ish 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';

--but time and again in Chaucer's lines we find that if we allow
the words their natural English stresses, we break up the music
altogether; whereas if we read them like French, without
syllabic accent, they make a very reasonable music indeed. Now
French had been in England the language of court and culture; it
was still spoken in polite circles at Stratforde-at-le-Bowe; and
Chaucer was a courtier, Anglo-French, not Anglo-Saxon; and he
had gone to France for his first models, and had translated a
great French poem; and Anglo-Saxon verse-methods were hardly
usable any longer. So it may well have appeared to him that
serious poetry was naturally French in meter and method. There
was no model for what he wanted to do in English; the English
five-iambic line had not been invented, and only the popular
lyricists, of the proletariat, sang in stresses. And anyhow, as
the upper classes, to which he belonged more or less, were only
growing out of French into English, very likely they pronounced
their English with a good deal of French accent.

Now it seems to me that something of the same kind, with a
difference, is what happened with Ennius. You are to understand
him as, though Greek by birth, _Romanior ipsis Romanis:_ Greek
body, but ultra-Roman ego. One may see the like thing happen
with one's own eyes at any time: men European-born, who are
quite the extremest Americans. In his case, the spark of his
Greek heredity set alight the Roman conflagration of his nature.
He was born in Calabria, a Roman subject, in 239; and had fought
for Rome before Cato, then quaestor, brought him in his train
from Sardinia in 204.

A glance at the cycles, and a measuring-up of things with our
thirteen-decade yardstick, will suggest the importance of the
time he lived in. The _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ gives A.D. 42
as the date for the end of the golden Age of Latin Literature.
Its first great names are those of Cicero, Caesar, and Lucretius.
Thirteen decades before 42 A.D., or in 88 B.C., these three were
respectively eighteen, fourteen, and eight years old; so we may
fairly call that Golden Age thirteen decades long, and beginning
in 88. Thirteen decades back from that bring us to 218; and as
much more from that, to 348. You will remember