I have strictly limited myself in these lectures to the humble function of giving practical advice to the translator of Homer. He, I still think, must not follow so confidently, as makers of English hexameters have hitherto followed, Mr. Munro’s maxim,—quantity may be utterly discarded. He must not, like Mr. Longfellow, make seventeen a dactyl in spite of all the length of its last syllable, even though he can plead that in counting we lay the accent on the first syllable of this word. He may be far from attaining Mr. Spedding’s nicety of ear;—may be unable to feel that ‘while quantity is a dactyl, quiddity is a tribrach,’ and that ‘rapidly is a word to which we find no parallel in Latin;’—but I think he must bring himself to distinguish, with Mr. Spedding, between ‘th’ o’erwearied eyelid,’ and ‘the wearied eyelid,’ as being, the one a correct ending for an hexameter, the other an ending with a false quantity in it; instead of finding, with Mr. Munro, that this distinction ‘conveys to his mind no intelligible idea.’ He must temper his belief in Mr. Munro’s dictum,—quantity must be utterly discarded,—by mixing with it a belief in this other dictum of the same author,—two or more consonants take longer time in enunciating than one.[1]
- ↑ Substantially, however, in the question at issue between Mr. Munro and Mr. Spedding, I agree with Mr. Munro. By the italicised words in the following sentence, ‘The rhythm of the Virgilian hexameter depends entirely on cæsura, pause, and a due arrangement of words,’ he has touched, it seems to me, in the constitution of this
