Or perhaps it was Horace's
Maece¦nas, atavis ¦¦ edite reg¦ibus.
We were told, of course, that it was not all quite as simple as this: that there were frequent metrical variations, such as trochees changing places with dactyls, and anapests with iambi; that feet could be inverted, so that a trochaic line might begin with an iambus, an anapestic line with a dactyl, or vice versa; that syllables might be omitted at the beginning or the end or even in the middle of a line, and that this "cutting-off" was called catalexis; that syllables might even be added at the beginning or end of certain lines and that these syllables were called hypermetric; and that we must be very watchful about pauses, particularly about a somewhat mysterious chief pause, liable to occur about the middle of a line, called a caesura. But the magic password to admit us to this unknown world of Greek and Roman prosody was after all the word Quantity.
If a few of us were bold enough to ask the main difference between this Roman system of versification and the system which governed modern English poetry—even such rude playground verse as
"Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,
Catch a nigger by the toe"—
we were promptly told by the teacher that the difference was a very plain one, namely, that English, like all the Germanic languages, obeyed in its verse the principles of Stress. Instead of looking for "long" and "short" syllables, we had merely to look for "stressed" and "unstressed" syllables. It was a matter, not of quantity, but of accent; and if we remembered this fact, there was no harm but rather a great convenience, in retaining the technical names of classical versification. Only we must be careful that by "iambus," in English poetry, we meant an unstressed syllable, rather than a short syllable followed by a long one. And so with "trochee," "dactyl," "anapest" and the rest; if we knew that accent and not quantity was what we really had in mind, it was proper enough to speak of Paradise Lost as written in "iambic pentameter," and Evangeline in "dactylic hexameter," etc. The trick was to count stresses and not syllables, for was not Coleridge's Christabel written in a metre which varied its syllables anywhere from four to twelve for the line, yet maintained its music by regularity of stress?
Nothing could be plainer than all this. Yet some of us discovered when we went to college and listened to instructors who grew strangely excited over prosody, that it was not all as easy as this distinction between Quantity and Stress would seem to indicate. For we were now told that the Greek and Roman habits of daily speech in prose had something to do with their instinctive choice of verse-rhythms: that at the very time when the Greek heroic hexameters were being composed, there was a natural dactylic roll in spoken prose; that Roman daily speech had a stronger stress than Greek, so that Horace, in imitating Greek lyric measures, had stubborn natural word-accents to reconcile with his quantitative measures; that the Roman poets, who had originally allowed normal word-accent and verse-pulse to coincide for the most part, came gradually to enjoy a certain clash between them, keeping all the while the quantitative principle dominant; so that when Virgil and Horace read their verses aloud, and word-accent and verse-pulse fell upon different syllables, the verse-pulse yielded slightly to the word-accent, thus adding something of the charm of conversational prose to the normal time-values of the rhythm. In a word, we were now taught—if I may quote from a personal letter of a distinguished American Latinist—that "the almost universal belief that Latin verse is a matter of quantity only is a mistake. Word-accent was not lost in Latin verse."
And then, as if this undermining of our schoolboy faith in pure Quantity were not enough, came the surprising information that the Romans had kept, perhaps from the beginning of their poetizing, a popular type of accented verse, as seen in the rude chant of the Roman legionaries,
Mílle Fráncos mílle sémel Sármatás occídimús. [Footnote: See C. M. Lewis, Foreign Sources of Modern English Versification. Halle, 1898.]
Certainly those sun-burnt "doughboys" were not bothering themselves about trochees and iambi and such toys of cultivated "literary" persons; they were amusing themselves on the march by inventing words to fit the "goose-step." Their