In the mind of the present writer, the distinction between accent and quantity has neither been sufficiently attended to nor sufficiently neglected. This is because, in many respects, they are decidedly contrasted with, and opposed to, each other; whilst, at the same time—paradoxical as it may appear—they are, for the majority of practical purposes, convertible. That inadvertence on these points should occur, is not to be wondered at. Professional grammarians—men who deal with the purely philological questions of metre and syllabification—with few exceptions, confound them.
In English Latin (by which I mean Latin as pronounced by Englishmen) there is, in practice, no such a thing as quantity; so that the sign by which it is denoted is, in nine cases out of ten, superfluous. Mark the accent, and the quantity will take care of itself.
I say that there is no such a thing in English Latin as quantity. I ought rather to have said that
English quantities are not Latin quantities.
In Latin, the length of the syllable is determined by the length of the vowels and consonants combined. A long vowel, if followed in the same word by another (i. e. if followed by no consonant), is short. A short vowel, if followed by two consonants, is long. In English, on the other hand, long vowels make long, whilst short vowels make short, syllables; so that the quantity of a syllable in English is determined by the quantity of the vowel. The i in pius is short in Latin. In English it is long. The e in mend is short in English, long in Latin.
This, however, is not all. There is, besides, the following metrical paradox. A syllable may be made long by the very fact of its being short. It is the practice of the English language to signify the shortness of a vowel by doubling the consonant that follows. Hence we get such words as pitted, knotty, massive, &c.—words in which no one considers that the consonant is actually doubled. For do we not pronounce pitted and pitied alike? Consonants that appear double to the eye are common enough. Really double consonants—consonants that sound double to the ear—are rarities, occurring in one class of words only—viz. in compounds whereof the first element ends with the same sound with which the second begins, as soul-less, book-case, &c.
The doubling, then, of the consonant is a conventional mode of expressing the shortness of the vowel that precedes, and it addresses itself to the eye rather than the ear.
But does it address itself to the eye only? If it did, pitied and pitted, being sounded alike, would also be of the same quantity. We know, however, that to the English writer of Latin verses they are not so. We know that the first is short (pĭtied), the latter long (pītted). For all this, they are sounded alike: so that the difference in quantity (which, as a metrical fact, really exists) is, to a great degree, conventional. At any rate, we arrive at it by a secondary process. We know how the word is spelt; and we know that certain modes of spelling give certain rules of metre. Our senses here are regulated by our experience.
Let a classical scholar hear the first line of the Eclogues read—