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’;

—­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 348 as the year of the death of Plato, which we took as marking the end of the Golden Age of Greek.  In 218 Ennius was twenty-one.  He was the Father of Latin Poetry; as Cato the Censor, seven years his junior, was the Father of Latin Prose.  So you see, he came right upon a Greek cycle; right upon the dawn of what should have been a new Greek day, with the night of Hellenisticism in between.  And he took, how shall I put it?—­the forces of that new day, and transmuted them, in himself as crucible, from Greek to Roman...  A sort of Channel through which the impulse was deflected from Greek to Latin...