Transcriber's Notes

The reception of the first two volumes of a larger work (since completed) on English Prosody suggested, to the author and to the publishers, that there might be room for a more compressed dealing with the subject, possessing more introductory character, and attempting the functions of a manual as well as those of a history. It did not, however, seem that the matter could be satisfactorily treated in extremely brief form, as a primer or elementary school-book. The subject is one not very well suited for elementary instruction; and in endeavouring to shape it for that use there is a particular danger of too positive and peremptory statement in reference to matters of the most contentious kind. Catechetical instruction has to be categorical; if you set hypotheses, or alternative systems, before young scholars, they are apt either to distrust the whole thing or to become hopelessly muddled. And the opposite danger—of unhesitating adoption of positive statements on doubtful points—must have been found to be only too real by any one who has had to do with education. Schoolboys cannot be too early, or too plentifully, or too variously supplied with good examples of verse; but they should be thoroughly familiar with the practice before they come to the principles.

To the Senior Forms of the higher Secondary Schools, on the other hand, and to students in those Universities which admit English literature as a subject, this function of it is quite suitable and well adapted, and it is for their use that this volume is planned (as well as for that of the general reader who may hardly feel inclined to tackle three large octavos). An effort will be made to include everything that is vital to a clear understanding of the subject; while opportunity will, it is hoped, be found for insertion of some information, both of a historical and of a practical kind, which did not seem so germane to the larger History. It has been a main object with me in preparing this book, while reducing prosodic theory to the necessary minimum, but keeping that, to "load every rift" with prosodic fact; and I could almost recommend the student to devote himself to the Contents and the Index, illustrated by the Glossary, all of which have been made exceptionally full, before attacking the text.

The work, like the larger one of which it is not so much an abstract as a parallel with a different purpose, cannot hope to content those who think that prosody should be, like mathematics or music, a science, immutable, peremptory, abstract in the other sense. It will not content those who think—in pursuance or independently of such an opinion—that it should discard appreciation of the actual poetry, on which, from my point of view, it is solely based. It will, from another point, leave dissatisfied those who decline the attempt to reduce this poetry to some general but elastic laws, and who concentrate themselves on the immediate musical or rhetorical values (as they seem to them) of individual poems, or passages, or even (as is not uncommon) lines. Nor will it provide, what some seem to desire, a tabular analysis of every verse-form in the language, for reasons explained in the proper place (v. inf. p. 336 note). But, from past experience, it seems that it may find some public ready for it; and it is perhaps not wholly fatuous to hope that it may help to create a larger.[1]

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

Edinburgh,
All Souls' Day,
1910.

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Prosody, or the study of the constitution of verse, was, not so long ago, made familiar, in so far as it concerned Latin, to all persons educated above the very lowest degree, by the presence of a tractate on the subject as a conclusion to the Latin Grammar. The same persons were further obliged to a more than theoretical knowledge of it, in so far as it concerned that language, by the once universal, now (as some think) most unwisely disused habit of composing Latin verses. The great majority of English poets, from at least the sixteenth century, if not earlier, until far into the nineteenth, had actually composed such verses; and even more had learnt the rules of them, long before attempting in English the work which has given them their fame. It is sometimes held that this fact—which as a fact is undeniable—has had an undue influence on the way in which English prosody has been regarded; that it must have exercised an enormous influence on the way in which English poetry has been produced may be denied, but hardly by any one who really considers the fact itself, and who is capable of drawing an inference.

It was, however, a very considerable time before any attempt was regularly made to construct a similar scientific or artistic analysis for English verse itself. Although efforts were made early to adjust that verse to the complete forms of Latin—and of Greek, which is in some respects prosodically nearer than Latin to English,— although such attempts have been constantly repeated and are being continued now,—it has always been impossible for any intelligent person to make them without finding curious, sometimes rather indefinite, but extremely palpable differences and difficulties in the way. The differences especially have sometimes been exaggerated and more often mistaken, and it is partly owing to this fact that, up to the present moment, no authoritative body of doctrine on the subject of English prosody can be said to exist. It is believed by the present writer that such a body of doctrine ought to be and can be framed—with the constant proviso and warning that it will be doctrine subject, not to the practically invariable uniformity of Science, but to the wide variations of Art,—not to the absolute compulsion of the universal, but to the comparative freedom of the individual and particular. The inquiries and considerations upon which this doctrine is based will be found, at full, in the larger work referred to in the Preface. In the first Book, here, will be set forth the leading systems or principles which have actually underlain, and do underlie, the conflicting views and the discordant terminology of the subject, and this will be followed by perhaps the most valuable part, if any be valuable, of the whole—a series of selected passages, scanned and commented, from the very beginning to the very end of English poetry. In the second, a survey will be given of that actual history of the actual poetry which ought to be, but has very seldom been, the basis of every discussion on prosody. In the third a brief conspectus will be supplied of the actual opinions which have been held on this subject by those who have handled it in English. The fourth will give, in the first place, a Glossary of Terms, which appears to be very much needed; in the second, a list of poets who have specially influenced the course of prosody, with reasoned remarks on their connection with it; in the third, a selected list of important metres with their origins and affiliations; any further matter which may seem necessary following, with a short Bibliography to conclude. The object of the whole is not merely to inculcate what seems to the author to be the best if not the only adequate general system of English prosody, but to provide the student with ample materials for forming his own judgment on this difficult, long debated, often mistaken, but always, if duly handled, profitable and delectable matter.

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The great difficulty attending the study of English prosody, and the cause of the fact that no book hitherto published can be said to possess actual authority on the subject, arises from the other fact that no general agreement exists, or ever has existed, on the root-principles of the matter.[3] Classical writers on metre, of whom we possess a tolerable stock, differed with each other on many minor points of opinion, and from each other in the ways in which they attacked the subject. But they were practically agreed that "quantity" (i.e. the difference of technical "time" in pronunciation of syllables) and "feet"—that is to say, certain regular mathematical combinations of "long" and "short" quantity—constituted metre. They had indeed accent—the later Greeks certainly and the Latins probably—which was independent of, and perhaps sometimes opposed to, quantity; but except in what we call the ante-classical times of Latin and the post-classical times of both Latin and Greek, it had nothing to do with metrical arrangement. They had different values of "long" and "short"; but these did not affect metre, nor did the fact that in both languages, but especially in Greek, a certain number of syllables were allowed to be "common"—that is to say, capable of taking the place of "long" or "short" alike. The central system of prosodic arrangement (till the flooding of the later Empire with "barbarians" of various nationality and as various intonation and modes of speech broke it down altogether) remained the same. "Longs" and "shorts" in the various combinations and permutations possible, up to three syllables most commonly, up to four in fewer cases, and possibly up to five in still fewer, made up lines which experiment discovered to be harmonious, and practice adopted as such. These lines were sometimes used continuously (with or without certain internal variations of feet, considered equivalent to each other), as in modern blank verse; sometimes arranged in batches corresponding more or less to each other, as in modern couplet or stanza poetry.

On the other hand, though English prosodists may sometimes agree on details, translated into their different terminologies, the systems which lie at the root of these terminologies are almost irreconcilably different. Even the reduction of these systems to three types may excite protest, though it is believed that it can be made out without begging the question in favour of any one.

The discord begins as early as possible; for there are some who would maintain that "accentual" systems and "stress" systems ought not to be identified, or even associated. It is quite true that the words are technically used[4] with less or more extensive and intensive meaning; but definitions of each are almost always driven to adopt the other, and in prosodic systems they are practically inseparable. The soundest distinction perhaps is that "accent" refers to the habitual stress laid on a syllable in ordinary pronunciation; "stress" to a syllable specially accented for this or that reason, logical, rhetorical, or prosodic purely.

According to this system (or systems) English poetry consists of syllables—accented or unaccented, stressed or unstressed—arranged on principles which, whatever they may be in themselves, have no analogy to those of classical feet. According to the more reckless and thorough-going accentualists—the view is expressed, with all but its utmost crudity, in Coleridge's celebrated Preface to Christabel[5]—all you have got to do is to look to the accents. Cruder advocates still have said that "accents take the place of feet" (which is something like saying that points take the place of swords), or that unaccented syllables are "left to take care of themselves." It has also been contended that the number and the position of accents or stresses give a complete and sufficient scheme of the metre. And in some late forms of stress-prosody the regularity, actual or comparative, which used to be contended for by accentualists themselves, is entirely given up; lines in continuous and apparently identical arrangement may have two, three, four, five, or even more stresses. While yet others have gone farther still and deliberately proposed reading of verse as a prose paragraph, the natural stresses of which will give the rhythm at which the author aimed.[6] Some again would deny the existence of any normal form of staple lines like the heroic, distributing them in "bars" of "beats" which may vary almost indefinitely.

On the other hand, there are some accentualists who hardly differ, in more than terminology, from the upholders of a foot-and-quantity system. They think that there is no or little time-quantity in English; that an English "long" syllable is really an accented one only, and an English short syllable an unaccented. They would not neglect the unaccented syllables; but would keep them in batches similar to, if not actually homonymous with, feet. In fact the difference with them becomes, if not one of mere terminology, one chiefly on the previous question of the final constitution and causation of "long" and "short" syllables. Of these, and of a larger number who consciously or unconsciously approach nearer to, though they do not actually enter, the "go-as-you-please" prosody of the extreme stressmen, the majority of English prosodists has nearly always consisted. Gascoigne, our first writer on the subject, belonged to them, calling accent itself "emphasis," and applying the term "accent" only to the written or typographical symbols of it; while he laid great stress on its observance in verse. With those who adopt this system, and its terminology, the substitution of a trochee for an iamb in the heroic line is "inversion of accent," the raising or lowering of the usual pronounced value of a syllable, "wrenching of accent," and so on. And the principal argument which they advance in favour of their system against the foot-and-quantity scheme is the very large prevalence of "common" syllables in English—an undoubted fact; though the inference does not seem to follow.

The mere use of the word "unaccented" for "short" and "accented" for "long" does no particular harm, though it seems to some clumsy, irrational, and not always strictly correct even from its own point of view, while it produces unnecessary difficulty in the case of feet, or "sections," with no accent in them—things which most certainly exist in English poetry. But the moment that advance is made upon this mere question of words and names, far more serious mischief arises. There can be no doubt that the insistence on strict accent, alternately placed, led directly to the monotonous and snip-snap verse of the eighteenth century. In some cases it leads, logically and necessarily, to denial of such feet as those just mentioned—a denial which flies straight in the face of fact. Although it does not necessarily involve, it most frequently leads also to, the forbidding, ignoring, or shuffling off of trisyllabic feet, which are the chief glory and the chief charm of English poetry, as substituted for dissyllabic. And, further still, it leads to the most extraordinary confusion of rhythms—accentualists very commonly, if not always, maintaining that, inasmuch as there are the same number of accented syllables, it does not matter whether you scan

iambically or

trochaically,

dactylically or

anapæstically.

Further still, and almost worst of all, it leads to the enormities of fancy stress above referred to, committed by people who decline to regard as "long" syllables not accented in ordinary pronunciation.

But its greatest crime is its hopeless inadequacy, poverty, and "beggarly elementariness." At best the accentual prosodist, unless he is a quantitative one in disguise, confines himself to the mere skeleton of the lines, and neglects their delicately formed and softly coloured flesh and members. To leave unaccented syllables "as it were to take care of themselves" is to make prosody mere singsong or patter.

Finally, it may be observed that, in all accentual or stress prosodies which are not utterly loose and desultory, there is a tendency to multiply exceptions, provisos, minor classifications to suit particular cases, and the like, so that English prosody assumes the aspect, not of a combination of general order and individual freedom, but of a tangle of by-laws and partial regulations. Unnecessary when it is not mischievous, mischievous when it is strictly and logically carried out, the accentual system derives its only support from the fact above mentioned (the large number of common syllables to be found in English), from the actual existence of it in Old English before the language and the poetry had been modified by Romance admixture, and from an unscientific application of the true proposition that the classical and the English prosodies are in some respects radically different.

It will, however, of course be proper to give examples of the manner in which accentual (or stress) scansion is worked by its own partisans and exponents. Their common formula for the English heroic line in its normal aspect is 5^xa:[7]

What òft | was thòught, | but nè'er | so wèll | exprèst.

If they meet with a trisyllabic foot, as in

they either admit two unaccented syllables between the accents, or suggest "slur" or synalœpha or "elision" ("man-yan"), this last especially taking place with the definite article "the" ("th'"). But this last process need not be insisted on by accentualists, though it must by the next class we shall come to.

It is common, if not universal, for accentual prosodists to hold that two accents must not come together, so that they are troubled by that double line of Milton's where the ending and beginning run—

They admit occasional "inversion of accent" (trochaic substitution)—especially at the opening of a verse,—as in the line which Milton begins with

but, when they hold fast to their principles, dislike it much in other cases, as, for instance, in

And they complain when the accent which they think necessary falls, as they call it, on one of two weak syllables, as in

This older and simpler school, however, represented by Johnson, has been largely supplemented by another, whose members use the term "stress" or ictus in preference to "accent," and to a greater or less extent give up the attempt to establish normality of line at all.

Some of them[8] admit lines of four, three, or even two stresses, as, for instance—

Others[9] break it up into "bars" or "sections" which need not contain the same or any fixed number of "beats" or "stresses," while some again[10] seem to regard the stresses of a whole passage as supplying, like those of a prose paragraph, a sufficient rhythmical skeleton the flesh of which—the unaccented or unstressed part—is allowed to huddle itself on and shuffle itself along as it pleases.

This school has received large recent accessions; but even now the greater number of accentualists do little more than eschew the terms of quantity, and substitute for them those of accent, more or less consistently. Many of them even use the classical names and divisions of feet; and with these there need not, according to strict necessity, be any quarrel, since their error, if it be one, only affects the constitution of prosodic material before it is verse at all, and not the actual prosodic arrangement of verse as such.

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A strictly syllabic system of prosody has hardly at any time been a sufficient key, even in appearance, to English verse. But it has preserved a curious insistence of pretension, and the study of it is of great and informing prosodic interest. It is, of course, French in origin—French prosody, except in eccentric instances, has been from the first, and is to the present day, strictly syllabic. It is innocuous in so far as in the words "octosyllable," "decasyllable," "fourteener," and the like, the irreducible syllabic minimum (save by licence of certain metres) is conveniently indicated. In so early an example as Orm (v. inf.) we find it carried out exactly and literally. But the inherited spirit of Old English, surviving and resisting all changes and reinforcements of vocabulary, accent, and everything else, will have none of it. In the fifteener[11] itself; in its sequel and preserver, ballad measure; in octosyllabic couplet—not merely in the loose form of Genesis and Exodus, but to some extent even in the strict one of The Owl and the Nightingale; in almost all mixed modes, when once they have broken free from direct copying of French or Provençal, it is cast to the winds. It can only be introduced into Chaucer, as far as his heroic couplet is concerned, by perpetual violations of probability, document, and rhythm. Even in Gower, the principal representative of it, and one who probably did aim at it, there are some certain, and many probable, lapses from strict observance. But in the linguistic and phonetic changes of the fifteenth century, with the consequent decadence of original literary poetry, the principle of syllabic liberty degenerates into intolerable licence, and the doggerel which resulted, after triumphing or at least existing for some generations, provoked considerable reaction in practice and a still more considerable mistake in principle.

