Ut bélli signum Laurénti Túrnus ab árce.
but
Ut belli signúm.
O dear! and can you, courteous and well-instructed reader, positively read your ‘Georgics’ or ‘Æneid’ in that way? Do you, as a habit, scan as you go along? Do you not feel it very awkward, must not the Romans also have felt it rather awkward, to pass so continually and violently from the ordinary to the sing-song accentuation? And if, as I think you must allow, there was some awkwardness in it, why is it that Virgil, and the other good versifiers, so constantly prefer that form of verse in which this awkwardness most appears? Why is
Spárgens húmida mélla, soporíférúmque papáver,
where there is no such difficulty, a rare form, and ‘Ut bélli sígnum,’ where there is, a common and favourite one? Do you know, I shall venture to assert, that in the Latin language the system of accentuation was this, which enjoined the awkwardness you complain of; the separation, in general, of the colloquial and the metrical accent, the very opposite of that which we observe, who, unless the two coincide, think the verse bad. Enough of this, however.
Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past—come back, my dear sir, we will talk no more prosody—only just allow me to recite to you a few verses of metaphrase, as they used to say, from the ‘Odyssey’; constructed as nearly as may be upon the ancient principle; quantity, so far as, in our forward-rushing, consonant-crushing, Anglo-savage enunciation—long and short can in any kind be detected, quantity attended to in the first place, and care also bestowed, in the second, to have the natural accents very frequently laid upon syllables which the metrical reading depresses.
The aged Nestor, sitting among his sons at Pylos, is telling Telemachus, who has come from Ithaca to ask tidings of his father, how, after the taking of Troy, the insolence and violence of the Achæans called down upon them the displeasure of the Father of the Gods and the stern blue-eyed virgin, his daughter. Agamemnon and Meneläus, flushed with wine, quarrelled openly in an assembly held at sunset, which broke up in disorder and tumult; the leaders, some of them, staying behind to please Agamemnon; others, drawing down their ships without delay and sailing off with Ulysses, came as far as Tenedos, and then turned again back. But I, says Nestor—
But I, with my ships in a body, the whole that obeyed me,
Fled, well perceiving that wrath was rising against us;