" The only difficulty was that
(even leaving out of question the melodious masses of vowel) these
gentlemen never could get their English hexameters to sound Greek. Did
they look Greek?- that should have been the query, and the reply might
have led to a solution of the riddle. In placing a copy of ancient
hexameters side by side with a copy (in similar type) of such
hexameters as Professor Longfellow, or Professor Felton or the
Frogpondian Professors collectively, are in the shameful practice of
composing "on the model of the Greek," it will be seen that the latter
(hexameters, not professors) are about one-third longer to the eye, on
an average, than the former. The more abundant dactyls make the
difference. And it is the greater number of spondees in the Greek than
in the English, in the ancient than in the modern tongue, which has
caused it to fall out that while these eminent scholars were groping
about in the dark for a Greek hexameter, which is a spondaic rhythm
varied now and then by dactyls, they merely stumbled, to the lasting
scandal of scholarship, over something which, on account of its
long-leggedness, we may as well term a Feltonian hexameter, and
which is a dactylic rhythm interrupted rarely by artificial spondees
which are no spondees at all, and which are curiously thrown in by the
heels at all kinds of improper and impertinent points.
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