phrases, that no doubt they were to be found in Terence and Plautus, but that they had become quite antiquated in his time; others he knew to be in Catullus and Lucretius, but that he and his contemporaries would not have ventured to use them. Of others he would profess himself to be utterly ignorant, though perhaps he would not take on him to assert that they were bad,-these came from Juvenal, Statius, and others, down to Claudian; finally, he might light on some which he would pronounce to be absolute solecisms and barbarisms,— namely, modern ideas and phraseology in a Latin dress.

In fact, modern Latin poetry is an exotic, a mere hothouse plant, which evermore reminds us that it does not spring from the soil. He that writes it is always held down by secret chains, his wings are clipped, and he can never soar into the regions of poetic space. Spite of himself he must be a mere ape of the ancients, for he may be called on to give his authority for every term he employs. Look at Milton's lines on the deaths of the Bishops of Winchester and Ely, and compare them with those on the Marchioness of Winchester, written about the same time, and the difference between compositions in a living and in a dead language will be apparent. How fortunate was it that he did not write his Ode on the Nativity in Latin; the same ideas and sentiments might no doubt have been there, but how differently expressed! Beautiful as Milton's Latin poetry must be confessed to be, it probably does not find, even among those familiar with the language, one reader for fifty readers of his English poetry, and few perhaps ever read his Latin poems without a secret wish that he had written them in English.

We are, it must be again confessed, no friends to

modern Greek and Latin poetry; and it is to us a matter of sincere regret that in our systems of education so much time should be devoted to it that we think might be far better employed. Possibly Milton himself was of our opinion, for he has not included it in his plan of education. Prose composition in both languages, if not carried too far,* we deem to be of advantage; what we disapprove of is, making all, without exception, whether favoured by nature or not with poetic power, writers of Greek and Latin verses. The usual reason given is, that it makes them understand better, and relish more highly, the classic poetry. Of this we doubt; and if it be the truth, why not apply the same principle to their own language? why not make them writers of blank verse and Spenserian stanzas? In the French Alexandrines and the Italian Terza and Ottava Rima there are niceties and peculiarities which require to be understood in order to enjoy them fully, and yet we have never heard of any master setting his pupils to compose them. There is further, we think, this evil, that from so much importance being attached to mere versification, a trifling turn of mind, and a habit of attending more to form than to substance, is apt to be engendered.† We would say then, let the structure of the hexameter and the other forms of classic verse be carefully taught in schools, and let prizes, if it be deemed advisable, be offered in the universities, as is the custom, for poetic compositions in

Latin prose is now little used among us, except for inscriptions and for notes on the Classics, both of which are better in English.

+ When Burke said vectigal, there was a general laugh in the House of Commons at his ignorance of quantity,-they meant accent; for there was probably not one there who would not have pronounced mos, dos, and Dic mihi Damætas as Dick my high Damatas. How many were there among them who understood the Classics as well as Burke?

the classic languages, and those who have the requisite natural powers will soon appear, as is the case with prizes for English composition; but do not, for the sake of a favoured few, torture and waste the time of hundreds to whom nature has refused poetic talent. It is Latin verse that we have chiefly in view; for such are the niceties of the use of cases, tenses, and prepositions in Greek, that we regard it as almost impossible for a modern-it was probably equally so for an ancient Roman-to write in that language so as to escape the charge of barbarism from an old Athenian.*

Milton, as we have seen, would have Latin pronounced in the Italian manner. With respect to the vowels, we quite agree with him; for what can be more absurd than to pronounce amare, for instance, one way in Latin and another in Italian? As to the consonants, it is of less importance; for Cicero is as near as Chichero to the name which the Romans pronounced Kikero. There is however one sound which we have introduced, and which Milton's delicate ear abhorred in any language, that we would fain see banished, namely, that of sh, for c and t before i; as raisho, a dissyllable, for ratio, a trisyllable, with hard. We surely also might pay some attention to quantity, and not pronounce mōs, rōs, dōs, like moss, ross, doss, to say nothing of such a monster as mihi (mỹ high) for the Latin mihi, where h merely serves by way of diæresis, as in the French trahir. We seem also to make it a rule to pronounce the vowel of the antepenultimate long when it is accented.

*We must however inform the advocates for the present system that we were not educated on it; so they may apply to us, if they will, the fable of the fox that lost his tail. Still we think we have as keen a relish as any of them, for the poetry of Greece and Rome.

By our manner of reading Greek and Latin verse, we actually lose nearly all the poetic melody. In hexameters and sapphics, no doubt the two last feet frequently retain their proper melody in our mode of reading, but it is lost almost everywhere else. Most certainly the Greeks and Romans read their verses metrically, that is, with the accent on the first syllable of the dactyl and trochee, on the last of the anapast and the iamb. This is quite clear, from their lyric poetry, the Odes of Horace for example, for the accents must fall regularly in verses which are to be sung. French verse presents a parallel: the accents in songs are different from those of the same words as ordinarily pronounced; and this seems to have been the case with all French verse, even as low down as Marot, as it was in the Provençal, and to a less extent in Spanish and Italian. It is also the system of our own old verse, as may be seen in Chaucer, Gower, and others, down to the sixteenth century.

We will give one line from the Æneis as an example. Virgil undoubtedly read as follows:

Mc's erat Hésperió 'n Latio, quæ maxia Roma.

An English scholar would probably read as follows:

Mos e'rat Hesperio in La'sho, etc.

By changing the quantity and the accents, the melody of the first four feet, it is plain, is quite lost. Must not then the melody which we think we find in alcaics, iambics, and other forms, be almost purely imaginary? at least, be very different from what the ancients found in them? In Greek we make matters still worse, for neglecting the printed accents which are before our eyes, we introduce the Latin system of placing the accent on the

penultimate when long, and of never placing it on the last syllable.*

We will not say that Milton was so negligent of quantity as to say moss for mōs, etc., but as we have shown above, he certainly did not read Latin poetry metrically. We doubt if any one did in his time. Bentley, we know, scouted the very idea of that mode of reading it. It has however been revived in Germany, and, we believe, is used by all the scholars of that country.

We can answer for ourselves that before we learned to read metrically, we often thought that the Greek tragedies might just as well have been printed as prose. Read the fine anapasts with which the Persæ begins in the modern manner, and then metrically, and mark the difference! We once got a Greek to read some of Homer for us; he read it by the printed accents, and of course we could not discern even a trace of metric harmony. Yet he thought it very fine.