Page:Essays in miniature.djvu/55

 Rh than words—syllables, letters, accents, punctuation.

"Codex A and Codex B, Codex Cantabrigiensis and Codex Cottonianus, were ransacked in turn to show how this noun should be in the dative, not in the accusative; how that verb should have the accent paroxytone, not perispomenon; and how, by all the rules of prosody, there should be an iambus, not a spondee, in this place or that." The lad who has heard all his college life about the wonderful supplement to the Hecuba turns to it with wistful eyes, expecting to find some subtle key to Greek tragedy. "Behold, it is a treatise on certain Greek metres. Its talk is of cæsural pauses, penthemimeral and hephthemimeral, of isochronous feet, of enclitics and cretic terminations; and the grand doctrine it promulgates is expressed in the canon regarding the pause which, from the discoverer, has been named the Porsonian—that when the iambic trimeter after a word of more than one syllable has the cretic termination included either in one word or in two, then the fifth foot must be