and of submitting to you whether you are not forced by the metre; your
suprema lex; to treat _over_, the distinct dissyllable,—exactly as you
have treated _over_,—the compounded; by taking away the accent. And if
you take away the accent, which seems to me a most evident necessity,
you are immediately reduced to another necessity quite as evident, that
of recognizing English pyrrhics. I believe that English pyrrhics exist
much in the same word that Latin unaccented words may be said to exist
by the doctrine of atonics: and I am struck with a singular analogy
between the two cases. There is, I concede, no English dissyllable, a
pyrrhic _per se_; and, in Latin, according to Quinctillian “non est
aliqua vox sine acuta.” But in Latin, according to Quinctillian, some
words by juxtaposition with others lose their own accent, ex. gr:
_circum litora_ or ab óres and, in an analogous manner many English
dissyllables either by incorporation with other words, as Hīgh
ŏvĕr-ārched, or by juxtaposition with them, as tīer ōvĕr tīer, lose
their own accent, in its modern sense. English pyrrhics made by these
means seem to me sufficiently abundant: I shall put down a few exemplary
lines: one from Anstey