Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/224

150 he calls it afterwards when he had it, and found it was in lyric measures.

and originally signified only a mournful or funeral song, an elegy as we say in English, referring to the subject of the song, and not to the measure. But elegies being generally writ in hexameters and pentameters, the word came afterwards to be applied purely to the measure, without any regard to the subject. However, this second sense of the word did not so far prevail as absolutely to extinguish the first: still and  were now and then employed in a looser meaning than what the grammarians put upon 'em, and of this I will give the Doctor one plain instance from a darling author of his—Dion Chrysostome, who in his 4th book De Regno calls the heroic verses written on Sardanapalus's tomb, and Aristophanes, speaking of the nightingale, has this passage:

where can signify nothing but a melancholy tune, or mournful song; unless our grammarian can