Wyatt, Surrey, and their successors in the middle of the century and the first half of Elizabeth's reign, are pretty strict syllabically; and it was from their practice, doubtless, that Gascoigne—one of the last of the group, but our first English preceptist in prosody—conceived the idea that English has but one foot, of two syllables. Spenser's practice in the Shepherd's Kalendar is not wholly in accordance with this; but even he came near to observing it later, and the early blank-verse writers were painfully scrupulous in this respect.

But it was inevitable that blank verse, and especially dramatic blank verse, should break through these restraints; and in the hands of Shakespeare it soon showed that the greatest English verse simply paid no attention at all to syllabic limitations; while lyric, though rather slower, was not so very slow to indulge itself to some extent, as it was tempted by "triple-timed" music. The excesses, however, of the decayed blank verse of the First Caroline period joined with those of the enjambed couplet, though these were not strictly syllabic, to throw liberty into discredit; and the growth and popularity of the strict closed couplet encouraged a fresh delusion—that English prosody ought to be syllabic. Dryden himself to some extent countenanced this, though he indemnified himself by the free use of the Alexandrine, or even of the fourteener, in decasyllabics. The example of Milton was for some time not imitated, and has even to this day been misunderstood. About the time of Dryden's own death, in the temporary decadence of the poetic spirit, syllabic prosody made a bold bid for absolute rule.

In the year 1702 Edward Bysshe, publishing[12] the first detailed and positive manual of English prosody, laid it down, without qualification or apology, that "the structure of our verses, whether blank or rhyming, consists in a certain number of syllables; not in feet composed of long or short syllables, as the verses of the Greeks and Romans." And although all Bysshe's details, which, as will be seen below, were rigidly arranged on these principles—so that he made no distinction between verse of triple time (though he grudgingly and almost tacitly admitted it) and verse of double, as such,—were not adopted by others, his doctrine was always (save in a very few instances to be duly noticed later) implicitly, and often explicitly, the doctrine of the eighteenth century. Nor has this ever lost a certain measure of support; while it is very curious that the few foreign students of English prosody who have arisen in late years are usually inclined to it.

One difficulty in it, however, could never escape its most peremptory devotees; and a shift for meeting it must have been devised at the same time as the doctrine. It was all very well to lay down that English verse must consist of a certain number of syllables; but it could escape no one who had ever read a volume or even a few pages of English poetry, that it did consist of a very uncertain number of them. The problem was, therefore, how to get rid of the surplus where it existed. It was met by recourse to that very classical prosody which was in other respects being denied, and by the adoption of ruthless "elision" or "crushing out" of the supposed superfluities. This involved not merely elision proper—the vanishing or metrical ignoring of a vowel at the end of a word before a vowel (or an h) at the beginning of another, "th('/e) Almighty," "t('/o) admire." Application of a similar process to the interior of words like "vi('/o)let," "di('/a)mond," was inculcated, and in fact insisted on; and even where consonants preceded and followed a vowel of the easily slurrable kind, as in "watery," the suppression of the e and sometimes even of other vowels—"del('/i)cate"—was prescribed.

There may possibly be two opinions (though it seems strange that there should be) on the æsthetic results of this proceeding. To the present writer they seem utterly hideous; while the admission of the full syllables seems melodious and satisfying. It may also be pointed out that there is a very tell-tale character about the fact that not a few prosodists who defend "elision" in principle defend it only as a metrical fiction, and even lay down positively that the elided syllables are always to be pronounced.[13] But it is far less matter of opinion—if it is even matter of opinion at all—first, that this process of mangling and monotonising English poetry is unnecessary; and, secondly, that it is inconsistent with the historic development of the language and the literature. That it is unnecessary will, it is hoped, be demonstrated in the next of these Introductory Chapters; and that it is unhistorical the whole body of the historical survey to follow will show. And another objection of great importance can be made good at once and here. The rigid observance of the syllabic system produces, and cannot but produce, an intolerable monotony—a monotony which has made the favourite verse of the eighteenth century positively (if perhaps excessively and unreasonably) loathsome to succeeding generations. It would be condemned by this, if it had no other fault; while it has, as a matter of fact, hardly a virtue. It was tried once for all by Orm, and failed once for all, in the beginning of modern English, and it has never been tried in practice or maintained in theory since without validating inferior poetry and discouraging good.[14]

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Although the accentual and the syllabic systems—sometimes separate, but oftener combined—have, on the whole, dominated English preceptist prosody almost from the time when it first began to be formally studied, there has, until very recently, been a constant tendency to blend with these, if not the full acceptance, at any rate a certain borrowing, of the terminology of a third system—the foot-and-quantity one, so well known in the classical prosodies. Not before Bysshe (c. 1700) do you find any positive denial of "feet." Gascoigne (c. 1570) talks of them; Milton speaks of "committing short and long"; Dr. Johnson, though using a strict accent-and-syllable scheme, admits (whether with absolute accuracy or not does not matter) that "our heroic verse is derived from the iambic." And in more modern times, from Mitford downwards, arguments against the applicability of the terms in English have not unfrequently been found consistent with an occasional, if not a regular, employment of them.

In fact, nothing but a curious suspicion, as of something cabalistical in them, can prevent their use, or the use of some much more clumsy and inconvenient equivalents—bars, beats, sections, what not;[15] for that use is based on the most unalterable of all things, except the laws of thought, the laws of mathematics. Everybody, whatsoever his prosodic sect, admits that verse consists of alternations of two values—some would say of more than two, but that only complicates the application of an unchanged argument. Now the possible combinations of two different things, in successive numerical units of two, three, four, etc., are not arbitrary, but naturally fixed; and the names of feet—iambic, trochaic, dactylic, etc.—are merely tickets for these combinations.

The reasons of the objection have been various, and are perhaps not always fully stated, or even fully appreciated, by those who advance them. It is most common perhaps now (though it was not so formerly) to find the objection itself lodged thus—that the so-called English iambs, anapæsts, etc., are different things from the feet so called in Greek or Latin. This is sufficiently met by the reply that they are naturally so, the languages being different, and that all that is necessary is that the English foot should stand to English prosody as the Latin or Greek foot does to Latin or Greek, that is to say, as the necessary and constituent middle stage between the syllable and the line. But a less vague and, in appearance at least, more solid objection is that the Latin and the Greek foot were constituted out of definite "quantities" attaching to definite syllables, and that there is "no syllabic quantity in English," though there may be vowel quantity. And this objection is generally, if not always, based on or backed by a further one, that "quantity" depends directly on time of pronunciation; while this again is supported, still further back, by elaborate discussions of accent and quantity,[16] by denials that accent can constitute quantity, and by learned expatiations in quest of proof that Greeks and Romans scanned their verses as they did not pronounce them—that there was a sort of amicable pitched battle, always going on, between quantity and accent.

Now it can be easily shown that, even if these contentions as to classical verse be accepted (and some of them are very doubtful), they supply no sort of bar to the application of the foot system, with such quantity as it requires, to English. It is quite true that the proportion of syllables of absolutely fixed quantity—that is fixed capacity of filling up what corresponds to the long or short places of a classical verse—is, in English, very small. There are some which the ear discovers by the awkwardness of the sound when they are forced into a "short" place. So also there are some which—by the coincidence of vowel quality, position, and absence of accent—it is practically impossible to put into a "long" place, such as the second syllable of "Deity." Nor are what are called "long vowel sounds"—the sounds of "rīte," "fāte," "bēat," "Ēurope," "ōmen," "āwkward," etc.—always sufficient to make a syllable inflexibly long; though they may be sometimes. Again, the extremest "shortness" of vowel sound, as in "and" or "if," will not prevent such syllables from being indubitably long in certain values and collocations.

In other words, that peculiarity of being "common"—that is to say, of being capable of holding either position—which was far from unknown in the classical languages, is very much more prevalent in English. It would be quite false to say that every syllable in English is common; but it is scarcely at all false to say that almost every English monosyllable is, and an extremely large proportion of others.

The methods and movements by which this commonness is turned into length or shortness for the purposes of the poet are obvious enough, and in practice undeniable; though the processes of professional phonetics sometimes tend to obscure or even to deny them. Every well-educated and well-bred Englishman, who has been accustomed to read poetry and utter speech carefully, knows that when he emphasises a syllable like "and," "if," "the," etc., it becomes what the Germans would call versfähig—capable of performing its metrical duty—in the long position; that when he does not, it is not so capable. Every one knows in practice, though it may be denied in theory, that similar lengthening[17] follows the doubling of a consonant after a short vowel, or the placing of a group of consonants of different kinds after it—the vowel-sound running, as it were, under the penthouse of consonants till it emerges. Extreme loudness and sharpness would have the same effect in conversation, but, unless very obviously suggested by sense, would escape notice in silent reading. Not very seldom, the mere art of the poet will get weight enough on a short syllable to fit it for its place as "long," or conjure away from a long one length enough to enable it to act as "short."

At any rate, it is with these two values, and with syllables endowed with them by custom, incidental effect, place, sense, the poet's sleight of hand, or otherwise, that the English poet deals; and has dealt, ever since a period impossible to nail down with exactness to year or decade, but beginning, perhaps, early in the twelfth century and perfecting itself in the thirteenth and later. And impartial examination of the whole facts from that period shows that he deals with them on a system, in early times no doubt almost or quite unconsciously adopted, but perfectly recognisable. In still earlier or "Old" English verse this system is not discernible at all; in the earliest period of "Middle" English it is discernible, struggling to get itself into shape. Later, with advances and relapses, it perfects itself absolutely. Its principles are as follows:—

Every English verse consists of a certain number of feet, made up of long and short syllables, each of which is of equal consequence in the general composition of the line.

The correspondence of the foot arrangements between different lines constitutes the link between them, and determines their general character.

But this correspondence need not be limited to repetition of feet composed of a fixed and identical number of syllables in the same order; on the contrary, the best verse admits of large substitution of feet of different syllabic length, provided—(1) that these are equal or nearly equal in prosodic value to those for which they are substituted; (2) that the substituted feet go rhythmically well with those next to which they are placed.[18]

But, for the purpose of this present book, illustration and example are of much more value than abstract exposition; and to them we shall now turn.

Here, for instance, is a line from Tennyson's "Brook":

Now the system which regards syllabic precision first of all, with a minor glance at accent, but rejects "feet," surveys this line and pronounces it passable with the elision

but rather shakes its head at the absence of accent, or the slight and weak accent, in "innumerable," and the "inversion" of accent in "twìnkled."

The system which looks at accent first of all pronounces that there are only four proper accents [stresses] here:

Both these systems, moreover—the syllabic, as far as it recognises accent; the accentual, of necessity,—regard "twinkled" as the admittance (pardonable, censurable, or quite condemnable, according to individual theory) of "wrenched accent," "inverted stress," or something of the kind—as a thing abnormal and licentious.

The foot system simply scans it—

regarding "twinkled" as a trochee substituted in full right for an iamb, and "the innu-" as an anapæst in like case; "merā" as raised, by a liberty not out of accordance with the actual derivation, to a sufficiently long quantity for its position, and the other two feet as pure iambs.

Now let us examine these three views.

In the first place, the bare syllabic view (which, it is fair to say, is almost obsolete, save among foreigners, though in consistency it ought to find defenders at home) takes no account of any special quality in the line at all. It is turned out to sample; the knife is applied at "th'" to fit specification; and there you are. It differs only from Southey's favourite heroic ejaculation

in being less "pure."

The syllabic-plus-accentual view passes it; but with certain reservations. "Twinkled" is an "aberration," a "licence" perhaps (in some views certainly), a more or even less venial sin, while "-āble" with a in a stressed or accented place is a case for more head-shaking still. The line is saved; yet so as by fire.

So is it under the looser stress-accentual system, but by a fire more devouring still. According to this latter, all rhythmical similarity with its companion five-stress lines is lost on the one hand, and on the other a jumble, with difficulty readable and absolutely heterogeneous, is created in the line itself. Your first rhythmical mouthful is "twink-," then you gabble over "led the innū-" till you rest on this last; then you repeat the process (as soon as you have breath enough) with "-merable ear," and finally you reach "and tail." But you never find your fifth stress, and instead of continuous blank verse you make the context a sort of clumsy Pindaric.[21]

Even if this last description be regarded as exaggerated, it will remain a sober fact that, in all these handlings, either the beauty of the line is obscured altogether, or it is smuggled off as a "licence," or it is converted into something individual, separated from its neighbours, and possessing no kinship to them.

Yet the line, though not "a wonder and a wild desire," is a good one; and (therein differing from their eighteenth-century ancestors) the syllabists and accentualists would mostly nowadays allow this, though their principles have to submit it to privilegia and allowances to make it out.

The foot arrangement makes no difficulty, needs no privilegium, and necessarily applies none. The line is at once recognised by the ear as a good line and correspondent to its neighbours, which, as a body, and also at once when a few have been read, informed that ear that they were five-foot lines of iambic basis. Therefore it will lend itself to foot-arrangement on that norm. The five feet may be iambs, trochees, anapæsts, spondees, tribrachs, and perhaps (this is a question of ear) dactyls and pyrrhics. These may be substituted for each other as the ear shall dictate, provided that the general iambic base is not overthrown or unduly obscured.

Further, these feet are composed of long and short syllables, the length and shortness of which is determined to some extent by ordinary pronunciation, but subject to various modifying influences of position and juxtaposition. Under those laws to which all its companions are equally and inevitably subject, mutatis mutandis, it makes itself out as above:

trochee, anapæst, iamb, iamb, iamb. The justification of ā in "āble" has already been partly given; it may be added that in the actual pronunciation of the word by good speakers there is a "secondary accent" (as they call it) on the syllable.

Here there is no straining, no "private bill" legislation, no separating of the line from its fellows, only a reasonable Reign of Law with reasonable easements.

Let us now take a more complicated instance, also from Tennyson. In that poet's first volume there was a "Song" which, unlike most of its fellows, remained practically unaltered amid the great changes which he introduced later. It has, I believe, always been a special favourite with those who have been most in sympathy with his poetry. But, nearly twenty years after its first appearance, it was described by no ill-qualified judge (an admirer of Tennyson on the whole) in the words given in the note:[22] and I believe it had been similarly objected to earlier. Now what were the lines that excited this cry of agonised indignation? They are as follows:—

Now it is not very difficult to perceive the defects of this extremely beautiful thing in the eyes of a syllabic-accentualist, as this critic (whether knowing it or not) probably was.

The syllabists have always, by a perhaps natural though perhaps also irrational extension of their arithmetical prepossession, disliked lines of irregular length on the page. Bysshe would have barred stanzas; a very few years before Tennyson's book, Crowe, then Public Orator at Oxford, had protested against the exquisite line-adjustments of the seventeenth century. To the pure accentualists the thing might seem an unholy jumble, accented irregularly, irregularly arranged in number, seemingly observing different rhythms in different parts.

