taritis_, _[)[ae]]qu[)a]bilitas_, _imb[)e]cillus_,
_susp[)i]cionem_, but _fid[=u]ciarius_, _m[=e]diocritas_,
_p[=a]rticipare_. I do not know why the popular voice now gives
_[)A]riadne_, for our forefathers said _[=A]riadne_ as they said
_[=a]rea_.

In very long words the alternation of stress and no-stress was
insisted on. I remember a schoolmaster who took his degree at Oxford
in the year 1827 reproving a boy for saying _['A]lphesib['oe]us_
instead of _Alphesib['oe]us_, and I suspect that Wordsworth meant no
inverted stress in

La['o]dam['i]a, that at Jove's command--

nor Landor in

Art['e]mid['o]ra, gods invisible--

though I hope that they did.

* * * * *

It is not to be thought that these rules were in any way arbitrary. So
little was this so that, I believe, they were never even formulated.
If examples with the quantities marked were ever given, they must have
been for the use of foreigners settling in England. English boys did
not want rules, and their teachers could not really have given them.
The teachers did not understand that each vowel represented not two
sounds only, a long and a short, but many more. This fact was no more
understood by John Walker, the actor and lexicographer, who in 1798
published a Key to the Classical Pronunciation of Greek and Latin
proper names. His general rule was wrong as a general rule, and so far
as it agreed with facts it was useless. He says that when a vowel ends
a syllable it is long, and when it does not it is short. Apart from
the confusion of cause and effect there is the error of identifying
for instance the _e_ in _beatus_ and the _e_ in _habebat_. Moreover,
Walker confounds the _u_ in 'curfew', really long, with the short and
otherwise different _u_ in 'but'. The rule was useless as a guide,
for it did not say whether _moneo_ for instance was to be read as
_ino-neo_ or as _mon-eo_, and therefore whether the _o_ was to be long
or short. Even Walker's list is no exact guide. He gives for instance
_M[=o]-na_, which is right, and _M[=o]-n[ae]ses_, which is not. Now
without going into the difference between long vowels and ordinary
vowels, of which latter some are long in scansion and some short, it
is clear that there is no identity. In fact _Mona_, has the long _o_
of 'moan' and _Mon[ae]ses_ the ordinary _o_ of 'monaster'. A boy at
school was not troubled by these matters. He had only two things to
learn, first the quantity o