though it is based on the accentuation which Englishmen give to all Virgil’s lines, and to many of Homer’s,—that the quantity which in Greek or Latin words we feel, or imagine we feel, even though it be unsupported by accent, we do not feel or imagine we feel in English words, when it is thus unsupported. For example, in repeating the Latin line,
Ipsa tibi blandos fundent cunabula flores . . .
an Englishman feels the length of the second syllable of fundent, although he lays the accent on the first; but in repeating Mr. Spedding’s line,
Softly cometh slumber closing th’ o’er wearied eyelid . . .
the English ear, full of the accent on the first syllable of closing, has really no sense at all of any length in its second. The metrical beat of the line is thus quite destroyed.
So when Mr. Spedding proposes a new Anglo-Virgilian hexameter he proposes an impossibility; when he ‘denies altogether that the metrical movement of the English hexameter has any resemblance to that of the Greek,’ he denies too much; when he declares that, ‘were every other metre impossible, an attempt to translate Homer into English hexameters might be permitted, but that such an attempt he himself would never read,’ he exhibits, it seems to me, a little of that obduracy and over-vehemence in liking and disliking,—a remnant, I suppose, of our insular ferocity,—to which English criticism is so