Now see how it looks under the foot system:

the feet being sometimes, at the beginning of the lines, monosyllabic, and of course of one long syllable only (Ēarth-|, Hēa-|, Ō-|); sometimes dissyllabic, iambic mainly, but occasionally at least semi-spondaic—

often trisyllabic, and then always anapæstic—

Even so early in the present book this should need little comment; but it may be the better for some. It is an instance of substitution carried out boldly, but unerringly; so that, iamb and anapæst being the coin of interchange and equivalence, the rhythm is now iambic, now anapæstic chiefly, the two being not muddled, but fluctuant—a prosodic part-song. And the foot system brings this out straightforwardly and on its general principles, with no beggings or assumptions whatever for the particular instance. Moreover, the structure of the piece may be paralleled freely from the songs in Shakespeare's plays.[23]

It is indeed sometimes said that such methods of scansion as these may apply very well to nineteenth-century poets, but that they are out of place in regard to older ones. This is demonstrably false. The method applies alike, and in like measure obviates all difficulties, in examples of the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It is as applicable to the early and mostly anonymous romancers and song-writers as to Tennyson, it accommodates Shakespeare as well as Browning. To Milton as to Shelley, to Dryden and Pope as to the most celebrated of our modern experimenters, say to Miss Christina Rossetti or Mr. Swinburne, it "fits like a glove." The rules in the next chapter, and the subjoined examples fully scanned in Chapter VI., will show its application as a beginning; the whole contents of this volume must give the fuller illustration and confirmation.[24]

---

1. English poetry, from the first constitution of literary Middle English to the present day, can best be scanned by a system of feet, or groups of syllables in two different values, which may be called for convenience long ( ̄ ) and short ( ̆ ).

2. The nature of these groups of syllables is determined by the usual mathematical laws of permutation; but some of them appear more frequently than others in English poetry, and some hardly occur at all.

3. Although, in the symbols of their constitution, these feet resemble those of the classical prosodies, it does not follow that they are identical with them, except mathematically,[25] the nature of the languages being different; and, in particular, their powers of combining in metre are far from being identical, so that combinations of feet which are successful in Greek and Latin need by no means be successful in English. Success is indeed almost limited to instances where the metrical constituents are restricted to iambs ( ̆ ̄ ), anapæsts ( ̆ ̆ ̄ ), and trochees ( ̄ ̆ ), with the spondee ( ̄ ̄ ) as an occasional ingredient.

4. The iamb ( ̆ ̄ ), the trochee ( ̄ ̆ ), and the anapæst ( ̆ ̆ ̄ ) are by far the commonest English feet; in fact, the great bulk of English poetry is composed of them.

5. The spondee ( ̄ ̄ ) is not so unusual as has sometimes been thought; but owing to the commonness of most syllables, especially in thesis, it may often be passed as an iamb, and sometimes as a trochee.

6. The dactyl ( ̄ ̆ ̆ ), on the other hand, though observable enough in separate English words, does not seem to compound happily in English, its use being almost limited to that of a substitute for the trochee. Used in continuity, either singly or with other feet, it has a tendency, especially in lines of some length, to rearrange itself into anapæsts with anacrusis. In very short lines, however, this "tilt" has not always time to develop itself.

7. The pyrrhic ( ̆ ̆ ) may occur in English, but is rarely wanted (see note above on spondee).

8. The tribrach ( ̆ ̆ ̆ ), however, has become not unusual.

9. Other combinations (for names see Glossary) than these are certainly rare, and are perhaps never wanted in English verse, though they are plentiful in prose. (See Rule 41 and Glossary.)

10. The quality, or contrast of quality, called "quantity," which fits English syllables for their places as long or short in a foot, is not uniform or constant.

11. It does not necessarily depend on the amount of time taken to pronounce the syllable; though there is probably a tendency to lengthen or shorten this time according to the prosodic length or shortness required.

12. It does not wholly depend on the usual quantity[26] of the vowel sound in the syllable; for long-sounding vowels are not very seldom shortened, and short-sounding ones are constantly made long.

13. An accumulation of consonants after the vowel will lengthen it prosodically, but need not necessarily do so.

14. Strong rhetorical stress will almost always lengthen if required.

15. The place in verse, if cunningly managed by the poet, will lengthen or shorten.

16. All monosyllables are common, the articles being, however, least susceptible of lengthening, and the indefinite perhaps hardly at all.

17. The most important law of English prosody is that which permits and directs the interchange of certain of these feet with others, or, in technical language, the substitution of equivalent feet.

18. This process of substitution is governed by two laws: one in a manner a priori, the other the result of experience only.

19. Substitution must not take place in a batch of lines, or even (with rare exceptions) in a single line, to such an extent that the base of the metre can be mistaken.

20. Even short of this result of confusion the ear must decide whether the substitution is allowable.

21. As a result of experience we find that the feet most suitable—if not alone suitable—as substitutes for the iamb—the commonest foot-staple—are the trochee, the anapæst, and the tribrach; that the dactyl substitutes well, if not too freely used, for the trochee.[27] These equivalences are reciprocal.

22. Next to equivalence, the most important and valuable engine in the constitution of English verses is the variation of the middle or internal pause.

23. Except in very long lines—which always tend to pause themselves either at the middle or at two places more or less equidistant—there is no reason why the pause of an English line should not be at any syllable from the first to the penultimate, and none why it should or should not occur at the end of a line, couplet, or even stanza—though in the last-named case rather special reasons are required for its omission. Not every line need necessarily have any pause at all.

24. The effect of blank verse depends more upon pause-variation than upon anything else; and by this variation, accompanied by stop or overrun ("enjambment") at the end of the line, verse-paragraphs are constituted, which can contain verse-clauses or sentences, in like manner brought into existence by pauses.

25. Lines, composed as above of feet, can be used in English either continuously on the same or equivalent patterns, or in batches of two or more.

26. The batches of two almost necessarily require rhyme to indicate and isolate them, especially if the individual lines are of the same length. Other batches [stanzas] might, as far as any a priori objection goes, consist of unrhymed lines, symmetrically correspondent, or irregular [Pindaric].

27. It is, however, found in practice, despite the examples of Campion, Collins, and one or two others, that rhymeless batching or stanza-making is very seldom successful.[28]

28. There is neither a priori objection nor a posteriori inconvenience to be urged against the construction of stanzas or batches in lines of very uneven length.

29. Every stanza-scheme must undergo, and is finally to be judged by, the test of the ear, and that only.

30. The commonest and oldest line-combinations—octosyllabic couplet, "common" or "ballad" measure, "long" and "short" measure, etc.—in some cases demonstrably, in all probably, result from the breaking up of the old long line ("fifteener" or "fourteener"), which itself came from the metricalising of the O.E. double stave.

31. It is natural to English poetry—i.e. Middle and Modern English, or English poetry proper—to rhyme; and, except in the case of blank verse, no unrhymed measure for the last seven centuries has ever produced large quantities of uniformly satisfactory quality.

32. Rhyme in English must be "full," i.e. consonantal (on the vowel and following consonant or consonants), not merely assonantal (on the vowel only). Assonance by itself is insufficient.

33. It should not, according to modern usage, be identical—that is to say, the rhyming syllables should not consist of exactly the same vowels and consonants. But exceptions to this may be found in good poets, especially when the words are not the same.

34. Good rhyme has necessarily varied, at different times, with pronunciation; but a certain rough rule may be seen prevailing not uncommonly, that vowels in rhyme may take the value which they have in words other than those actually employed.[29]

35. What is sometimes called "head-rhyme" (i.e. "alliteration") has now no place in English as rhyme at all, nor does it constitute either metre or stanza; but it is a permissible, and often a very considerable, ornament to verse.

36. Rhyme is either single (on the last syllable only), double (on the two last), or triple (on the three last). Beyond three the effect would be burlesque, and this is hard to keep out of triple rhyme, and even sometimes seems to menace the double.

37. In serious poetry the fuller in sound the single rhyme is the better.

38. Rhyme is usually at the end of the line; but it may be "internal"; that is to say, syllables at one or even more than one place within the line may rhyme to the syllable at the end or to each other, and syllables within one line may rhyme to those at corresponding places within another.

39. But this has a dangerous tendency to break the lines up.

40. The effect of English poetry at all times, but especially for the last hundred years, has been largely dependent on Vowel-music. This is by no means limited to the practice of what used to be called "making the sound suit the sense," though the two sometimes coincide. Vowel-music, not without occasional assistance from consonants, establishes a sort of accompaniment to the intelligible poetry—a prosodic setting.

41. In the management of this, as of rhyme, pause, enjambment, and even the selection and juxtaposition of feet themselves, the poet often, if not as a rule in the best examples, uses particular sleights of fingering and execution parallel to those of the musical composer and performer. The results of this may appear to constitute verse-sections different from the feet. But these, however, never supersede feet, and are always resolvable into them; nor do they ever supply criteria for anything except the individual line or passage. They stand to prosody proper very much as delivery or elocution does to rhetoric. The conveniences of this "fingering," or poetic elocution, as well as sense and other things, may sometimes bring about alternative scansions, but all these connect themselves with and are obedient to the general foot system.[30]

42. Despite this possibility of alternative scansion, and the other and commoner possibility of substitution of individual feet, iambic and trochaic, dactylic and anapæstic, metre or rhythm remain entirely distinct. Any system which regards these as merely different names for the same thing is self-condemned as disregarding the evidence, or rather verdict, of the ear.

---

No better examples can be taken for this than two already used by Dr. Sievers—the close of the Phœnix with its illuminative Latin admixture, and a bit of Beowulf (205 ff.)(dotted foot division added in first case):

In these the general trochaic run and the corresponding tendency to dactylic substitution, which are so evident in the Latin, as it were muffle themselves in the English; and the contrast, so strikingly brought out in the mixed passage, is not really less evident in the pure Anglo-Saxon one. The muffling is the result, partly of the imperfect substitution, or rather the actual presence of syllables not digested into the metre; partly of the overbearing middle pause, which, suggesting another in each section, chops the whole up into disconnected grunts or spasmodic phrases.

Here an immense advance is made. The rhythm is still trochaic, though it is by no means certain that it does not show symptoms of iambicisation. It is far more well marked; and one of the means of the marking is that the "ditch in the middle"—the formal pause,—though no doubt technically and even rhetorically existing, is overrun by the suggested feet as long as the trochee is kept. But if this pause holds its place it suggests iambic scansion—

and something like the whole future of English poetry lies in the suggestion. Do not omit to notice the metrical assistance given by the epanaphora, or repetition of the same word and phrases in the same place, and by the imperfect and irregular assonances emphasising the divisions.

A distinct effort at iambic stanza, such as that of the great Ambrosian hymn, Veni Redemptor gentium.

It is not surprising if the experimenter stumbles, if the old trochaic rhythm is sometimes in his head, and if, in the last verse, he either overruns or divides and makes a quintet. The struggle towards feet—and new feet—is there, and rhyme, if imperfect, is there also.

The moral of this (whether it be written as above in eights and sevens or continuously as "fifteeners") is unmistakable, as stated before: the writer, for all his scrupulous indication of short vowels, seems to care no more than if he were a modern Frenchman for syllabic quantity, or even for accent. He will have his fifteen syllables, his pause at the eighth, and his sing-song run of seven dissyllabic batches and a feminine ending. But, will he nill he, he impresses—with whatever sing-song effect and whatever merciless iteration—the iambic beat throughout his whole enormous work.

These four couplets (continuous in the original) exhibit perfectly the process which was going on. (2) is a rather shapeless example of the old scarcely metrical Anglo-Saxon line with a roughly trochaic rhythm; and (4) is not very different. But (3) is a not quite successful, though recognisable, attempt at a rhymed (it is actually assonanced) iambic dimeter or octosyllabic couplet. And (1) is this couplet complete at all points in rhythm, metre, and rhyme—capable, in fact, of being exactly quantified and rendered exactly into modern English, all but the dropped final e:

Thĕn ān|swĕrēd|[ĕ] Vōr|tĭger
ŏf īlk | ăn ē|vĭl hē | wăs wāre.

The exact origin[31] of the "fourteener," "septenar" (as the Germans call it), "long Alexandrine" (as it was very improperly termed in England for a time), "seven-foot" or "seven-accent" line—to give its various designations—is a matter of conjecture. The "fifteener" of Orm with the redundant syllable lopped off; a variation with iambic or "rising stress" rhythm substituted for trochaic or falling, and a syllable added in the popular Latin metre of

with other things; most probably of all, a shortened metrification of the old long line, to represent the frequent inequality of its halves better than the octosyllabic couplet—have been suggested. It holds, however, such an important place in English prosody from the early thirteenth to the late sixteenth century, and its resolution into the ballad couplet or "common measure" is of so much greater importance still, that it can hardly have too much attention.

The extraordinarily prosaic and "stumping" cadence of the Ormulum perhaps obscures the connection, especially as this rigid syllabisation makes trisyllabic feet impossible. But the true rhythm appears, though still with a redundant syllable, in the famous Moral Ode, the older versions of which are dated before Orm. The oldest, as it is supposed to be, of these shows the form in full existence—

But the youngest—

gives a priceless improvement; for even if "nu" has dropped out, the resulting monosyllabic foot is quite rhythmical, the trisyllabic "-ter and eke" is unmistakable, and the life and spirit that it gives to the verse equally so.

In the course of the thirteenth century the form develops immensely. As a continuous one, it furnishes the staple of the Chronicle and Saints' Lives, attributed—the former certainly and the latter probably in at least some cases—to Robert of Gloucester. As thus in Lear's complaint:

But before long it shows, though it may be still written on, an evident tendency to break up into ballad measure, as in the (also thirteenth-century) Judas poem:

We have seen how, in Layamon, the regular rhymed octosyllabic couplet or iambic dimeter ("four-stress line," etc.) shows itself, either as a deliberate alternative to the old long line, or as a half-unconscious result of the endeavour to adjust it to the new metrical tendencies of the language. And we saw, also, that its examples in Layamon himself vary from absolute normality to different stages of licence or incompleteness. Before long, however, we find two varieties establishing themselves, with more or less distinct and definite contrast. The first, which seems to keep French or Latin examples more or less strictly before it, is exemplified in The Owl and the Nightingale, and scans as follows:

Here, it will be observed, there is practically no licence except a few doubtful e's, and that of omitting one syllable and making the line "acephalous" iambic or catalectic trochaic. This form was followed largely, and, from Chaucer and Gower onwards, by most poets, except Spenser, till the time of Chatterton, Blake, and Coleridge in Christabel.

Side by side with it, however, a form embodying the special characteristic of the new English prosody— equivalent substitution—exhibits itself in full force in the mid-thirteenth-century Genesis and Exodus, as well as in other miscellaneous poems and in the romances. Here are specimens from Genesis and Exodus, 2367-2376:

And from Richard Cœur de Lion, 3261-3268:

Here, it will be observed, the foot of three syllables—generally, if not always, an anapæst—and even, it would seem, that of one sometimes, are freely substituted for that of two, adding immensely to the variety, spirit, and freedom of the line. The first "ne hadde" is perhaps run together.

At an uncertain period in the thirteenth century this makes its appearance—no doubt directly imitated from the French, but probably also in part a derivative of the application of metrical tendency to the aboriginal line-couplet. Its French name[33] is not, to our eyes, appropriate —one would rather call it "waisted" or "waisted-and-tailed rhyme"; and as it is very largely (in fact, with the plain couplet predominantly) used in the English romances, "romance-six" as opposed to "ballad-four" seems a good name for it. It sometimes, however, extends to three, four, or even six sets of two eights and a six, and is found both plain and equivalenced, as thus:

(Chaucer, Sir Thopas.)

