312 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 



special care at the same time that in no case shall the emphasis of the accent 

 be drawn into a prolongation of a short vowel. In the matter of quantity, I 

 allow length by position to be pronounced short, according to the English habit, 

 partly because I do not feel sure that this length was anything but a metrical 

 license unknown to prose, partly because I should not think it advisable to 

 encumber the English lighthorseman with a greater weight of heavy Spondaic 

 armour than he can conveniently carry. On the elevation of tone which natu- 

 rally accompanies the stress, and indeed always seems to have done so at the 

 end of a clause, I do not curiously insist, the accent being sufficiently 

 marked without it. As little do I endeavour to distinguish between a long 

 accented syllable, as in nrjvr), and a circumflex, as in {xaXkov, though I have not 

 the slightest difficulty myself in bringing out the combination of rising and falling 

 inflexion on the same syllable which the circumflex properly denotes. Thus, in 

 the reading of prose, which should be continued assiduously for six months or 

 a year before poetry is meddled with : I then take up Homer, and forthwith 

 intimate to my students that, as the whole doctrine of Greek metres was a part 

 of the science of music, it necessarily followed the laws of that science, and 

 can be understood only by an entire subordination or sinking of the spoken accent 

 in the first place, and a recitation according to the regularly recurrent beats of 

 the rhythm. This, which teachers imagine to be so difficult, is one of the 

 easiest things in the world. Most human beings have ears, and can beat time. 

 Even serpents, and elephants, and dancing bears can do this. And in order 

 that the rhythm may be thoroughly worked into the ear, I have no objec- 

 tion even to what may be called a little sing-song at starting ; but the pupil, of 

 course, as he advances, must be trained to counteract the monotony of mere 

 rhythm by that variety which a proper attention to expression and punctuation 

 produces. In this way, the whole perplexing and tedious doctrine of accent 

 and quantity is learned from beginning to end by the ear • the pain of prosody 

 becomes a pleasure ; accent and quantity learn to observe their proper bounds, 

 each, happy in his recognised domain, forgetting all thought of making a hostile 

 invasion into the territory of the other. The only difficulty in the matter arises 

 from the necessity of teaching a number of thoughtless and idle young men to 

 unlearn all that lumber of false quantities and false accents which has either been 

 systematically built up, or carelessly allowed to accumulate in the schools ; but 

 this is a difficulty which it is in the power of schoolmasters, and of schoolmas- 

 ters alone, radically to remove. And I feel convinced that, so soon as a radical 

 reform in this matter shall be seriously undertaken by teachers, not only will 

 the inculcation of classical Greek be much facilitated, but the organs of utter- 

 ance being rendered more flexible and more amenable to training, will accom- 

 modate themselves to the characteristic peculiarities of German, French, and 

 other living orthoepies, with an aptitude the want of which is now so frequently 

 lamented. 



