Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/246

 associations that they are especially interesting to the scientific student of literature.

To touch upon the Plautine metre first, as the formal mark of this transition, all students of Plautus know that the main reason why his scansion is so difficult to ears accustomed to Vergilian and Horatian metres, is that in his plays the old accentual scansion, on which the Saturnian measure was based, modifies and occasionally overrides the Greek scansion by quantity; just as the mixture of accentual and syllabic scansion in Chaucer would seem to mark the junction of Saxon and Norman literatures. But the spirit of the Plautine comedy is even more distinctly transitional than the form. In the prologue to the Casina the difficulty of depicting the manners of a foreign country in such a way as to retain truth yet interest the spectators is clearly illustrated. Two slaves of the same household are seeking in marriage their fellow-slave; but, the marriage of slaves being unknown to the Romans, the difficulty must be explained. "I suppose," says the speaker of the prologue, "that some present are now talking thus among themselves: Faith, what's this now? Slaves' marriage? Would slaves be marrying or asking a wife for themselves? They've introduced a new thing that happens nowhere in the world.' (Novum áttulerunt quód fit nusquam géntium.) But I assert that this is done in Greece and Carthage, and here, too, in our own country in Apulia; in these places slaves' marriages are usually looked after even more carefully than those of freemen."