ; and the common people, whose ears were 

 trained mainly by the spoken accent, could . not be expected either to 

 compose verses in neglect of that accent, or to sympathise fully with its 

 neglect in the case of verses composed by cultivated poets, except in so far 

 as their own education had kept them in living connection with those schools 

 of music from which the cultivated poetry had emanated. Now, in the best 

 ages of Greece this living connection naturally existed ; and the effect of custom 

 and association would be such, that no other verses but those composed on the 

 original quantitative principle would be recognised as legitimate even by the 

 vulgar ear. But the moment that a great national decay commenced, and 

 schools of popular culture were neglected, from that moment the common 

 people, left to themselves, if ever they tried poetical composition, could do so 

 only in obedience to the instinct which governs all poetry not intimately associated 

 with the musical art. Poetry now became a species of measured conversation to 

 which laws were given by the spoken accent, and where the fixed musical 

 recurrence of long and short syllables was systematically ignored. In this 

 change there is nothing strange or mysterious ; on ■ the contrary, it was the 

 natural, and, we may say, necessary consequence of passing from a musical to a 

 colloquial epoch in literature ; and as a fleet-footed man, when he leaves the 

 ice and takes off his skates, passes to a kind of locomotion governed by different 

 conditions and subject to different laws, so a people, shaken loose from all 

 musical tradition and left to form a poetry for itself, will infallibly fall upon a 

 form of verse in which the musical value of vowels will be sacrificed to the 

 familiar control of accentually preponderant syllables. 



5. One word remains on the question of scholastic practice, which has 



VOL. XXVI. PART II. 4 L 



