Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/81

 Rh France and Italy." This did not exhaust the abuse. He quoted as applicable to Warner, the sentence of Gray on Eusden, once poet-laureate. "Eusden was a person of great hopes in his youth, though at last he turned out a ." The words in the original are "drunken parson," and the reference seems to me a hit below the belt.

In 1797 our Doctor published without his name a little work, issued at 3s. sewed, with the grand title of "Metronariston, or a new pleasure recommended in a dissertation upon a part of Greek & Latin prosody." He had been drawn to a study of the subject by a chance walk with "a learned ecclesiastic at Rome" in the Campo Vaccino, the old Forum, and the Via Sacra. In the latter quarter the priest naturally quoted the Horatian line "Ibam forte via sacra, sicut meus est mos" and quoted it with a "quantity too new and pleasing to my ear to be passed unnoticed." Through his old friend, John Nichols, the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, the brochure was reviewed in that periodical [March 1797 p. 232] as endeavouring "with much good sense & great pleasantry wholly to explode the present long-established doctrines of quantity and accent and apparently with very great success." Warner wished, to use his own words, that Greek and Latin verses should be read "with a strict observance of the Measure, or as we commonly call it, the Quantity of the syllables." The dedication, a wordy dedication of twelve pages, to Jacob Bryant, the well-known classical scholar, was signed "a disciple of Mekerchus" and prefixed to the volume was a portrait of that worthy. Thereupon the editor of that journal inserted in the April number an account of Mekerchus and a reproduction of his portrait. His name was Meetkercke, derived from an estate almost half-way between Bruges and Blankenberghe. This was possibly the estate with a glorious mediæval barn, about a mile from the station, and about the same distance from