Many readers will recollect another word, which for
years brought John Kemble into hot water with the pit of Drury Lane. It
was the plural of the word ache. This is generally made a dissyllable by
the Elizabethan dramatists; it occurs in the 'Tempest.' Prospero says--
'I'll fill thy bones with aches.'
What follows, which I do not remember _literatim_, is such metrically
as to _require_ two syllables for aches. But how, then, was this to
be pronounced? Kemble thought _akies_ would sound ludicrous; _aitches_
therefore he called it: and always the pit howled like a famished
_menagerie_, as they did also when he chose (and he constantly chose) to
pronounce _beard_ like _bird_. Many of these niceties must be known,
before a critic can ever allow _himself_ to believe that he is right in
_obelizing_, or in marking with so much as a ? any verse whatever of
Milton's. And there are some of these niceties, I am satisfied, not even
yet fully investigated.
It is, however, to be borne in mind, after all allowances and provisional
reservations have been made that Bentley's hypothesis (injudiciously as it
was managed by that great scholar) has really a truth of fact to stand
upon. Not only must Milton have composed his three greatest poems, the two
'Paradises, and the 'Samson,' in a state of blindness--but subsequently,
in the correction of the proofs, he must have suffered still more from
this conflict with darkness and, consequently, from this dependence upon
careless readers.
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