Criticism is so apt in general to be vague and impalpable, that when it gives us a solid and definite possession, such as is Mr. Spedding’s parallel of the Virgilian and the English hexameter with their difference of accentuation distinctly marked, we cannot be too grateful to it. It is in the way in which Mr. Spedding proceeds to press his conclusions from the parallel which he has drawn out, that his criticism seems to me to come a little short. Here even he, I think, shows (if he will allow me to say so) a little of that want of pliancy and suppleness so common among critics, but so dangerous to their criticism; he is a little too absolute in imposing his metrical laws, he too much forgets the excellent maxim of Menander, so applicable to literary criticism:
Καλὸν οἱ νόμοι σφόδρ’ εἰσίν· ὁ δ’ ὁρων τοὺς νόμους
λίαν ἀκριβως, συκοφάντης φαίνεται·
hexameter, the central point, which Mr. Spadding misses. The accent, or heightened tone, of Virgil in reading his own hexameters, was probably far from being the same thing as the accent or stress with which we read them. The general effect of each line, in Virgil’s mouth, was probably therefore something widely different from what Mr. Spedding assumes it to have been: an ancient’s accentual reading was something which allowed the metrical beat of the Latin line to be far more perceptible than our accentual reading allows it to be.
On the question as to the real rhythm of the ancient hexameter, Mr. Newman has in his Reply a page quite admirable for force and precision. Here he is in his element, and his ability and acuteness have their proper scope. But it is true that the modern reading of the ancient hexameter is what the modern hexameter has to imitate, and that the English reading of the Virgilian hexameter is as Mr. Spedding describes it. Why this reading has not been imitated by the English hexameter, I have tried to point out in the text.
