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- ding, between 'th' o'er-wearied eyelid', and
'the wearied eyelid', as being, the one a correct ending for a 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].
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*
- ↑ Substantially, however, in the question at issue between Mr Munro and Mr Spedding, I agree with Mr Munro. By the italicized 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 hexameter, the central point which Mr Spedding 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
