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'Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you,
To a mortal? but ye are without old age and immortal.
Was it that ye, with man, might have your thousands of sorrows?
For than man, indeed, there breathes no wretcheder creature,
Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving'.
Here I will observe that the use of 'own', in the second line for the last syllable of a dactyl, and the use of 'To a', in the fourth, for a complete spondee, though they do not, I think, actually spoil the run of the hexameter, are yet undoubtedly instances of that over-reliance on accent, and too free disregard of quantity, which Lord Redesdale visits with just reprehension[1].*
- ↑ It must be remembered, however, that, if we disregard quantity too much in constructing English hexameters, we also disregard accent too much in reading Greek hexameters. We read every Greek dactyl so as to make a pure dactyl of it; but, to a Greek, the accent must have hindered many dactyls from sounding as pure dactyls. When we read <g>αἰόλος</g> ἵππος, for instance, or <g>αἰγιόχοιο</g>, the dactyl in each of these cases is made by us as pure a dactyl as 'Tityre', or 'dignity'; but to a Greek it was not so. To him αἰόλος must have been nearly as impure a dactyl as 'death-destined' is to us; and αἰγιόχ nearly as impure as the 'dressed his own' of my text. Nor, I think, does this right mode of pronouncing the two words at all spoil the run of the line as a hexameter. The effect of <g>αἰόλλος</g> ἵππος (or something like that), though not our effect, is not a disagreeable one. On the other hand, κορυθαιόλος as a paroxytonon, although it has the respectable