(Le Bone Florence of Rome, 778-783.)

The plain form, as Chaucer, of malice prepense, showed in the above, is particularly liable to sing-song effect.

(a) A very considerable number of these were introduced, sometimes no doubt by direct imitation of French or (as in the case of the "Burns-metre,"[34]) Provençal originals, sometimes by the ingenuity of the individual poet, working on the plastic material of the blended language, according to the new metrical foot-system. They all scan easily by this, as may be seen in a stanza of Tristrem, one of the Harleian Lyrics, and a "Burns stanza" from the York Plays; while anapæstic substitution, amounting to something like "triple time" as a whole, appears in the Hampolian extract.

(Sir Tristrem, 1255-63.)

(Three-foot iambic with single-foot "bob." All final e's sounded or elided. One monosyllabic, and two or three trisyllabic, substitutions.)

(Alison, Harleian MS. p. 27, ed. Wright.)

(From the other stanzas it appears that the middle quatrain should consist of three eights and a six, and that something has dropped—supplied now by carets. Otherwise the scheme is clear.)

("York" Plays, vi. § 2.)

(The final e's are beginning to be neglected, and the whole is probably in strict iambics here, though vacillation between four- and five-foot lines is not absolutely impossible. But there is trisyllabic substitution elsewhere, though not very much. It may be remembered that there is little of it in Burns's own examples of this metre. Closer still to his is the following):

(Ibid. § 24.)

(b)

(Horstmann's Hampole, i. 72.)

(Probably, when first written, the ultimate e's of the even lines were sounded; but even this is not certain, and the superiority of the shortening would soon have struck the ear.)

(c) More elaborate stanza from the Drama:

("Townley" Plays, iii. p. 23, E.E.T.S.)

The idea that the new metres in English were invariably direct copies of those already existing in French (or Latin) seems to be decisively negatived by the fact that the decasyllabic line—the staple, not indeed in couplet but in long batches or tirades, of the earlier French chansons de geste—makes a rare appearance in English verse before the late fourteenth century. But it does appear, thereby, on the other hand, negativing the notion that Chaucer "introduced" it, and suggesting that it was, in part at least, a genuine experiment—not in imitation, but in really independent development, of the possibilities of English metre. Here are scanned examples of different periods.

(a) Uncertain in intention, but assuming distinct couplet cadence:

(Orison of Our Lady (c. 1200).)

(b) Expansion of octosyllable in single line:

(Genesis and Exodus, 3840 (c. 1250).)

(c) In couplet:

(Richard Cœur de Lion, 2435-36 (before 1325?).)

(d) Overflow of octosyllable into decasyllable; probably, in the first place, from the equivalenced lines lending themselves to another run:

(In Hampole's Prick of Conscience, 680, 681
(before 1350), with scores of others.)

The examples of this revival (see Book II.) cannot, of course, in their nature, be strictly scanned. But it is important to bring out the change of rhythm as compared with the older examples (v. sup. p. 37).

(To prevent confusion with positive metrical scansion, I have made the scanning bars dotted, and have doubled the foot-division line for the middle pause in the first extract.)

(William of Palerne.)

(Notice that the nisus towards anapæstic cadence overruns the break both in the metre and, as at "-glent," "stor," "-port" below, in the half line.)

(Cleanness.)

(Gawain and the Green Knight.)

The metrical additions, on the other hand (see Book II.), and those poems which, while employing alliteration, subject it to metrical schemes, scan perfectly, as:

("Wheels" of Gawain and the Green Knight.)

(The Pearl, ii.)

("Wheel" of The Awnyrs of Arthur, xxvii.)

Decasyllables:

(A. i. 159.)

(A. v. 97.)

Alexandrines:

(C. viii. 189.)

(B. xvi. 81.)

Fourteeners:

(B. viii. 56.)

(B. xi. 166.)

A large number might be added where the pronunciation which was shortly to come in necessarily makes such lines, though they may not have been intended as such; for instance—

(B. xii. 125.)

and even octosyllables will appear—

(A. iii. 277.)

partly explaining to us the chaos of lines in fifteenth-century poetry.

Octosyllable:

(House of Fame, i. 130-139.)

(Two "acephalous" lines, initial monosyllabic feet, or trochaic admixtures; some unimportant elisions before vowels and h; middle pause not kept in lines 1, 4, 6, and 10.)

Rhyme-royal:

(Troilus and Criseyde, v. 1814-20.)

(Metre quite regular, but pause much varied—practically none in line 5. Elisions as above, but e's not valued, or elided, in erthe, pleyne. Final couplet hendecasyllabic, as indeed most are.)

(a) Riding rhyme or heroic couplet:

(Opening paragraph of Canterbury Tales.)

(Very regular; but possible trisyllabic feet wherever "every" occurs, and a certain one in "Caunt|erbury|." Pause almost indifferently at 4th and 5th syllables. French-Latin accent in "Natùre." Many hendecasyllables or redundances; but all made by the e in one form or another.)

(b) "Acephalous" or nine-syllable lines:

(c) Alexandrines:

(K. T. 1036.)

(Sq. T. 585.)

(a) Trochaic substitution:

(Conf. Am. i. 2348.)

(b) Anapæstic substitution:

(iv. 1331.)

(v. 447.)

(if the dissyllabic "ie" is insisted on).

(v. 2514.)

(v. 5011.)

(It will be observed that in these four instances, all acknowledged by Professor Macaulay, the final e is required to make the trisyllabic foot, though the first instance differs slightly from the others. I should myself add a large number where Mr. Macaulay sees only "slur," but in which occur words like "ever" (i. 3), "many a" (i. 316, 317), or syllables like "eth," which must be valued in one case at least here—

(Prol. 505.)

where Mr. Macaulay reads "tobrekth," and where the copyists very likely made it so.)

(c) Acephalous lines:

Very rare if the e be always allowed. Perhaps non-existent.

(a) Lydgate's decasyllabic couplet:

(Story of Thebes, 1250 sqq.)

(3, tolerable; 2, ditto, with hiatus at cæsura; 1, last foot missing; 4, "acephalous"; 5, syllable missing at cæsura.)

(b) His rhyme-royal:

(Temple of Glass, st. 16.)

(Two examples (2 and 3) of the so-called "Lydgatian" missing syllable at cæsura.)

(c) A typical minor, John Metham, in Amoryus and Cleopes, stanza 1:

(A fourteener, a decasyllable, an Alexandrine, a sixteener, and three decasyllables, the last very shaky either as that or as an Alexandrine! In fact, sheer doggerel of the unintended kind.)

(a) Chevy Chase:

(It must be observed that this modern spelling exactly represents the old prosodically. The reader will then see that there are no liberties, on the equivalent system, except the crasis of "-viot" and "ever." The former, insignificant in any case, is still more so here, for the actual Northumbrian pronunciation is or was "Chevot"; while if "ever" changes places with "that," there is not even any crasis needed. For a piece so rough in phrase, and copied by a person so evidently illiterate, the exactness is astonishing.)

(b) "E.I.O.":

(Spelling modernised as before, but not a word altered.)

(a) Skelton:

I.

(Crown of Laurel.)

II.

(Elinor Rumming.)

(b) Examples from Heywood and other interludes.

(1) Continuous long doggerel:

(2) Singles:

(Shortened six.)
This | wyse him | deprave,

(Octosyllable.)
And give | the ab|solu|tion.

(Irregular decasyllable.)
The aboun|dant grace | of the | powèr | divyne

(Alexandrine.)
Preserve | this aud|ience | and leave | them to | inclyne.

(Irregular fourteener.)
Then hold | down thine | head like | a pret|ty man | and take | my blessing.

(In all these examples the doggerel is probably intended; that is to say, the writers are not aiming at a regularity which they cannot reach, but cheerfully or despairingly renouncing it.)

(a) Barbour (regular octosyllables):

(One "acephalous" line.)

(b) Wyntoun (octosyllables somewhat freer):

(IV. ii. 157-160.)

(c) Blind Harry (regular decasyllables on French model):

(d) James I. (rhyme-royal):

(e) Henryson (ballad measure; slight anapæstic substitution):

Those who deny the valued e in "grenè," as not Scots, may refuse the second instance of trisyllabic feet, but the first will remain.

(f) Dunbar (alliterative):

Dunbar (dimeter iambic quatrains with refrain, and much anapæstic substitution):

(g) Alexander Scott (stanzas):

(h) Montgomerie (Cherry and Slae stanza):

(a) Wyatt (sonnet)

(I formerly scanned line 9:

But "forèst" is so frequent and makes such a much better rhythm that perhaps it should be preferred. It will, however, emphasise still further the poet's curious uncertainty about the "-eth" rhymes—whether he shall arrange them on that syllable only, or take in the penultimate. Besides this point, the student should specially notice the pains taken to get, not merely the feet, but the syllables right at the cost sometimes of pretty strongly "wrenched" accent. On all this see Book II. The final è's are rather a curiosity than important: longè may have been sounded, "luste" and "harte" (so printed in Tottel) improbably.)

(b) Wyatt (lyric stanza):

(It will be observed that this rondeau-like motion, with its short lines and frequent repetition, is brought off better than the sonnet, though the French accent sticks in travàil.)

(c) Surrey (sonnet):

(Observe how much more surely and lightly the younger poet treads in the uncertain pioneer footsteps of the elder.)

(d) Surrey ("poulter's measure"):

(Very little to be said for it, except as a school of regular rhythm. Broken up into "short measure" (6, 6, 8, 6) it has been not ineffective in hymns.)

(e) Gascoigne (lyric stanza):

(f) Turberville (lyric stanza):

(Observe in both of these the absolute syllabic regularity, and observance of foot-rhythm.)

(a) Shep. Kal. (strict stanza):

(Regular iambs throughout. One double rhyme.)

(b) Shep. Kal. (equivalenced octosyllable—Christabel or Genesis and Exodus metre):

(Observe that this last is the only distinct, if not the only possible, decasyllabic couplet, while it can become an Alexandrine by valuing "hal|lowèd" |; and that "priestès" is the only attempt at valued Chaucerian e.)

(c) Shep. Kal. (equivalenced stanza):

It may be just desirable to remind the student that a final "-ion" is commonly dissyllabic in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. "Worn of par|amours" is possible.

(d) "Spenserian" stanza (occasional, but mostly slight, equivalence. Pause in ll. 1-8 at discretion; in 9 usually at middle, but, as in the following, not always):

(e) Mother Hubberd's Tale (antithetic and stopped heroic couplet):

(f) Epithalamion (elaborate quasi-Pindaric stanza concerted in different line length, but almost strictly iambic; "the," etc., before a vowel being probably elided):

(a) Surrey (translation of Aeneid):

(The interest of the new mode here is manifold. The lines are almost wholly "single-moulded," the author's anxiety to keep himself right without rhyme necessitating this. The cæsura at the fourth syllable is almost always kept, according to the tradition of the French line. Once (in the penultimate line) he has to overflow; but into an Alexandrine, not into the next line. Whether by intention or not—"sprite" being possible—he once discovers the enormous advantage of the trisyllabic foot.[39] Once he makes with "rest" and "breast" the oversight of a "Leonine" rhyme. But, on the whole, the success is remarkable for a beginning; and there are indications of what has to be done to secure the end.)

(b) First dramatic attempts—Gorboduc onwards:

(Gorboduc.)

(Misfortunes of Arthur.)

(Battle of Alcazar.)

(F. Bacon and F. Bungay.}

(Tamburlaine.)

(An extreme stiffness and "single-mouldedness" in the lines; modified in Peele and Greene by trisyllabic feet, perhaps not intended as such ("heav'n" was pretty certainly regarded and generally spelt as a monosyllable, and the pronunciations "ev'ry" and "Margret" are old; while "t'invade" and "th'uncertain" would be likely), but virtually so, and inviting, especially in "Margaret," the full and beautiful value. The Gorboduc form, as is natural, is much the least accomplished. It is indeed what, by an almost incomprehensible inversion of sense and nature, some people call "blank verse according to the rules"—ten syllables only, five almost strictly iambic feet (="accent on the even places"); pause near the middle; stop, metrical, if not grammatical, at every end—in fact, the roughest and most rudimentary form possible.)

(c) Early non-dramatic blanks (Gascoigne):

(It will be noticed that the "single-moulded" character is even more noticeable here than in drama, and is emphasised by the epanaphora. There is one redundance—"saintish" ("jagged" is probably "jagg'd"), and, as we know that the author thought the iamb the only English foot, we must not read "rĕvĕnue," but, with "tow'rs," "revènue"—which indeed was, by precisians, regarded as the correct pronunciation not so very long ago.)

(d) Perfected "single-mould":

(David and Bethsabe.)

(Tamburlaine.)

(These passages, despite their extreme poetical beauty, are still prosodically immature. Even when, as in the last, there are lines with no technical "stop" at the end, as at "held" and "heads," the grammatical incompleteness does not interfere with the rounding off of the prosodic period or sub-period. Marlowe (v. inf.) could enjamb couplet beautifully, but not blank verse. Note also that the lines are strictly decasyllabic, the only hints at trisyllabic feet being in words like "Heaven," then regularly a monosyllable, "every," and "flowers.")

(e) Shakespeare.

(1) Early single-moulded:

(Titus Andronicus.)

(Same remarks applying as to the last citation.)

(2) Beginning of perfected stage:

(Romeo and Juliet.)

(No trisyllabic feet yet, and no redundance: but, by shift of pause and completer juncture of lines, the paragraph effect solidly founded.)

(3) Further process in the same direction:

(Antony and Cleopatra.)

(Here the double division marks indicate stronger, and the single lighter, pauses—not, as usually in the latter case, feet. The variation of the pause for paragraph effect is here consummate; but the verse, as its conditions require, is of the severer type.)

(4) Perfection in passion:

(King Lear.)

(Every extension taken. Monosyllabic feet either at the first "blow" and "winds," or the last, and "rage," perhaps at both (an Alexandrine). Trisyllabic at "-phŭrŏus ānd," "rĭĕrs tō," and "ĭty̆ ō̆'." Redundance at "-ing thun⋮der." Pause fully played upon as above: enjambment at "spout"; parenthetic enjambment at "fires.")

(5) Perfection in quiet:

(The Tempest.)

(Not much trisyllabic—the dreaminess not requiring it. A good deal of redundance, and enjambment pushed nearly to the furthest by taking place at "and."[40])

(f) Redundance encroaching.

Beaumont and Fletcher:

(The False One.)

(Here it will be seen there are two actual Alexandrines (three if we allow the full value to "con|queror|") and twelve redundant lines to four non-redundant! The fire of the poetry fuses this, but cannot always be counted on, as in the next.)

(The Loyal Subject.)

(Which, with its repetition of stumbling amphibrachic ends, is rather hideous.)

(g) Spread of the infection, and complete decay of blank verse from various causes.

(1) Shirley:

(The Brothers.)

(Actual scansion quite correct, and therefore not marked throughout. Redundance not excessive ("innocence" may be taken as such, and not as making an Alexandrine, if liked); hardly any, and no misused, trisyllabic feet. But enjambment at "what," "to," "thou," and "shall" badly managed.)

