Tragedy, however, needed an easy line of moderate length for its ordinary dialogues, and several meters in different moods to carry the monologues, songs, and emotional dialogues. For these Livius and Naevius, as we have noticed, had taken over and adapted a large number of Greek verse-forms. Now the adaptation of a foreign meter is a very serious matter. It took English poetry hundreds of years to merge French and old English rhythms, as it took France centuries to find a satisfactory adaptation of the medieval Latin systems. The labor of reshaping Greek meters for use in Latin was all the more difficult at the time because the Latin language happened to be just then at a critical point in its accentual development. The Greek word-accent had but very slight stress, so that quantity was permitted to determine verse-rhythm. In Latin, also, the quantity of the vowel and the syllable was still the dominant element at this time, indeed determined the position of the word accent, and was responsible for the penultimate accent rule that prevailed in most words during the century in which Naevius wrote. Latin must have been nearly as precise in the observance of longs and shorts as Greek. But the difficulty was that the stress of the word accent had also been a marked factor in Latin pronunciation for some time. Now in forming or introducing new rhythms the Latin poets would have to choose either stress or quantity as the decisive element on which to build and force the other element to comply. This is a choice that very few languages have imposed upon their poets. In English there was of course no such decision necessary since our accent remained a strong stress while our syllabic quantities, in the mingling of Germanic and French, became so completely confused that the values of half of them are hardly determinable by ear. This difference between Latin and English has not always been given due weight. When, for instance, the late Poet Laureate of England assumed that the quantitative meters of Ennius and Vergil resemble in effect the quantitative meters that he composed in English, he disregarded the vital difference between the two languages.[16] While in Latin quantities were readily distinguished even by the rabble, a fact that is shown by the emergence of the penultimate law before there were any teachers, in English it requires a laboratory apparatus to decide what really is the length of certain syllables. On the other hand, stress is dominant in English and unmistakable in all colloquial speech, whereas in Latin it was so moderate in the new position it had recently acquired that for many centuries after Plautus it had very little effect upon the morphology of the language. Apparently the first Roman poets chose as wisely as could be expected in determining to base their meters upon quantity rather than upon word-stress. But in doing so they had to face a serious dilemma: a stress-accent does not like to be disregarded, and