TERENTIAN METRES. Few subjects connected with Latin literature have been treated with lees success than the principles and laws which govern the metres of Latin comedy. The majority of readers seem to look upon the writings of Plautus and Terence as mere bumble prose arbitrarily distributed so as to present to the eye the appearance of verse without its realities. For them it would be better if the whole were printed consecutively, and such an arrange ment would in fact be supported by not a few of the existing manu scripts. On the other band, there have been writers who have laboured to remove the difficulties that obscure the subject, among whom none before Bentley and Hermann appear to have had any success. Since their time, Bothe, Ritachl, and Fleckcisen have done good service, although the first and second of these recent critics have too frequently been rash in their innovations. Even the writer of the Life of Terence, in the Biographic Universelle ' (published in 1826), gave the following extraordinary criticism upon the metres of Terence :—" The sole rule which he observes with tolerable regularity is to end each verse with an iamb ; and even this limitation he often disregards, as, for instance, in the terminations laic consiste ; si via, nurse jam; audio riotentcr ; hue adducant ; Lane venturam, &c. With regard to the other feet, he freely substitutes for the iamb or spondee, a trochee, anapest, dactyl, double pyrrhic, or four short syllables, and a cretio or short between two longs," &c. This writer thus started with the false impression that all the verses of Terence are reduced by critics to the single metre, called trimeter iambic ; whereas in fact all who have dealt with the subject, except himself, are aware that the poet has at least three forma of verse which end trochaically ; and his second exception is disposed of by the more correct orthography milldam. In England, again, so late as the year 1837, we had a scheme of the Tercntian meters, which for the commonest of those metres, the trimeterdambic, gave us the following scale:— with the additional remarks that quo quid Lune may be a dactyl, that hie quidem eat, studd par, and the three first syllables of roluptati, may pass for anapests, &c., Ac. All this is exceedingly unsatisfactory, and it would be better to abandon the problem as insoluble, than to give currency to extravaganoies which would enable us to find in any given chapter of Ciesar a series of trimetcr•iambies.
It must be admitted that the metres of the Greek dramatists, and more particularly of the tragedians, gratify the ear with rhythms which, comparatively speaking, are smooth and appreciable. But it ahould be recollected, in the first place, that the Greek Language is distinguished front among other language. by its abundance of words which end in a short syllable, and the advantage to the poet is increased by the large number of instances where these short final syllables have a vowel ending. Compare, for instance, the accuaatives singular Aovoctr, 3ouAor, iroAu', dantora, with tho Latin musam, permit, narim, (contra ; the nominative and accusative plural acupons, danaorat, with the Latin feseis; the numerals /era, arrez, with the Latin siptem, decent ; tit° verbs TVITETC, TVWTOU171, with the Latin seribitis, scribunt ; the pro nouns ite, or, I, with snE, hi, eZ. In fact the Latin language exceeds the
creek in the number of long syllables, as much as the English and tlerman Languages exceed the Latin.
A still more important matter is the question whether, and how far, the written language of the Romans is an exact representative of the spoken Language. It seems to be a condition of language in general that its pronunciation should always be passing through a series of changes, and that those changes should consist for the meet part in the gradual omission of letters and even syllables. Thus the Romau *Rea domina is in madonna ; in French, madame ; in English, madam, ma'am, and even muss and mint. Meanwhile, for the most part, tho changes in orthography are slow, and consequently nearly always in arrear of the orthoepy. Thus it will be found that the sounds of English and German words which appear to the eye so weighed down with consonants, are in the mouth of a native tolerably harmonious. Was such the case with the Roman also f We answer with little hesitation in the affirmative, partly because the laws which now govern language can scarcely have been wanting in ancient Italy, and partly because we find the point established by several incidental remarks m Latin writers. Thus Suctonius says, in his Life of Augustus (c. 88), "Orthography—that is, the laws and principles of writing laid down by grammarians—he was not very observant of, but seems rather to follow the opinion of those who hold that we should write as we speak. For as to his habit of changing or omitting not merely single letters, but even whole syllables, that is a common error." It should be observed, too, that Suetonius had himself seen the hand writing of the emperor. (Ibid, c. 87.) Again, Quintilian Inst.,' xi. 3, 33) says, "As, on the one hand, it is essential that e,yery word should be clearly articulated, so, on tho other hand, to reckon up, if we may so speak, every separate letter, is painful and wearisome." Iu the same chapter he further observes, " Not only in a coalition of vowels very common, but some too of the consonants are disguised (dissimulantsr), when a vowel follows ; " where he must refer to some other letter than in, probably the final s generally and the final d of neuter pronouns. Moreover, l'riscian, who by tho way appears to have written when the Latin language had ceased to be spoken as a living tongue, at times throws out auch conjectures as the following :—" I think that vigil, vigilis, should rather be pronounced per syneopant." We might appeal to Cicero's authority for the fact that a final a was frequently omitted in pronunciatiou. But there are still other argu ments in support of the principle for which wo are contending. Within the limits of the Latin language itself we find such changes actually in progesa—as, magi', nisi, elms, argue, °Nue, sive, ticre,videris, riderunt, proridens, mihi, nihil, poptilus, tegunten, opera, pottage, »wrote, norerit, noristi, commit°, becoming severally sage, ni, ipse, nee, ac, sett, nett, vidire, vierjrc, prudens, mi, nil, gals, poplus (compare also poplicus), ttgmen, opra, posse, mak, norit, condo. Principles of etymology would enable us to carry the list out to a vast extent, and this still more, if we employed the analogies of the Greek tongue.