(2) Suckling:

(Aglaura.)

(A hopeless jumble. The 1st, as a fragment, and 2nd lines are all right, and the 6th could be completed properly. But 3, 4, and 5—though 3 and 5 could come in with other companions—upset any kind of continuous arrangement, and 4 would hardly be good anywhere.)

(3) Davenant:

(Albovine.)

(More hopeless still, and left unscanned for the student's edification.)

(h) The Miltonic Restoration.

Early dramatic experiment.

Comus is evidently written under three different influences, which may be said to be in the main those of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Fletcher. The poet often uses Fletcher's heavy trisyllabic endings—

and has not infrequent Alexandrines, the most certain of which is—

But he makes the verse more and more free and original, as in the following extracts:

(The full comments given on previous passages make it unnecessary to annotate this much. The last passage has the full paragraph combination.[41])

(a) Prae-Spenserian:

(Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578).)

(Anapæstic substitution (if not definite anapæstic base) arising doubtless rather from tune than from deliberate prosodic purpose; but quite prosodically correct, and sure to propagate itself.)

(b) Post-Spenserian:

(Phœnix Nest (1593).)

(Pure iambics; effect produced by short "bob" rhymes.)

(c) Ben Jonson (strict common measure):

(As mostly with Ben, strict iambics, save for the opening trochee, and something like a spondee in "Jove's nec-." The wonderful effect which he, or Donne, or the Spirit of the Age, taught to the next two generations is produced entirely by careful choice and fingering of the words and rhymes.)

(d) Ben Jonson (anapæstic measure):

("Through," as often, is probably to be valued "thorough," and "chariot" was generally "chawyot" or "charret." It will be observed that although this is fine it is slightly laboured. The age was hardly at ease with the anapæst as yet.)

(e) Campion (selections):

(1) Classical

English anacreontic.

English elegiac.

English iambic.

(2) Natural

The student should require little assistance here, odd as some of the rhythms may seem. But "Rose-cheeked Laura" ought to be trochaically scanned, and will then be naturally "English." Nothing can make the "English elegiac" harmonious. Note that line 3 of "Break now" may be anapæstic like 4 and 5:

(a) Tusser (1st ed. 1557; complete, 1573):

(Perfectly good, though not very euphonious.)

(b) Gifford, H. (1580):

(c) Mary Ambree (c. 1584):

(Percy patched the bracketed words (his copy being evidently corrupt) in lines 1 and 2. But 3 and 4 are exactly as in the folio; and their anapæstic base is quite clear. At the same time, it is worth remarking that these early lines are apt, frequently though not regularly, to buttress their start on a dissyllabic foot.)

(a) Spenser.

The very opening of Mother Hubberd's Tale (1591), quoted above (p. 62) in its stopped aspect, shows the way to enjambment:

And we have, further, an instance as shocking to "regular" prosodists as anything in the seventeenth century:

(b) Marlowe—as remarkable in Hero and Leander for this as for "single-moulding" in blank verse:

(c) Drayton began with fairly separated couplets; but indulged in overrunning later, as in David and Goliath:

(d) Browne:

(The actual verse-sentence does not end for another half-dozen lines; but the scansion is so perfectly regular that it seems unnecessary to mark it. "Aprìl" is quite Spenserian, and has both Latin and French justification.)

(e) The later seventeenth-century enjambers:

(Thealma and Clearchus, 2203-2216.)

(Cupid and Psyche, iii. 259-262.)

(Pharonnida, IV. iii. 243-256.)

(The same remark applies here as to Browne. Some of these poets are indeed great "apostrophators," such things as "t'" for "to," "b'" for "by," and "'s" for "his" being common. But these uglinesses are generally resorted to in order to attain or keep the strict decasyllabic. Chalkhill (an actual Elizabethan, if he was anything) is less shy of at least apparent trisyllabics, as in "bĕĭng drīv|en," "ex|pĭăte thēir.|" The double rhyme of "sea" to "they" and "seas" to "please" is worth noticing; v. sup. Rule 34, p. 34.)

(a) Spenser (Mother Hubberd's Tale), v. sup. p. 62.

(b) Drayton (Heroical Epistles, "Suffolk to Margaret"):

(Here all the characteristics of the eighteenth-century couplet may be found—the central cæsura or split, the balance of the two halves, the completion of sense in the couplet and almost in the line.)

(c) Fairfax (end couplets):

(Observe here the tendency, not merely to balance, but to positive antithesis, in the halves.)

(d) Beaumont, Sir John:

(e) Sandys.

Compare the openings of Job I. and II.:

---

(f) Waller:

(g) Cowley (Davideis):

(It should be observed on these that in Beaumont, Sandys I., Waller, and Cowley the separation of the couplets is strictly maintained; in Sandys II. not. In fact, this passage, but for the rhymes, has almost the run of Miltonic blank verse. Waller once approaches an initial trochee or "inversion of accent" in "With the." Here Cowley is pretty regular. But not far off may be found such a line as—

where he must either have intended "they-ex-" to be elided or have meant an anapæstic ending of the kind so common in the dramatists his contemporaries. And he constantly uses (explicitly defending it) the Alexandrine, as in—

or—

while he often employs trochees or spondees. He does not use the triplet in the Davideis, but does elsewhere, and, after Virgil, he sometimes indulges in half-lines.)

(a) Shakespeare (doubtfully?):

(These distichs from the Passionate Pilgrim will illustrate the two different forms which the heptasyllable—really an octosyllable acephalous or catalectic—can take. The catalectic form (1) becomes trochaic; the acephalous (2), iambic. They can be interchanged, and either can group with the full iambic dimeter; but, individually, it would spoil (1) to scan it as iambic, (2) to scan it as trochaic. Yet on "accentual" scansion there is no difference; and some advocates of recent fancy "stress"-systems maintain that the rhythms are identical!)

(b) Shakespeare (almost certainly):

(In this famous and eminently Shakespearian passage from Pericles, the last line, a heptasyllable, goes perfectly with the rest, or octosyllables, either as acephalous or as catalectic, either as an iambic fellow or a trochaic substitute.)

(c) Shakespeare (certainly):

(From A Midsummer Night's Dream. Same as last, except that the full octosyllable is only reached at the end, and perhaps in line 4. "Hecat[e]," as often, is dissyllabic.)

(d) Browne, W.:

(Pure octosyllables. There is a catalectic line now and then elsewhere, but it is an evident exception.)

(e) Wither:

(Pure heptasyllables, taking either cadence, and, when extended, owing the extension mainly, if not wholly, to the double rhyme. The first line gives the alternative scansion; but Wither's run is, on the whole, trochaic, as Browne's is iambic.)

(a) See above, § XXIII., for "Drink to me only."

(b) Donne(?), Ayton(?), Anon.(?), (C.M.):

(A capital example of the possibility of rhetorical addition to the strict foot-system, as in line 2, "I took it || to be thine."[43] For "concayt" and "estate" cf. sup. § XXV. sub fin.)

(c) Herrick (C.M.):

(Strongly flavoured, and greatly improved, by trochaic substitution in first foot.)

(d) Marvell (L.M.):

(e) Lord Herbert of Cherbury (In Memoriam metre):

(Great regularity of feet; but already the "circular" motion which Tennyson was to perfect.)

(a) Dryden (1691?):

(These early anapæsts, as noted, are very apt to begin with dissyllabic feet. But it was no rule: in this same piece, "The Beautiful Lady of the May," occurs the line:

All the nymphs | were in white | and the shep|herd in green.

(b) Anon. in Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719, but contents often much older):

(c) Prior (1696):

(Observe here in "assid[u]ous" and "bus[i]ness" the liberty of combining adjacent vowels (-uous) and following familiar pronunciation (bizness) which this light verse especially authorises.

Dryden (complete stanza from "Anne Killigrew" ode):

VI

(88-91, heroics; 92, 93, octosyllables; 94-96, heroics; 97, octosyllable; 98, Alexandrine; 99, 100, heroic; 101, octosyllable; 102, heroic; 103, Alexandrine; 104, octosyllable; 105, 106, heroics; 107, fourteener; 108-118, continuous octosyllables; 119-125, continuous heroics capped and finished off by 126, Alexandrine. In 97, probably "th' offence.")

(a) Dryden (early non-dramatic):

(Note recurrent you and your employed like pauses to vary verse. Otherwise strictly "regular.")

(b) Dryden ("heroic"-dramatic type at best):

(Conquest of Granada II., III. iii.)

(Observe how the alternation of central pause, strongly (|) and weakly (¦) or hardly at all (no mark) emphasised, knits and shades the verse; and how, in the first line, there is positive enjambment. Yet there is still no trisyllabic substitution. This type is continued and perfected in the great satires and didactic pieces for argument and attack, and in the Fables for narrative. It admits, to relieve monotony, the Alexandrine (Hind and Panther, i. 23, 24))—

the triplet (ibid. a little further)—

both combined (Palamon and Arcite, ii. 560-562)—

and sometimes the fourteener (Medal, 94)—

(c) Passages from Garth, (1), and Pope, (2) and (3), to illustrate the mechanical character of the eighteenth-century couplet, the ease with which it can be shifted from decasyllabic to octosyllabic, and its peculiar construction of ridge-backed antithetic pause:

(The Dispensary.)

(Read, omitting the interlined epithets, and you get perfectly fluent octosyllables.)

(Windsor Forest.)

Now this, in the same way, by the omission of some of the italicised gradus epithets, becomes—

[Transcriber's Note: In the following example, first part of each line is angled up the page, and second part of each line is angled down.]

(3)        Not with more glories  in th' ethereal plain
The sun first rises  o'er the purpled main,
Than issuing forth  the rival of his beams
Launch'd on the bosom of  the silver Thames.
Fair nymphs and well-drest youths  around her shone,
But ev'ry eye was fix'd  on her alone.
On her white breast  a sparkling cross she wore,
Which Jews might kiss  and Infidels adore.
Her livelylooks  a sprightly mind disclose,
Quick as her eyes  and as unfixed as those.
Favours to none  to all she smiles extends,
Oft she rejects  but never once offends.
Bright as the sun  her eyes the gazers strike,
And like the sun  they shine on all alike.
Yet graceful ease  and sweetness void of pride
Might hide her faults  if Belles had faults to hide.
If to her share  some female errors fall,
Look in her face  and you'll forget them all.

(The Rape of the Lock.)

Of course Pope,[44] in the close of the Dunciad and elsewhere, has passages of the utmost dignity; and the antithetic arrangement is good for satire. But perhaps the finest passages of this class of couplet—certainly the finest with the Dunciad close—are the following, from

(d) Johnson (Vanity of Human Wishes—end):

and

(e) Crabbe ("Delay brings Danger"—end):

(Observe, besides the other points mentioned, that trisyllabic feet practically never occur in Garth, Pope, and Johnson—"wat'ry for watery," and words like "ether(ea)l," "celest(ia)l," "happ(ie)r," being intended to take the benefit of elision, though, as a matter of fact, they give that of extension. Only Crabbe, in "gathering," may perhaps not have meant "gath'ring.")

(a) Thomson:

(This, from the poem on Newton, is Thomson at his very best in blank verse, or nearly so. He was, however, too apt to emphasise his phrases into full stops, producing what Johnson justly called "broken style," as thus:

The trick was pushed to a pitch of absurdity by

(b) Glover:

and is somewhat noteworthy in Young and others. The reason probably was a sort of nervous fear lest, in the absence of rhyme, the versification should not be sufficiently marked. But at length the proper flow was recovered by

(c) Cowper:

(Yardley Oak.)

(The spondee "Tīme māde" and trochee "kīng ŏf" are certainly intentional, whether consciously as such or not. The anapæst "-mĕrŏus flōcks" may not have been meant, for Cowper had not cleared his mind up about "elision," but is one in fact.)

Analysis of Gray's Bard (the second and third divisions coincide to the minutest degree):

I. i.

I. i. (Strophe)

•  1. Troch. dim. cat. ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄.
•  2. Iamb. dim. acat. ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄.
•  3. ditto
•  4. ditto
•  5 as 1.
•  6 and 7. Heroics nearly pure, ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄.
•  8 as 2 to 4.
•  9 to 13. Heroics
• 14. Alexandrine ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄. "Quiv'ring," probably.

I. ii.

I. ii. (Antistrophe)

Identical.

I. iii.

I. iii. (Epode)

•  1. Iamb. dim. brachycat. ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄.
•  2. ditto
•  3. Heroic.
•  4, 5, as 1, 2, with trochee substituted in first place.
•  6 as 3.
•  7. Iamb. dim. acat.
•  8. Troch. dim. cat.
•  9 to 14. Heroics: the last 4 in quatrain.
• 15 to 18. Iamb. dims. arranged in stanza quatrain; internal rhymes only in lines 15 and 17.
• 19. Heroic.
• 20. Alexandrine.

(a) Gay:

(Remarkable for the improvement, by the redundant syllable in the odd lines, on the plain anapæstic three-foot quatrain used later by Shenstone and Cowper, as well as for its leading up to the more obvious successes of Praed and Mr. Swinburne; v. inf. § XLIV.)

(b) Gray:

(Eleventh-century poets employed the old romance-six, or rime couée, almost more largely than any other metre for general lyrical purposes.)

(c) (D. Lewis?):

(Another instance of the refreshing and alterative effect of
redundance—in this case on the old "long measure." But even in its
stricter form the century managed "L.M." better than "C.M.," which,
till Blake, was almost always sing-song.)

Percy's Reliques, however, taught it something better; though Percy's own imitations and those of others were often as described above. Yet soon we find in

(a) Chatterton, such adaptations of ballad metre as—

and such equivalenced octosyllabic couplet and stanza as—

But the real Columbus here was

(b) Blake, who from 1780 onwards wrote such things as—

(This cannot be studied too carefully, and is almost a typical example of sound prosody, orderly without monotony and free without licence. Every substitution is justified, both on the general principles expounded throughout this book, and to the ear in each individual case.)

(a) Collins (Ode to Evening):

(Perfectly regular heroics and sixes; "pastoral" most probably intended to be "past'ral.")

(b) Sayers (Choruses of Moina):

I.

(This—which is fairly but not wholly free from the fault noted in II.—is ordinary iambic and trochaic mixture.)

II.

(It will be observed that each of the couplets enclosed in square brackets is simply a blank-verse line, arbitrarily split. This is probably the result of the effort at rhymeless stanza. Observe the unbroken iambic rhythm—another danger.)

(c) Southey (Thalaba):

(Iambic lines of various lengths with trochaic and spondaic but no other substitution (there are anapæsts elsewhere). The couplet-six, or split Alexandrine, is intentional, but Southey expressly avoids split heroics.)

(d) Shelley (Queen Mab):

(a) Percy's imitation of equivalence and extension of scheme (Sir Cawline):

(Not bad; might have been improved by "And the tears|.")

(b) Goldsmith (regularised sing-song):

(c) Southey (quite sound in principle, and not bad in effect; but a little more poetic powder wanted):

(d) Coleridge (the real thing in simpler and more complex form):

(The presence and absence of anapæstic substitution here, with its effect in each case, should be carefully studied.)

