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I. ACCENT AND RHYME IN LATIN CHRISTIAN POETRY.

1. There is one class of critics, whose verdict on the Latinity of early and medieval hymns, and of similar compositions modelled after them, may with perfect confidence be anticipated. We refer to those who, coming direct from the study of the classical standards, would apply the rules, which Catullus or Horace observed, in the structure of their verses, to the compositions of Hildebert, or Adam of St Victor, or Thomas of Celano. It is not enough to remind these critics, of what they ought to remember, that a much less restrained use of iambic and trochaic feet than Horace would have chosen, served the purposes of Plautus and. Terence. If they have made no study of medieval sacred poetry, they must be told, that without abating in the smallest degree, their admiration of the artistic success, with which the masters of Lyrical Latin verse have moulded their prosody, according to their Greek exemplars, they must study later developments of the Latin tongue before pronouncing a judgment on them. These later developments, as they will find, embrace a new literature of many centuries, which has brought out a native capacity of Latin, to embody thought and feeling, as far above the range of Horace, as the heaven is higher than the earth.*

A modern tractate, extending over ninety-two pages, has been issued

* It is remarkable that the Venerable Bede, who had cultivated Latin sacred poetry with no small success, who was an accomplished Greek scholar, and thus knew the genesis of Latin classical prosody, has given us a treatise 'De arte metrica.' After treating of Metre, he introduces Rhythm, of which he says: 'Est verborum compositio non metrica ratione, sed numero syllabarum, ad judicium aurium examinata.' The titles of two of his chapters are these: (15.) Quod et auctoritas sæpe et necessitas metricorum decreta violet. (16.) Ut prisci poetae quaedam aliter quam moderni proposuerint. He allows great licence, on which George Buchanan would have frowned, in substituting other than iambic feet in any except the last of an iambic tetrameter; and while he defends the third foot of a Trochaic tetrameter against the intrusion of any but a trochee, he yet surrenders this, and says: 'Aliquando et tertio loco prioris versicuti spondeum reperies.' We could quote from the 'Dies iræ,' the 'Stabat mater,' and other models of the best mediæval and more modern rhythm, evidence that this licence given by Bede, eleven hundred years ago, has been used as occasion has required ever since his day.

(A.D. 1851) by Chr. Theophilus Schuch, ‘De poesis Latinæ rhythmis et rimis,' the very title of which accurately indicates the two points of departure from the classical standard, from which the Christian poets began to diverge early in the fourth century, or even before that time; gradually forsaking the old authorities, until they succeeded, by slow degrees, in establishing a system of their own. During the lapse of several hundred years, Christian poetry laboured almost unconsciously to establish accent and rhyme, as ruling qualities of verse. Both of these were native to Latin, though latent in the language, so long as it continued, under the hands of the classical poets, to be ruled by quantity. The tardy process of this development of rhyme and accent, is traced by Schuch, as its classical basis had previously been by Archbishop Trench; and both writers have given a series of quotations, to which we refer those who desire to examine a change, the full history of which has not yet been written.

2. On this special department, we adopt the criticism of another, rather than offer any of our own. We accept the views of Archbishop Trench, the highest living authority on this subject, who has done more than all other English writers in diffusing sound views on this part of sacred literature, and in originating a taste for ancient Christian Lyrics. In the introduction to his 'Sacred Latin Poetry,' he has explained and defended those reasons, which gradually led to the substitution of accent for quantity, and has satisfactorily established the following positions : (1) That Christianity needed forms more free and elastic, than those by which the Roman poets bound themselves, in order adequately to express her mind and heart; and that the artifices of the Latin prosody, and especially those which were cultivated with so much success, by the most eminent of the classical Lyric poets, would have been bondage to men, who had derived from their Christianity a new system of lofty thought and sentiment, which sought utterance in forms not imposed upon her, but chosen and dictated by herself. (2) Again, he shows that, in virtue of the inherent right and power, by which the religion of Christ was to make all things new, the Christian poets, in due time, began to cast off the bondage of classical quantity, in order to have, at their command,

