Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/49

38 to do duty as such) coincide, in the second they do not. He says that we cannot be so sure of the accent with which Greek verse should be read as of that with which Latin should; but that the lines of Homer in which the accent and the long syllable coincide as in the English hexameter, are certainly very rare. He suggests a type of English hexameter in agreement with the Virgilian model, and formed on the supposition that ‘quantity is as distinguishable in English as in Latin or Greek by any ear that will attend to it.’ Of the truth of this supposition he entertains no doubt. The new hexameter will, Mr. Spedding thinks, at least have the merit of resembling, in its metrical movement, the classical hexameter, which merit the ordinary English hexameter has not. But even with this improved hexameter he is not satisfied; and he goes on, first to suggest other metres for rendering Homer, and finally to suggest that rendering Homer is impossible.

A scholar to whom all who admire Lucretius owe a large debt of gratitude,—Mr. Munro,—has replied to Mr. Spedding. Mr. Munro declares that ‘the accent of the old Greeks and Romans resembled our accent only in name, in reality was essentially different;’ that ‘our English reading of Homer and Virgil has in itself no meaning;’ and that ‘accent has nothing to do with the Virgilian hexameter.’ If this be so, of course the merit which Mr. Spedding attributes to his own hexameter, of really corresponding