Specimens of Christabel, with note on the application of the system to later lyric. (Some have said that in Christabel "the consideration of feet is dropped altogether," and others, that it "cannot be analysed," or can only be so by the rough process of counting accents. Let us go and do it.)

(A five-lined ballad stanza, freely but regularly equivalenced with anapæsts. Line 3 may be four monosyllabic feet, or an iambic monometer—two feet,—according to the value put on the first note of the owl's cry.) The rest of the piece is not in ballad stanza, but in octosyllabic couplet, again more or less freely but regularly equivalenced, and allowing itself occasional licences of rhyme-order, line-length, etc. Thus the succeeding lines are in two batches, where the substitution—anapæstic, trochaic, spondaic or monosyllabic—increases, dwindles, disappears and reappears ad libitum:

The whole of the rest follows suit, with occasional variations (not, save in one case perhaps, "irregularities"), as, for instance—

where a triple scansion might appear possible: (1) monosyllabic beginnings indicated by ||; (2) three-foot lines with anapæstic opening (|); and (3) the trochaic variation common in seventeenth-century poets (¦). A famous third line—

decides in favour of (1), for (2) and (3) would exceedingly spoil its beauty. There is sometimes almost complete anapæstic substitution—

which is still further developed in the spell of Geraldine—

(This, in couplet, is a little dangerous.)

It is most remarkable, but suggestive to a further extent of the fact that Coleridge did not entirely comprehend what he was doing, that Christabel, especially its opening stanza, supplies a complete key to the later nineteenth-century lyrical scansion which (v. sup. p. 27) he and others failed to understand in Tennyson. That opening stanza, placed side by side with the "Hollyhock Song" (see above again), will completely interpret it to any one who has eye and ear enough to mutate the mutanda. And when the connection and the interpretation have once been seized, there is nothing, from Shelley's apparently impulsive and instinctive harmonies to the most complicated experiments of Browning and Swinburne, which will not yield to the master keys of equivalent substitution and varying of line-length, subject to the general law of rhythmical uniformity, or at least symphonised change. It has been said, for instance, by the latest and most painful French student of English prosody, M. Verrier, that in Shelley's Cloud "traditional metric renounces the attempt" to divide it into feet. Here is the division, made without its being necessary to think twice—hardly to think once—about a single article of it:

(Base anapæstic, and normal length dimeter; but shortened to three and two feet, thus—424243434343. The two last three-foot lines catalectic dimeter, or, to put the same thing in another way, the first threes plain, the last redundanced. Substitution of iamb or spondee for anapæst perfectly regular, and (to keep the anapæstic base specially marked against the iambic) not very much indulged in. "Showers" and "flowers" as well as probably "shaken" and "waken" used in their shortened or practically monosyllabic value. Nothing in the least incalculable, eccentric, or even difficult, on the foot system.)

(The examples given will be found to be all more or less of the enjambed variety. Not only has the other been much less practised, owing to reaction from the over-fondness of the eighteenth century for it, but that century, including the period of throwing back to Dryden,[46] practically found out all its considerable but limited possibilities.)

(a) Leigh Hunt (Story of Rimini):

(Various substitutions marked, as also in the following.)

(b) Keats (Endymion):

(As in the seventeenth-century patterns, not much equivalence:—the paragraph effect, produced by enjambment and varied pause, being chiefly relied on to prevent monotony. Later, in Lamia, Keats tried, after study of Dryden, a less fluent pattern, with stop as well as enjambment, Alexandrine, and triplet.)

(c) Browning (Sordello):

(Practically a long blank-verse paragraph with the addition of rhyme, which sometimes almost escapes notice.)

(d) M. Arnold (Tristram and Iseult):

(An admirable following of Keats's model; the rhymes not too much kept out of view, and suggestions of trochaic and spondaic as well as trisyllabic substitution deftly used. For some strange reason he never returned to it, but left it for William Morris to develop, completely and most effectively, in Jason and The Earthly Paradise.)

(e) Tennyson very seldom tried the couplet, but when he did, as in "The Vision of Sin," he achieved it magnificently:

(Observe how fine this couplet is, and how personal. We have seen how Keats studied Dryden: this is as if Dryden had studied Keats.)

(f) Mr. Swinburne (Tristram of Lyonesse):

(In this splendid metre the characteristics of stopped and enjambed couplet are to a great extent combined. Considerable anapæstic substitution to gain speed.)

(a) Wordsworth ("Yew Trees"):

(The student should notice the difference, slight but distinctly perceptible, from the Miltonic model.)

(b) Shelley (Alastor):

(There are actually seven lines more before the paragraph comes at once to a line-end and a full stop in punctuation. Note also the Thomsonian mid-stops; the Wordsworthian atmosphere (cf. citation above); the actual or suggested trisyllables; the actual redundance in "jas|mine," and the suggested one in "chas|m.")

(c) Browning—early (Pauline):

(Wordsworthian-Shelleyan, but with a greater touch of dramatic soliloquy in it. Redundance, but no trisyllabics.)

(d) Browning—later (Mr. Sludge, "The Medium"):

(This unhesitating trisyllabic substitution sometimes reaches the very dangerous adjustment of trochee-anapæst, as in—

The Ring and the Book.)

(e) Tennyson—early (Lover's Tale):

(Substitution trochaic only, except for "heaven"—always ambiguous in value.)

(f) Tennyson—standard middle (Ulysses):

(Verse-paragraph completely achieved by variation of pause and different weighting of line, with, again, little or no trisyllabic substitution.)

Tennyson—later (The Holy Grail):

(Paragraph still more ambitious and elaborate, with much trisyllabic substitution and some redundance.)

(a) Keats (Eve of St. Mark):

(b) Morris (The Ring given to Venus):

(Here the effect is entirely achieved by dividing the couplets, with full stops or strong pauses at the end of the first line, and running the sense of the second into the first of the next; by considerable variations of internal pause, and by placing emphatic or brightly coloured words at different spots. Equivalence is practically limited to such things as "glittering," "aguish," "many a," etc., where it is at minimum strength.)

(a) Drayton (Polyolbion):

(b) Browning (Fifine at the Fair):

(Printing of lines disjoined to show the extra stress which Browning lays on the middle pause, and which, though not universal, is general throughout the poem. The case is rather the other way with Drayton. He observes the pause, which is indeed the law of the line; but he does not seem to avail himself of it much as a prosodic or rhetorical instrument.)

The Dying Swan of Tennyson, scanned entirely through to show the application of the system. (It brings out a scheme of dimeters wholly iambic at the lowest rate of substitution, wholly anapæstic at the highest, mixed between. A few instances occur of the other usual and regular licences—trochaic and spondaic substitution, monosyllabic feet (or catalexis) and one or two of brachycatalexis, three feet instead of four. And it is to be specially noted that the poet uses these, not at random, but so as to swell and raise his rhythm, proportionately and progressively, from the slow motion and scanty syllabising of the opening scene-stanza to the "flood of eddying song" at the close. This process is entirely unaccounted for on the bare "four-stress" system.)

I.

II.

III.

This piece, with the "Hollyhock" (v. sup. p. 27), Blake's "Mad Song" (§ XXXV.), Shelley's "Cloud" (note, p. 100), and the Christabel selections (§ XXXVIII.), will almost completely exemplify substitution in lyric. But the germ is far older—in Shakespeare, in "E.I.O.," and even in pieces earlier still.

This remarkable measure illustrates, with especial appositeness, the natural history of metrical evolution, and so may be dealt with more fully as a specimen. There can be little doubt that its original, or the earliest form to which it can be traced, is the split Alexandrine or three-foot iambic, which appears in the French of Philippe de Thaun, and in several English poems, such as the Bestiary, translated from Philippe's—

and as even King Horn. But this gives far too little room in English; and the rhymes, when rhyme is introduced, come too quick. Substitution of trisyllabic feet remedies both faults; while the actual six, with interchanged rhyme, gives beautiful work, though the lines are still rather short:

This shortness kept it back, more especially when the fear of mainly trisyllabic measures came in after the fifteenth-century anarchy. But as soon as that fear disappeared, and the anapæst forced itself into general use, logic, assisted by tune, suggested a cutting down of the popular dimeter or four-foot anapæstic line to three. This, for a long time, maintained itself in strict literature without much variety of structure, as, at different times, is shown by Shenstone in the well-known—

and by Cowper in the still better known "Alexander Selkirk" lines—

and in "Catherina"—

Now, though these lines are pretty, they are exposed to the charge of being pretty sing-song, and monotonous jingle. But this had, long before Cowper, been to a great extent remedied, though for comic purposes only or mainly, in such things as Gay's "Molly Mog," quoted above, and Chesterfield-Pulteney's

(Pronounce "Verden" with the proper English value of er, and give "farthing" its then correct form of "farden," and the rhyme will be spotless.)

What it was that made Byron take this up for a serious purpose in the lines to Haidee (before Don Juan) is not, I believe, known:

The gain here, from the redundant syllable and double rhyme in the odd lines, and from a rather more frequent use of dissyllabic feet to prevent monotony, is immense. Praed adopted the measure, and improved it still further, in his admirable "Letter of Advice":

And then Mr. Swinburne had the probably final inspiration of shortening the last line to two feet (or an anapæstic monometer), with an astonishing result of added and finished music:

(a) Tennyson (The Lotos-Eaters):

(Trochaic six- and seven-foot lines, always hypercatalectic, or, in stricter language, trochaic trimeters hypercatalectic and tetrameters catalectic.)

At the close the poet avails himself of the iambic alternative which is so effective, and has a pure fourteener:

(There is no trisyllabic substitution.)

(b) Tennyson (Maud):

(A rather deceptive metre; for which reason foot-division has been postponed above.) It may look at first sight like a trochaic run, but this will be found not to fit. Then hexameters of the Evangeline type, with a syllable cut off at the end, suggest themselves; but it will be seen that some openings make this very bad. It is really a six-foot anapæst with the usual allowance of iambic substitution and of monosyllabic ("anacrustic") beginning, as thus:

(c) Tennyson (Voyage of Maeldune):

(Same metre, but almost purely anapæstic; the central pause frequently strong.)

(d) Tennyson (Kapiolani)

(Apparently intended for a dactylic octometer. Like all these things in English, it probably goes better as anapæstic with anacrusis and hypercatalexis. See dotted scansion.)

(e) Browning (Abt Vogler):

(Note the alliteration.)

At first, as you read this, you can, if your ears are accustomed to classical metres, have no doubt about the scheme. It is simply the regular elegiac couplet "accentually" rendered in English, with the abscission of the last syllable of the hexameter—a catalectic hexameter and a pentameter acatalectic. For the first four lines of the first octave there is no doubt at all. But when you get on to the second half you are pulled up. In the fifth and sixth lines the pentameter seems to have got to the first place, and the seventh is no more a hexameter than the eighth is its proper companion. For a moment you may fancy that this was intended—that the poet meant octaves of two different parts. But when you look at the other stanzas you will find that this is by no means the case. Truncated elegiac cadence appears, reappears, disappears in the most bewildering fashion, till you recognise—sooner or later according to your prosodic experience—that it was only simulated cadence after all, a sort of leaf-insect rhythm, and that the whole thing (as marked by the dotted scansion lines) is in six-foot anapæsts equivalenced daringly, but quite legitimately, with monosyllabic and dissyllabic feet.

(f) W. Morris ("The Wind"):

(First three lines six-foot (trimeter) anapæsts with full substitution. Refrain a graded "wheel" of four, four or five, and six iambic feet.)

(g) Morris (Love is Enough):

(Intentionally irregular "accentual" lines, but with an anapæstic or amphibrachic "under-hum." There is a good deal of alliteration elsewhere, and some here.)

(h) Morris (Sigurd metre, but the actual example from The House of the Wolfings):

(A splendid construction from older and newer examples. Strongly stressed, strictly middle-paused, but perfectly regular anapæstic sixes, with substitution and a hypercatalectic syllable or half foot at the pause.)

(i) Mr. Swinburne (Hesperia and Evening on the Broads).

The first line of Hesperia is practically a Kingsleyan hexameter (v. inf.) of the very best kind—

while the second—

is a pentameter of similar mould, with the centre gap cunningly filled in by the two short stitches "if at," capable, as you see below in

of being duly equivalenced with one long stitch, like "borne." Yet the second line is capable also of being scanned exactly as the first—anacrusis and five anapæests—but without the final redundance or hypercatalexis; and in other long lines you will find that the principle of equivalence is preserved throughout—that two shorts, as in

defeat the hexametrical movement, and pull off the mask at the beginning, though it returns at the end. The metre is really anapæstic throughout. And in Evening on the Broads the poet has carried this further still, providing in some cases regular apparent elegiacs:

(j) Mr. Swinburne (Choriambics):

(k) Mr. Swinburne (other long anapæstic and trochaic measures):

(These are respectively seven-foot anapæsts with redundance (anapæstic tetrameter catalectic); ditto eight-foot (tetrameter acatalectic); trochaic tetrameter acatalectic; and anapæstic tetrameter hypercatalectic (eight feet and a half).)

(To illustrate the strict octave and sextet pattern with final rhymes adjusted on the Italian pattern.)

Dante Rossetti:

(a) Earlier (Elizabethan):

(Watson, ap. Asch. Schoolmaster, p. 73, ed. Arber.)

(Stanyhurst, Æn. iv. 1-5, ed. Arber, p. 94.)

(Harvey in letter to Spenser, Eliz. Crit. Essays,
ed. Gregory Smith, i. 106.)

(Spenser in letter to Harvey, ibid. i. 99.)

(All these tried to accommodate—though sometimes rather roughly—English pronunciation to such of the rules of Latin quantity, by "nature" and "position," as could be applied. Some of them even tried to make general rules for English quantity. But the wiser, from Ascham to Campion, admitted that dactylic rhythm was difficult, if not impossible, to keep up in our language.)

(b) Later Georgian and Victorian.

(1) Coleridge (Specimen c. 1799?):

(A very fair attempt, but already showing the natural tendency of the lines, when poetically rhythmed, to anapæstic—the dotted—scansion.)

(2) Southey (Vision of Judgment):

(Anapæstic run avoided with some skill, save now and then; but at the cost of weak beginnings, frequent, and admitted, substitution of trochaic for spondaic effect, and, above all, as in line 1, an ugly rocking-horse division into three batches of two feet each instead of the proper 2-1/2 + 3-1/2 or 3-1/2 + 2-1/2.)

(3) Longfellow (Evangeline):

(A popular, tunable sort of rhythm, obtained by a very large proportion of dactyls—often really giving (and always when really good) the anapæstic effect,—unhesitating adoption of trochees and even pyrrhics for spondees, and not seldom the Southeyan split at feet 2 and 4. An essentially rickety measure.)

(4) Clough—earlier (in the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich—Evangeline type, but with more spondees and spondaic endings):

(5) Later he attempted English "quantitative" things of this kind:

and

This deliberate neglect of pronunciation ("pălāte" for "pālăte," "shĕphērd" for "shēphĕrd") has, in the last half-century or so, developed itself into a still more deliberate crusade against pronunciation; it being supposed that a conflict of accent and quantity has something attractive about it. Thus the late Mr. Stone wrote as a hexameter:

(6) On the other hand, Kingsley's Andromeda—the best poem of some length intended for English hexameters—is clearly, though not consciously, anapæstic, as thus:

And Mr. Swinburne did the same thing (see above) consciously.

