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The hero, that great heathen champion, has his epic filled full of Christian allusions and Christian morals, because the clerical redactor, in Christian England, could not but intrude these things into old pagan legends evolved by the continental ancestors of our race. Such archaeological anxieties are purely modern. For example, the Greeks clung to the hexameter in Homer.
He had a thousand reasons why the invader should be baffled, from a convenient hexameter in old Bacis’s oracle book, up to the fact that the Greeks used the longest spears. If he found it weary work looking the crowding peril in the face and smiling still, he never confessed it. His friends would marvel at his serenity.
A full period, then, is generally composed of four parts, which may be compared to as many hexameter verses, each of which have their proper points, or particles of continuation, by which they are connected so as to form a perfect period. Such is the following passage in Crassus: "Missos faciant patronos; ipsi prodeant." "Let them dismiss their patrons: let them answer for themselves."
'This is one of Dick's favourite stories, said Alec. 'It would be quite amusing if there were any truth in it. But Dick would not allow himself to be interrupted. 'At mathematics, on the other hand, he was a perfect ass. You know, some people seem to have that part of their brains wanting that deals with figures, and Alec couldn't add two and two together without making a hexameter out of it.
Having learned the composition of the hexameter, which is the easiest of all verses, I had the patience to measure out the greater part of Virgil into feet and quantity, and whenever I was dubious whether a syllable was long or short, immediately consulted my Virgil.
It is called hexameter because each line has six feet: one of these is of two long syllables, called spondee; the other, of three syllables, one long and two short, which is called dactyl. Both are isochronic. These in interchangeable order fill out the hexameter verse. It is called heroic because in it the deeds of the heroes are recounted.
With the principal lyric metres, too, the sapphic and alcaic, he had done what Virgil had done with the dactylic hexameter, carried them to the highest point of which the foreign Latin tongue was capable. They were naturalised, but remained sterile.
With this trait other features are quite accordant his political opposition tinged with radicalism, that here and there appears; his singing the praises of the Greek pleasures of the table; above all his setting aside the last national element in Latin poetry, the Saturnian measure, and substituting for it the Greek hexameter.
Occasionally he imitates Horace, much more often Virgil, and, in the legends, Ovid. His technical manipulation of the hexameter is good, though tinged with monotony. Occasionally he indulges in licenses which mark a deficient ear or an imperfect comprehension of the theory of quantity.
Horrentia Martis arma is worse than any of the rest. Horrentia is such a flat epithet as Tully would have given us in his verses. It is a mere filler to stop a vacancy in the hexameter, and connect the preface to the work of Virgil. Our author seems to sound a charge, and begins like the clangour of a trumpet: "Arma, virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris,"
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