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If we decline to tolerate any borrowed forms in art, if we either set no value on antiquity at all, or attribute to it some magical and unapproachable virtue, or if we will pardon no slips in poets who were forced, for instance, to guess or to discover a multitude of syllabic quantities, then we had better let this class of literature alone.
Take the following example: The syllabic value of the final e, already weakening in the London of Chaucer's later days, was more or less of an archaism even with his most immediate followers, none of whom use it with his unvarying correctness, and it soon became literally a dead letter.
Giotto, Era Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Gentile da Fabriano, Ghirlandajo, names like the beads of a rosary, commence the list, to which Botticelli, Perugino, Raffaello Santi, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Correggio, Tiziano, Veronese, and, last of all, with a name like the blast of a trumpet, the mighty Michael the Archangel, add their syllabic charm.
Sheridan was upon no occasion tempted to utter even a syllabic on the subject, except once for a few minutes, in the year 1787, upon some point relating to the attendance of a witness. To use a quotation which he himself applied to another branch of the question in 1807:
But when I read Chaucer I am forced to the conclusion that what he tried to do was precisely that: to imitate French music; to write English without regard to syllabic accent. The English lyrics of his time and earlier depend on the principle of accent: Sum' mer is' i-cum' en in, Loud' e sing' cuccu';
The peculiarity about it, as the name "syllabic" implies, is that each character is a syllable, and so there is really no spelling in the language.
The Latin comic poets, on the other hand, are negligent in their versification; they trouble themselves very little about syllabic quantity, and the very idea of it is almost lost amidst their many metrical licences. Their language also, at least that of Plautus, is deficient in cultivation and polish.
The chief difference between Troubadour and Gregorian music lies in the fact that the former was syllabic in character; in other words, one note was not held over several syllables, though several notes might be sung upon one syllable.
Women have an art of expressing contempt by syllabic emphasis that men never acquire. It is their failure to accomplish this that induces men to substitute profanity. Nevertheless, as that excellent woman remarked, the things I say in these papers are for the most part opinions. But what of that; what moves the world but opinions what has moved it up to where it is now, but opinions?
His bright eyes shone with pleasure, and his response was so expressive of eager longing, that I at once began the first lesson. Sitting beside him on the ground, I drew the syllabic characters and spent an hour or so in teaching them to him. He had a very retentive memory, and was intensely anxious to learn as rapidly as possible.
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