certain words and expressions, needed for their purposes; and he instances Prudentius, and even an earlier, though less distinguished, Christian poet, Commodianus, as examples of men who were impatient of the restraint which rigid adherence to classical authority would have imposed. (3.) Still further, the liberties used with classical Latin verse implied not merely the disuse of certain prosodial structures of the Greek type, but involved a new adaptation, to new thought, of classical quantity, by making the accent of a word dominate, when unavoidable, over its quantity. The Archbishop boldly asserts a fact, which many admirers of the purely classical standard are very apt, from their too exclusive knowledge of their only models, to forget: he takes this position, from which he cannot be displaced, that the system of classical quantity, as superseding accent, is not indigenous to the Latin tongue; that so far is quantity from being an ineradicable growth, the language might have set itself, as almost all other languages have done, free from this borrowed constraint, and might have put itself under the rule of accent, had it not been brought under the dominion of the earlier and finer literature of Greece, in which quantity was a native element.

3. It is not needful to quote authorities in defence of rhyme, of which Christian Latin poetry gradually availed itself, as a compensation for those wonderful musical cadences which it surrendered, in exchanging the system of long and short syllables for accent. Rhyme, of which many examples can be gathered from the classics, as ornaments accepted sometimes, though not sought by the ancient poets, might be quoted,* to prove that this ornament was (unlike quantity) native to Latin, though of later and tardy growth, inasmuch as it was introduced as the compensating alternative of quantity. All we insist upon is this,-that rhyme is indigenous to the Latin soil, is no exotic transplanted from Arabic or Celtic ground; and that few languages, if any, are more rich in rhyming resources, than that in which Cicero spoke, and Virgil and Horace sang. While we honour these poets

* Schuch and Archbishop Trench both cite many examples of classical rhymes. They occur in Ennius, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Martial, Lucian, Claudian. The examples given by Schuch, are especially copious; and he draws not a few Greek instances from Homer, and from the Greek Tragic and Comic writers.

(A.D. 1851) by Chr. Theophilus Schuch, De poesis Latina rhythmis et rimis,' the very title of which accurately indicates the two points of departure from the classical standard, from which the Christian poets began to diverge early in the fourth century, or even before that time; gradually forsaking the old authorities, until they succeeded, by slow degrees, in establishing a system of their own. During the lapse of several hundred years, Christian poetry laboured almost unconsciously to establish accent and rhyme, as ruling qualities of verse. Both of these were native to Latin, though latent in the language, so long as it continued, under the hands of the classical poets, to be ruled by quantity. The tardy process of this development of rhyme and accent, is traced by Schuch, as its classical basis had previously been by Archbishop Trench; and both writers have given a series of quotations, to which we refer those who desire to examine a change, the full history of which has not yet been written.

2. On this special department, we adopt the criticism of another, rather than offer any of our own. We accept the views of Archbishop Trench, the highest living authority on this subject, who has done more than all other English writers in diffusing sound views on this part of sacred literature, and in originating a taste for ancient Christian Lyrics. In the introduction to his 'Sacred Latin Poetry,' he has explained and defended those reasons, which gradually led to the substitution of accent for quantity, and has satisfactorily established the following positions : (1) That Christianity needed forms more free and elastic, than those by which the Roman poets bound themselves, in order adequately to express her mind and heart; and that the artifices of the Latin prosody, and especially those which were cultivated with so much success, by the most eminent of the classical Lyric poets, would have been bondage to men, who had derived from their Christianity a new system of lofty thought and sentiment, which sought utterance in forms not imposed upon her, but chosen and dictated by herself. (2) Again, he shows that, in virtue of the inherent right and power, by which the religion of Christ was to make all things new, the Christian poets, in due time, began to cast off the bondage of classical quantity, in order to have, at their command,

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