Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/267

 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 with the Virgilian hexameter, has no existence. Again; in contradiction to Mr Spedding's assertion that lines in which (in our reading of them) the accent and the long syllable coincide, as in the ordinary English hexameter, are 'rare even in Homer', Mr Munro declares that such lines, 'instead of being rare, are among the very commonest types of Homeric rhythm'. Mr Spedding asserts that 'quantity is as distinguishable in English as in Latin or Greek by any ear that will attend to it'; but Mr Munro replies, that in English 'neither his ear nor his reason recognises any real distinction of quantity except that which is produced by accentuated and unaccentuated syllables'. He therefore arrives at the conclusion that in constructing English hexameters, 'quantity must be