(a) Sapphics (Watts):

This illustrates—as do the pieces which it, beyond all doubt, patterned, though in succession rather than directly (Cowper's "Hatred and Vengeance," Southey's "Cold was the Night Wind," and Canning's triumphant parody of this latter, the "Needy Knifegrinder")—the unyokeableness of classical metres—when not merely iambic, trochaic, or anapæstic—to English rhythm. The proper run of the Sapphic line is—

but this constantly in English, though not so much in the first line as elsewhere, changes itself into

Mr. Swinburne has got it right, but only as a tour de force, and, as in line 2, not always quite certainly.

Saw the | white im|placable | Aphro|dite,
Saw the | hair un|bound and the | feet un|sandalled
Shine as | fire of | sunset on | western |waters,
Saw the re|luctant.

But Southey and Canning always suggest the wrong:

and

(b) Alcaics (Tennyson):

(Correct, but not natural.)

(c) Hendecasyllabics (Coleridge):

(These very pretty lines exhibit a most curious instance of the unconscious force of the prosodic genius of a language. Coleridge was a good classical scholar, and quite enough of a mathematician to know the difference between 11 and 12. Yet every one of these hendecasyllabics will be found to be a dodecasyllabic; the poet having substituted (as in English prosody is quite allowable) an initial dactyl for the dissyllabic foot of the original metre. Once more this shows the English impatience of classical form.)

(d) Hendecasyllabics (Tennyson):

A triumph, but a criticism as well, as its own ending shows:

or "versicultural" rather.

(e) Galliambics.

These have been tried splendidly by Tennyson in Boadicea, interestingly by Mr. George Meredith in Phaethon, unsuccessfully by the late Mr. Grant Allen in his version of the Atys of Catullus. But the metre is not quite plain sailing even in Greek and Latin, and it is therefore better to leave it alone here and return to it in Glossary.

(a) Triolet:

(b) Rondeau:

(The number of lines in a rondeau is not immutable, nor is it in a rondel, where the principle is the return of whole lines as in the triolet, but, since the poem is longer, giving room for more not repeated matter.)

(c) Ballade:

(All these examples are Mr. Austin Dobson's, and inserted here by his kind permission. It will be observed that the lines follow general English prosodic rules. It is only the stanza that is borrowed.)

(a) M. Arnold (The Strayed Reveller. Words printed exactly as original, except the added "and"; the also added brackets show the unconscious decasyllabism):

(Here the first piece is three pure decasyllables, with redundance, cut into five. The second requires only the addition of the italicised "and" to make it a complete blank-verse passage with two shortened lines or half-lines, x and y, of the kind common in Shakespeare. The poem is crammed with shorter stanza-pieces of the same kind.)

(b) Mr. Henley ("Speed." Printed as original and as prose):

(The decasyllable is not quite avoided even here, as in the bracketed phrase. But the main point is that the thing reads perfectly well as prose, with no obvious suggestion of metre at all.)

Some measures of recent poets have been objected, or at least proposed, as offering difficulties in respect of the system of this book. It has therefore seemed well to scan them here.

(a) Frederic Myers (St. Paul):

(There is nothing very peculiar or at all original in this, though it was probably now first used continuously for a poem of some length. It is only decasyllabic quatrain with uniform redundance in the first and third lines, and a strong inclination to trochaic opening, which in its turn suggests a primary dactyl and trochees to follow, as an alternative (see dotted scansion). Examples of it anterior to Myers may be found—commented on in the larger History (vol. iii. 481)—in Zophiel, very likely known to Myers, as he was much connected by family friendship with the Lake School; in the famous poem

the authorship of which has been so much contested; and in Emily Bronte's Remembrance (see again vol. iii. of Hist. Pros. p. 378), of which he cannot possibly have been ignorant.[48] His own share in the matter would seem to have been limited to the persevering adoption of it in an unvaried form. Whether this be an advantage or not is a question of taste: the prosodic description of the metre is clear and in no way recondite.)

(b) Ernest Dowson (Cynara) [Non sum qualis eram, etc.]:

(Sextet of Alexandrines with decasyllable (or brachycatalexis) in the 5th line, and with hypercatalexis, redundance, or double rhyme in the 4th and 6th. An original collocation, so far as I know, but nothing new or strange in principle. The actual poem is a rather beautiful one; but how much is contributed to the beauty by the special metre is another question. At any rate, once more, it has no difficulties for foot-scansion.)

(c) The universally known passage in Macbeth—

with the following lines, has also been proposed as a crux. But this must have been a not very brilliant joke; and it would be an insult to the student to scan the passage. It is one of the finest specimens of Shakespearian equivalence and "fingered" blank verse, but offers no more difficulties, on the system of this book, than any couplet of Pope or any verse of the "Old Hundredth." On the other hand, many passages of Shakespeare may not illegitimately puzzle the student if he does not realise that, although (it is believed) every line which is not corrupt can be scanned on our system, every line is by no means an exact five-foot. In accordance with the best English practice, older and newer, Shakespeare does not scruple to extend his lines to Alexandrines, and even to fourteeners, while the exigencies of drama entitle him to use lines of less than five full feet. But all these—the fragments as well as the extended lines—obey the general law of iambic arrangement with substitution in individual feet. Thus in Lady Macbeth's invocation of the Spirits of Evil (I. v. 49)—

is a regular Alexandrine. Her husband's hallucination—

stops in the second line at the third foot. Different lines of the ghost's great speech in Hamlet (I. v. 42-91) show the Alexandrine—

and a fragment of two feet and a half—

If studied in this way, even the scenes where short speeches of the conversational kind form the staple will be found to piece themselves together perfectly well in continuous scansion.

---

---

The main fact, at once central and fundamental—a pivot whereon the whole structure at once rests and turns,—which it is necessary to understand in order to understand English prosody, is connected with—is indeed one side or case of—the other fact of the history of English language and English literature. So far as is known to the present writer, no other language and no other literature stand in precisely the same condition, as regards the relation of their technically "Old," "Middle," and "New" or "Modern" forms. The relation of what is called "Old" French to Modern is not that of "Old" English to Modern, but rather that of "Middle," if not a closer one still. And though "High" and "Low" German have had their various stages separated for philological purposes, the Continental Teutonic dialects have never undergone anything like the process of modification by Romance influence, older and younger, popular and literary, which turned Anglo-Saxon into English between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries.

This process was one not so much—if indeed it was one at all—of conscious borrowing: it was one not so much of deliberate imitation (though there was much of that in a way) as one of actual physical impregnation, fertilising, blending, which resulted in a true and permanent "cross" or "hybrid perpetual," possessing and exercising the faculties of self-development and self-propagation.

In perhaps no way were these faculties more strikingly and remarkably exercised and illustrated than in regard to prosody; and it must, unluckily, be added that in no instance has their exercise been more frequently and more fatally misconstrued. The present writer begins a fresh attempt to set forth what really happened with the following encouragement—in the way of a reviewer's sentence on his earlier and larger effort—before his eyes: "Mr. S.'s contention is that A.S. prosody died out, and that English prosody is entirely drawn from the Latin, with the aid of French and Provençal." Now the "contention" of the History of English Prosody is as directly and deliberately bent against this doctrine as against Dr. Guest's theory, that the principles of Anglo-Saxon prosody have governed English throughout its course. These "falsehoods of extremes" appear to have more lives than a cat, if not as many heads as a hydra; and their main principle of vitality no doubt is that it is possible to put them in plump plain-looking phraseology "which the Beaver can well understand." What did actually happen was far less simple; but the attempt to explain it must once more be made.

As to what Anglo-Saxon prosody itself was, although, as in all these matters, there are minor dissidences among the authorities, the main arrangement is sun-clear. There is practically only one line; though (and the fact is of inestimable importance, and when once really understood will carry the understander through to the very present day) the syllabic lengths of that line may differ largely even in normal cases, and to an at first sight almost irrational degree in what are called the "extended" varieties.

This normal line in its most normal condition—neither cut short nor drawn out—consists usually of about nine or ten syllables. These are not arranged so as to produce a definite foot-rhythm, though there is a general suggestion of the trochee. And attempts (not to be spoken of with anything but encouragement and wishes for their success, if with some doubt as to its attainment) have been made to assign, in all cases, definite division into associations of syllables which might be called "feet." Other features are unmistakable and incontestable. There is always a sharp middle division—so strong that the lines may be, and often are, printed as halves. There are always more or fewer (most frequently two in the first half and one in the second) alliterated syllables (one consonant or any vowel). And these syllables, with occasionally another or so, are usually accented, but divided from each other by a certain or uncertain number of unaccented ones. The proportion and arrangement of these fall into the controverted things; and the extension of the normal line is a point only of indirect importance, though of very great importance indirectly, here. The attempts which have been made to trace ballad metre, nursery-rhyme metre, etc., to A.S. originals are also outside our limits. To the present writer they appear to be hopelessly vitiated by two absolutely certain facts: (1) that we do not know how Anglo-Saxon was pronounced; (2) that its pronunciation, whatever it was, must have been radically affected by the changes which made it into Middle English. But four cardinal points remain, of such importance that they cannot be too attentively studied or too constantly remembered. They are these: that the oldest English prosody rested on (1) a system of hard and fast middle pause; (2) alliteration, distributed over the whole line; (3) accented and unaccented syllables, the former usually knit to the alliteration in some kind of sub-combination; but (4) that the laws of this combination, and the principle on which the sub-combinations could be substituted, omitted, or multiplied, were of the freest description. It is said, and it can well be believed, that they forbade some things. It is certain that they permitted very many, combining the freest substitution in the same line, of the kind observable in the Latin and Greek hexameter or trimeter, with an apparent variety of lengths, in different lines, hardly inferior to that of a Greek chorus or ode.

This prosody governed English verse from a time certainly anterior to the existence of any "English" nationality to about 1000 A.D., the great bulk of the production resulting under it being considerably older than the last-named date. At or about that date, certainly before the "Conquest," it began to be subjected to devitalising and disintegrating influences, not necessary to be discussed in detail here. The important fact is that from c. 1000 to c. 1200 the existing amount of Old English verse is very small indeed; and that, even in the few existing probably dated examples, singular changes begin to exhibit themselves. In the "Rhyming Poem" (before 1000?) the introduction of the element indicated in the title completely revolutionises the system.[50] In the "Grave Poem" (c. 1100?) a new element of rhythm appears, the tendency being, here and henceforth, to substitute iambic, varied by anapæestic, cadence for the general trochaic run, and to associate two lines or four halves in a kind of quatrain.[51] In the remarkable fragments of St. Godric (1150?) rhyme, which does not appear in the "Grave Poem," assists the rhythmical tendency of this latter to make a new music;[52] and the well-known "Canute Song"[53] chimes in. While if the "Paternoster" be really of the twelfth century, as some have said, there are in it iambic dimeter couplets[54] of a kind which never, by any chance, suggests itself in the whole corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry proper.

This couplet is neither more nor less than a pair of iambic dimeters or "four-accent ['-beat'] lines in rising stress," shortened occasionally to seven syllables instead of eight, probably from the first also admitting extension, not by addition of feet, but by substitution of them.

Two couplets, or two batches of short (half) lines, from Layamon will show the difference at once and unmistakably to any one who possesses an ear:

The first distich, it will be observed, is a loose and broken-down one on the schemes of perfect O.E. verse. There is hardly any real alliteration, and the accented syllables are clumsily placed and valued. But the thing does retain, and that pretty sufficiently, the strong centre pause, and the folding-back swing of the two halves, like those of a flail or a pair of lemon-squeezers, which are the real characteristics of O.E. or A.S. verse. It is not itself "riche" versification; it is not "wel idone"; but you cannot mistake it for anything but what it is.

With the other you have got into a new world. There is alliteration here; but it has nothing on earth to do with the construction and run of the verse. There is what you may call accent if you insist upon it; but it is quite differently and much more regularly arranged, constituting, moreover, a rhythm perfectly distinct to the ear. There are two halves; but the second half is not so much a completion as a repetition. And instead of the strong middle break—a break and nothing else—the halves are tipped with rhyme—a division which, if they were printed straight on, you would not notice till you got to the end of the second, and which requires very little (hardly any) stop of the voice, while the breach of the old couplet insists on this.

Now the question legitimately suggests itself, "Why is this strange contrast present?"—a contrast which, it should be added, is not only present but omnipresent in this great poem of 30,000 (half) lines in all forms, from something quite near the old A.S. line, through things farther from it, to imperfect forms of the new couplet and so to perfect ones. One answer is as follows: "This couplet was already established in French literature—in fact in the very French literature (Wace) which formed part of Layamon's originals. Moreover, it exists also in Latin—the Latin of the hymns with which the priest Layamon must have been perfectly familiar. When, therefore, it appears, he is simply imitating it with more or less success." Now the facts of this answer, as far as they go, are indisputable. The octosyllabic couplet, though not so old as the decasyllabic line in O.F., is very old, and by Layamon's time had been written very largely indeed. Octosyllabic lines, both of iambic and trochaic cadence, form the very staple of the Latin hymns; and both in Latin (earlier far) and in French, after a period of assonance, rhyme had thoroughly established itself.

So far, so good; but it is to be hoped that intelligent minds will perceive an occurring difficulty. If this selection of metre is an elaborate attempt to imitate French or Latin, or both, why are its results so extraordinarily sporadic? One could understand the presence of many imperfect lines and couplets; it might even be surprising that in a first attempt there should be such good ones as that above quoted. But how could the man, in an actual majority of cases, produce stuff like the other distich quoted, and many more unrhythmical still, which are not even attempts at the iambic couplet—which have no connection whatever with it?

No; an explanation at once more subtle and more natural is wanted; for it is a great mistake to think that the subtler is necessarily the less natural. Does not this immense mass of apparently confused experiment suggest that the language itself has passed into a new rhythmical atmosphere?—that two different metrical systems, one dropping and dying off ever fainter to the ear, the other becoming clearer and clearer to it, were sounding in Layamon's brain? Sometimes he writes under one influence; sometimes under the other; more frequently under confused echoes of both. Such a set of causes would produce exactly such a set of results.

Nor is it of the slightest relevance, as an objection, to say that the total number of new Romance words in Layamon is very small—a couple of hundred perhaps in both forms of the poem taken together. You do not necessarily require one Romance word to fashion the most complicated metres of Tennyson and Mr. Swinburne. The point is, "What was the general rhythm, and what were the means of obtaining it, which sounded most gratefully in English ears at the opening of the thirteenth century and onwards?"

The facts, if they, as they too seldom have been, are carefully arranged and impartially considered, answer this further question as clearly as any reasonable person can desire.

We possess a relatively considerable number of poems composed probably between 1200 and 1250. The most important of these are, besides Layamon's Brut itself, the Ormulum, the Poema Morale or Moral Ode, the Orison of Our Lady, a Bestiary, the Proverbs of Alfred and of Hendyng, the Love-Rune and other minor pieces, the Middle English Genesis and Exodus, and The Owl and the Nightingale.

