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Miss Hurribattle, who looked as if she had some doubt whether poor Prosody was a man or an animal, returned a non-committal, "Indeed! I am very glad of it," but soon after added, "Was he a favorite dog?" "A dog!" exclaimed the Colonel, whose family-history, dates and all, seemed to course his veins instead of blood, "he was my many times great uncle!
The Colonel, who had now exhausted conversation with Miss Prosody, had leisure to observe the determined flirtation of young Vavasour with Bluebell.
The tragic, epic, and lyric muses, were silent and inglorious: the bards of Constantinople seldom rose above a riddle or epigram, a panegyric or tale; they forgot even the rules of prosody; and with the melody of Homer yet sounding in their ears, they confound all measure of feet and syllables in the impotent strains which have received the name of political or city verses.
Ted was motor-mad as Eunice was movie-mad. A thousand sarcastic refusals did not check his teasing for a car of his own. However lax he might be about early rising and the prosody of Vergil, he was tireless in tinkering.
The misfortune was that the classics were not taught as literature at all, but as exercises in grammar and prosody. They were dissected by teachers who were simply lecturers on the science of language, and who had not large views even about that.
Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers.
His rank, unweeded eloquence, abounding in a play of words, rabbinic allegories, verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he professed to despise, with a shameless image here or there, product not of formal method, but of Neapolitan improvisation, was akin to the heady wine, the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery, volcanic soil, fertile in the irregularities which manifest power.
No more theses, no more glosses upon the fingers or upon benedictions, hey?" Aramis smiled. "I will make verses," said he. "Yes, I dare say; verses perfumed with the odor of the billet from the attendant of Madame de Chevreuse. Teach Bazin prosody; that will console him. As to the horse, ride him a little every day, and that will accustom you to his maneuvers."
The thing he could not forgive, however, and which infuriated him most, was the workmanship of the hexameters, beating like empty tin cans and extending their syllabic quantities measured according to the unchanging rule of a pedantic and dull prosody.
Taking advantage of the tendency to shorten final vowels, he fixed almost every doubtful case as short, e.g. musa, patre, dare, omnibus, amaveris, pater, only leaving the long syllable where the metre required it, as condiderit. By this means he gave a dactylic direction to Latin prosody which it afterwards, though only slightly, extended.
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