ether it was long or, as in 'dynamite' and 'malachite',
short in Greek.

There is, however, one distinct class of Greek words in which the
Latin rule is not followed. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
there were scholars who rightly or wrongly treated the Greek accent as
a mark of stress. It is clear that this habit led to an inability to
maintain a long quantity in an unstressed syllable. Shakespeare must
have learnt his little Greek from a scholar who had this habit, for he
writes 'Andr['o]n[)i]cus' and also

I am mis['a]nthr[)o]pos and hate mankind.

Of course all scholars shortened the first vowel of the word, and
doubtless Shakespeare shortened also the third. Busby also thus
spoke Greek with the result that Dryden in later life sometimes
wrote epsilon instead of eta and also spoke of 'Cleom['e]nes' and
'Iphig[=e]n[)i]a'. As a boy at Westminster he wrote

Learn'd, Vertuous, Pious, Great, and have by this
An universal Metempsuchosis.

Macaulay with an ignorance very unusual in him rebuked his nephew for
saying 'metam['o]rph[)o]sis', and Dr. Johnson, had he been living,
would have rebuked Macaulay. For the sake of our poets we ought to
save 'apoth['e][)o]sis', which is in some danger. Garth may perhaps be
forgotten,

Allots the prince of his celestial line
An Apotheosis and rights divine,

but 'Rejected Addresses' should still carry weight. In the burlesque
couplet, ascribed in the first edition to the younger Colman and
afterwards transferred to Theodore Hook, we have

That John and Mrs. Bull from ale and tea-houses
May shout huzza for Punch's apotheosis.

It need hardly be said that 'tea-houses' like 'grandfathers' has the
stress on the antepenultimate.

There are other words of Greek origin which now break the rules,
though I believe the infringement to be quite modern. First we have
the class beginning with _proto_. It can hardly be doubted that our
ancestors followed rule and said 'pr[)o]tocol', and 'pr[)o]totype',
and I suspect also 'pr[)o]tomartyr'. There seems, however, to
be a general agreement nowadays to keep the Greek omega. As for
'protagonist' the word is so technical and is often so ludicrously
misunderstood that writers on the Greek drama would do well to retain
the Greek termination and say 'protagonistes'; for 'protagonist' is
very commonly mistaken and used for the opposite of 'antagonist'.

Next come words beginning with _hypo_ or _hyph_. In a disyllable the