This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1904. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... centual."1 Just as in English poetry there is a continual dissension between the naturalised French measures, decasyllabic, octosyllabic, &c, and the licentious spirit of the language, which will not count the syllables exactly, so in Latin the tunes of common speech interfered with the strict use of prosody. The analogies between English and Latin poetry are striking, when their histories are compared. The Latin Saturnian, it has often been thought, had the same fortune as the English alliterative verse; Chaucer is "our English Ennius," and his contemptuous allusion to the older fashion of poetry--"I cannot geste Rom Ram Rdp by lettre," is in the same spirit as the slighting reference to Nsevius in the younger poet's Annals:--"Scripsere alii rem Vorsubu' quos olim Fauni vatesque canebant." Ennius is all for the Greek prosody in Latin, as Chaucer is for the French metres in English. But there is a closer resemblance than this analogy of Saturnian and alliterative English, in the practice of the English and Latin poets who adopted the foreign models and did their best to be regular. Chaucer's verse is not the same as his French masters wrote; it does not keep the French rules exactly, and its graces and beauties are not those of the French. The Latin poets wrote like Homer, as near as they could, but they could not escape from their language: in Virgil and Ovid there are traces of the Italian Faun--vestiges of the old poetical diction, an emphasis which is not Greek, but comes down from the ancient days, before the vates and the Camense had made way for the Greek Muses. Greek metres were brought into agreement with the accent of Latin speech. One of the marvellous things in Latin at the end of the classical age is the effect of the accent in the Pervigilium Vener...