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480 DAVID A. FRICKHerbest (ca. 1531-1593), author of Periodica disputatio (Cracow, 1562).That the topic was considered important is witnessed by the fact that severalleading literary figures of the time entered into the debate: StanistawOrzechowski, Andrzej Nidecki, Piotr Skarga, and Jan Kochanowski. 60Efforts to describe the application of Latin doctrines of numerus to Polishprose encounter two major problems: the division of the speech intoperiods and cola, and the nature of the metrical feet used to mark the endsof those syntactic units.Any examination of attempts to imitate Latin prose rhythm in Polishmust take stress as the parameter governing the formation of metrical feet.But here we are hampered by a lack of precise knowledge about the statusof Polish stress in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In herstudy of Piotr Skarga's Kazania Sejmowe, Krystyna Stawecka offers a reasonableworking hypothesis for the investigation of prose rhythm in thisperiod. In my investigation of Smotryc'kyj, I have likewise assumed thatthe primary stress is fixed on the penultimate syllable of a word (or of agroup of words treated as a unit) and that a secondary stress on the initialsyllable of words of three or more syllables could sometimes be taken intoaccount in the formation of metrical markers. These general guidelines donot dictate when secondary stress plays a role in determining meter, nor dothey tell us which words are to be treated as enclitics. As Stawecka pointsout, this problem is sometimes solveable through a careful examination ofthe larger context. 61 Moreover, I have taken Smotryc'kyj's own punctuationas a clue to the division of his prose into periods and cola. In general, virgulesand colons often seem to mark the ends of cola, periods the ends ofperiods.Let us look first at the beginning of the exordium to chapter 1 ofThrenos, the section most investigators have in mind when they speak ofthe rhythmicality of Smotryc'kyj's prose. I give, for sake of reference, thesyllable count of each colon along the left, and my scansion along theright: 6260On the debate on the period, see Kazimierz Morawski, "Jakub Gorski, humanista i apologeta,"in Czasy Zygmuntowskie na lie prqdow Odrodzemia, ed. Janusz Tazbir (Warsaw,1965), pp. 114-52.61See Stawecka, "Z zagadnien rytmu Kazan sejmowych Skargi," pp. 182-84. On the problemsof Polish accentuation, see Zuzanna Topoliriska, Z historii akcentu polskiego od wiekuXVI do dzis (Wroclaw, 1961). It is important to bear in mind that more words (e.g., persona]pronouns, reflexive particles) could function as enclitics in seventeenth-century prose than isthe case today.62In describing Smotryc'kyj's metrical markers, I have adopted the shorthand used by MorrisW. Croll in his article on English oratorical prose ("The Cadence of English OratoricalProse"). The numbers refer to the syllables, counting from the end of the colon, that bear