Page:An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.djvu/15

Rh into equal or equivalent lengths, the regular and expected recurrence of which is the source of a peculiar pleasure. Quantity is an improvement which can only have sprung up among those whose ears had long been trained in the strict observance of metre. By Quantity is meant the volume, or time, or weight of a syllable. A 'false quantity' consists in giving to a syllable a sound larger, longer, and heavier,—or on the other hand smaller, shorter, and lighter,—than that which the ear expects. It is obvious that constant study and observation would tend to determine the quantity of all syllables which it was possible to use in poetry; and not their natural quantity only, i.e. the weight which they had when standing alone, but also the quantity given them by their position before other syllables. This work of quantifying—as it may be called—after being carried to great perfection among the Greeks, was by them imparted to the Romans. Then it was that, 'horridus ille Defluxit numerus Saturnius,' the rough stumbling measure of Naevius and earlier poets went into disuse, and metre perfected by quantity, in the various moulds,—hexameter, elegiac, alcaic, &c.,—which Greek invention had created, took its place.

Crites rightly extols the metre and quantity of the ancients; his mistake is in inferring, because the ancients did not use rhyme, that therefore it should be eschewed by the moderns. Neander, or Dryden, states correctly enough that when Roman society was broken up, and the Latin tongue, upon the invasions of the Barbarians, had become corrupted into several