His dramas have novel excellences, yet fail in unity and proportion. The emotional contents are more un- restrained. Passion runs riot, though the results still are dire.
The unison of form and substance ceases in the Alexandrian period of literature. Hexameter is used in dialogue and narrative unsuited to the dignity of that metre ;[1] or it is used to set forth science or philoso- phy.[2] The latter was an affectation with the Alexan- drians ; for an adequate prose was ready to their hand. They had not the reason of Xenophanes or Parmen- ides for using hexameter — that prose hardly existed. As for the metres of lyric song, the Alexandrians have lost command of them.
Lack of instinctive feeling for the right metre may have been related to the falling away of metrical quan- tity from the spoken language. Quantity had prob- ably passed from Greek speech before the Christian era; and from whatever time quantity ceased to be the basis of speech, poetry composed in metre neces- sarily became academic. Its rhythm no longer cor- responded with the living language; and the more complicated the metre, the more palpable would be the artificiality of the poem. The tendency was to use the simpler metres, which also passed over into Latin literature. That literature was to be academic rather than spontaneous in its development, the work of men educated in Greek poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy. Greek metres, in somewhat blunted modes, constituted the structure of Latin poetry, and Greek qualities en-