Hardly two of these are in the same metre, at least in the same form of the same metre, and none of them exhibits exactly the same curious blend of old and new as that which appears in the Brut. But, for that very reason, they enforce the same general lesson—for they do enforce it—in the most striking and conclusive way possible. That lesson is, as we saw, that the new language of English was seeking in every possible way for a new prosody of English, and was finding it under several and special forms of experiment, but in the same general spirit.

Orm—evidently, from his punctilio about spelling,[55] a man curious and particular about details—adopts the French principle of absolute syllabic uniformity; though he does not accept any of the actually existing French metres, and rejects—possibly to save trouble, possibly as thinking them unsuitable to his sacred subject—both assonance and rhyme. He writes—in the strictest and most humdrum iambic cadence, as of the least-inspired French or Latin poetry—"fifteeners" or combinations of eights and sevens. Of the old long-lined stave he has kept no positive quality but its centre pause, and hardly any important negative one save its rhymelessness. Of the new metre, he has aimed at—he has certainly reached—nothing but its foot-division and consequent rhythm. But he has got these in the most pronounced, if hardly in the most attractive, form. Except for the odd syllable, we are here already in full presence of the jog-trot ballad and hymn "common measure" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nay, this odd syllable itself is of great interest, for it reappears in the sung "breath" or "grunt"—"a":

Opinions may differ slightly on the question whether this fifteener is actually the same as the fourteener which later became so common, and which directly engendered the common measure itself; or whether the two were independent attempts to metricise the old long line. It is of course clear that, as final e's dropped off, fifteen would become fourteen in any case. But in two of the poems mentioned above, the Moral Ode and the Orison of Our Lady, although the first-named has many fifteeners, and the last is highly irregular, the set towards iambic seven-foot rhythm is well marked. And there are two still more interesting things about these two poems. We have several versions of the Poema Morale which have been arranged—not on prosodic grounds—in order of chronological sequence. And it is in the highest degree noteworthy that the latest of these forms, like the later version of Layamon, exhibits remarkable touches of prosodic melioration. It is still more important that among the irregular and experimental varieties of the Orison actual iambic decasyllables, and, what is more, something like the decasyllabic couplet, make their appearance nearly two centuries before Chaucer.[56]

These remarkable lessons in comparison are repeated, with the usual and invaluable confirmation of variety, in the curious documents called respectively the Proverbs Alfred and the Proverbs of Hendyng. The relation, in point of matter, of the latter to the former, and of the former itself to a possible A.S. collection made by the king, or under his auspices, need not concern us. It is enough that our existing Proverbs of Alfred are M.E. in language and early thirteenth century in date; while those of "Hendyng" are perhaps half a century younger. These latter are slightly more modern in language; but this is accompanied by, and no doubt not a little directly connected with, still greater modernisation of form. The earlier rehandler (or some of the rehandlers, for the work is pretty certainly not of one only) evidently stuck as near as he could to his original—words and all. But he was, or they were, in Layamon's state—only more so. Rhyme appears fitfully; regular iambic and trochaic rhythm more fitfully; alliteration most fitfully of all. The various sections are stanza-bundles of short lines or half lines, which, taken singly and printed straight on, might tempt no very hasty, ill-informed, or unintelligent reader to regard them as sheer prose, with an irregular sing-song and jingle here and there. On the other hand, the Proverbs of Hendyng are unmistakable English verse, the stanza called in French rime couée, from the Latin versus caudatus (afterwards common and famous as the six-line stanza in which a very large proportion, if not the majority, of our romances are written). It is a combination of eight- and six-syllabled lines arranged 8, 8, 6, 8, 8, 6, and rhymed aabccb; the rhythm being regularly iambic, and the whole differing in no respect from similar verse of the nineteenth century, and in only one respect from such as Gray's "Cat" ode in the eighteenth. And that one is priceless, for it is the appearance of substitution—the great English characteristic which separates our verse from its French patterns—if patterns they were—which the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries unwisely gave up, for which Shenstone pleaded,[57] and which Chatterton, and Blake, and Southey, and Coleridge restored. Monosyllabic and trisyllabic feet, as shown in the examples,[58] are freely employed; and the result is that a double advantage is secured. The actual shapelessness of one direct parent, the broken-down A.S. versicle, is effectually cured: there is no possibility of mistaking this composition for prose. The possible monotony and sing-song of the other—the regular syllabic French model, long afterwards parodied and exposed immortally in Chaucer's Sir Thopas—is avoided likewise. There is a little assonance, but for the most part quite regular and satisfactory rhyme. There is effective correspondent rhythm, resulting from feet clearly marked, but, as has been said, boldly handled in the English, not the French or Low Latin manner. The stanza is well kept, though the substitution prevents its being a mere mechanic reproduction. In short, there is freedom, and there is order.

Not less worthy of study is the Bestiary.[59] Here the direct origins are fortunately known and are of the utmost importance. The ultimate one is the Latin of Thetbaldus in "Leonine" hexameters—that is to say, hexameters with, in this case not very complete or regular, but still unmistakable, rhyme at the cæsura and the end. This gives something of a ready-made correspondence to the old A.S. line with its middle break, and, at the same time, suggests rhyming halves. But there was also at hand a French bestiary by Philippe de Thaun, where the writer, taking the other already established hexameter-trimeter of his own literature, the Alexandrine, breaks it into regular six-syllabled couplets. The Englishman, whoever he was, endeavours to follow this arrangement, and perhaps something more. He has got the six-syllable line and couplet in his ear; he has got even a sort of notion of stanza in addition, and he now and then hears rhyme. But he is a very rough verse-smith, in the Proverbs of Alfred stage or near it, and he is perpetually hitting and missing cadences and constructions which were not to be perfected for long, but half developed—queer creatures rearing themselves from the earth like those in the old woodcuts of the Creation. He has more variety than Layamon, and sometimes more music than the Alfred man; but with them he provides the great museum of examples of English verse in the first stage of making.

Every now and then, too, he provides us with something that is not rough at all, as in the passage appended,[60] which is perfect modern English rhythm and goes to a well-known carol tune. And of this more perfect craftsmanship, in forms precise enough to bring out the qualities and capacities of the new prosody, the minor and miscellaneous poems of the thirteenth century supply ample and varied instances. There is Romance-six, probably earlier than the Proverbs of Hendyng; "fourteener" metre, more polished than that of the Moral Ode; and, best of all, the beginning, in the Love-Rune,[61] of the great alternately rhymed octosyllabic quatrain, the "long measure" ("common," or the split fourteener, was to be a little later) of a myriad hymns and secular pieces since. This long measure is in some ways more advanced than almost anything of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, displaying equivalence, admitting internal rhyme[62]—prophesying, through Chatterton and Blake, the Great Instauration of Coleridge, Southey, and Scott.

But we must complete this group by what are perhaps its most important, though not its earliest members, the two great examples of the octosyllabic line itself in its simplest couplet form. It may almost be said that Genesis and Exodus (the M.E. not the A.S. paraphrase) and The Owl and the Nightingale are sufficient between them to teach all the main secrets of English prosody. They are certainly sufficient to show what it is and what it is not.

We have seen how this couplet emerges in the Brut of Layamon, and how it there presents itself as a "transient and embarrassed" alternative to mostly broken-down and shapeless pairs of something like the old half-line. In the two poems just mentioned it is not transient, but abides; nor is it in the least embarrassed. It has quite shaken off its dilapidated companions, and abides in its own house. But that house is a house of two wings or two fronts. The one which the author of The Owl and the Nightingale prefers approximates in its verse-building to the French system of architecture, and is, if not rigidly uniform in syllabic arrangement (and especially patient as the metre always has been since of limitation to seven with a consequent hint of trochaic rhythm), yet almost rigidly iambic or trochaic in run. The other, of which Genesis and Exodus is the main occupant, admits, with the utmost freedom, that principle of trisyllabic (if not also monosyllabic) equivalence into which the old liberty of Anglo-Saxon had transformed itself under the sufficient but not tyrannical pressure of the new foot prosody. And it presents an almost perfect specimen of the metre which Spenser (whether intentionally or not) employed in parts of the Shepherd's Calendar, and which Coleridge, more than 500 years later, believed himself to have invented, and explained in a very insufficient manner.

It is upon the understanding which the student attains and upon the interpretation which he makes or accepts of the group of pieces from the Brut to Genesis and Exodus, which have just been discussed, that this student's whole conception of English prosody will depend. Unfortunately, he will not find such authorities as have delivered themselves on the subject by any means unanimous; more unfortunately still, it must be said here, he will find most of them inadequate, and not a few positively wrong. In another part of this book some account of the more usual theories is given. It is enough to say here, that neither the system which regards this verse as consisting of a certain number of "stressed" syllables and a certain or uncertain number of "unstressed," nor that which would regard some of it as following old English, some new French models, appears to fit the actual facts or explain their actual consequences. To assign the "equivalenced" varieties to a northern, the "unequivalenced" to a southern origin, may or may not be in accordance with historical and geographical fact, but is prosodically irrelevant. To be content with discovering actual or possible particular foreign models for each metre may not be useless (something on the subject will again be found elsewhere in this volume), but will be inadequate, and may be misleading, if the general phenomena are not examined or if their lesson is not learnt.

It should not be hard to learn for any one who will patiently consider the facts narrated in this chapter, the dates (as far as they are known or guessed), and the scanned examples given in the text, the notes, and the general survey. It will be strange if he does not perceive that there is here something much more than a mere regularising of accentual verse with the addition of rhyme, something much more than a mere imitation of French and Latin models, like the frequent attempts at English hexameters, or those at English ballades and rondeaux which were revived some thirty years ago; above all, something not in the least adequately described by the phrases "adopting the French principles of prosody," "following the rhythm of the foreigner," and so forth. If, as he should,[63] he possesses some knowledge of Latin verse, classical and mediæval, some of French, a little (the more the better) of Old English, and as much as possible of Modern; if he will allow this knowledge to settle and clarify his observation of this Middle English verse of the latest twelfth and the first half of the thirteenth century, without allowing arbitrary theories of any kind to interfere, it seems almost impossible that he can fail to see what was going on. The prosody of English was changing from accent and alliteration to feet and rhyme; but it was not following French, or the general run of mediæval Latin, in adopting syllabic uniformity as a rule; and it was, in a large number, if not the majority of instances, allowing the substitution of equivalent feet (especially anapæsts for iambs) exactly as some, but not all, classical metre had allowed it.

Another point with which the student cannot familiarise himself too early, and one which he will find rarely or never insisted on in works dealing with English prosody, is that this apparent irregularity of foot arrangement brings out the existence, the importance, and, so to speak, the personality of the feet themselves, in a way impossible of achievement when a uniform number of syllables is insisted on in a line, and when "accent," "stress," or whatever the emphasising agent be called or considered, is restricted wholly or as much as possible to exactly corresponding places in that line. This monotony may sometimes seem to soothe, but in reality only deadens the susceptibility of the ear, and that ear comes to recognise only, if not only to demand, such coarser stimulus as that given by strong and more or less uniform centre-pause, as the sharp snap or clang of the concluding rhyme, and as rhetorical, not strictly poetical, emphasis placed on special points, especially by the aid of antithesis. On the other hand, the slight effort necessary to recognise the unity of the equivalent feet, under their diversity of substitution, demands and begets an active sensitiveness, which very soon yields positive, keen, and varied delight. No modern poetry can vie with English in the possession and provision of this, and those who neglect it deprive themselves of one of the greatest privileges of an Englishman.

But it is, of course, not contended that perfection in so difficult and exquisite an accomplishment was, or could have been, attained at once. The prosody, like the language, had to "make itself," to "grow," and, even more than the language, it had not merely to grow like a vegetable, but to make itself by animated, if often unconscious, efforts. Had things been otherwise it would have been far less interesting. As it is, there is not one of the imperfect efforts which have been briefly reviewed here that is not a "document in the case," a step in the progress, a fresh attempt of the bird to chip the shell and get clear of the fragments.

These documents, speaking approximately, have brought us to, and perhaps a little beyond, the middle of the thirteenth century. Philologists and palæographers do not give us much as dating from the latter part of that century, or at least from the third quarter of it. But towards the close, and onwards to the supposed birth date of Chaucer (1340), we have an ever-increasing mass of interesting material continuing the demonstration just given. At an uncertain period (not impossibly close to that birth itself) we find also a new phenomenon of a general kind and of first-rate importance; and in the last half or, say, the last third of the century we come, not only to Chaucer himself, but to two other poets, lesser than himself as masters of form, but by no means small in that respect, and contrasted with him in it after a really marvellous fashion.

We can give less individual attention to the first-named group of documents; but as a matter of fact they require less, and sub-group themselves. At the close of the thirteenth century we have a body of verse, the whole of it sometimes ascribed by guess-work, part of it ascribed with certainty, and yet more not without probability, to Robert of Gloucester. This work, consisting of a Chronicle and of many Saints' Lives, is entirely written in fourteener (or, when there is a final e, fifteener) couplets of the same general stamp as those which we have seen in the Moral Poem, but differentiated from those of the Ormulum by the admission of equivalence. They are, however, much more advanced than even the latest version of the Poema Morale; and the writer, or writers, can make them into a capital narrative vehicle, distinctly indicating, if not freely expressing, the further resolution into the ballad metre of eight and six.

But this craving for narrative in verse did not confine itself to a single vehicle; indeed, in probably a very great majority of instances, it preferred another, or two others, with which we are also acquainted, and further varieties still which we have not yet seen, but which show, unmistakably, the advance in prosodic aptitude. The great body of narrative verse, known as "the Romances," begins to date from the end of the thirteenth century—a few, such as Havelok and Horn, are certainly earlier than the fourteenth; by the end of the first third, if not of the first quarter, of this latter, a very large number were as certainly in existence.

Now probably the whole of these Romances were more or less directly imitated from French originals, nearly all of which we actually possess; but it is extremely remarkable that they by no means always followed the metre of those originals, and that when they did they took considerable liberties with it. That metre was almost invariably Alexandrine or decasyllabic, in long batches not couplets, or octosyllabic in couplet. Of the two probably oldest of ours, Havelok and Horn, the first does attempt this octosyllabic couplet, but treats it in a very rough and independent fashion, something in the Genesis and Exodus line, while King Horn seems to favour something like what we observe in part of the English Bestiary and the whole of the French one—a split Alexandrine or six-syllabled couplet. Very soon the rime couée or Romance-six (which had not been a staple romance-metre in French) appears, and occasionally more elaborate stanzas still, such as the complicated arrangement of Sir Tristrem. Those writers who prefer couplet improve upon Horn and Havelok, but they follow Genesis and Exodus much more than The Owl and the Nightingale.

Indeed, some of them develop this couplet in a manner possessing almost infinite "future." They not merely follow the writer of Genesis and Exodus in substituting trisyllabic, if not also monosyllabic, feet for dissyllabic to the number of four, but some of them develop hints, which may be found in that composition, by extending the actual foot-length of the line to five, and sometimes repeating this in an actual "heroic" pair. Whether this was in some, or even at first in all, cases accidental, does not really matter. The decasyllable or five-foot line was already existent in great masses of French poetry, though not in single couplets; it was natural that, occasionally, more room should be wanted than the octosyllable provides; and there is the undoubted fact that, in more than one other European language, ten, or according to the structure of the particular tongue, eleven syllables were suggesting themselves as the most convenient size. The fourteener was so long as to invite breaking up quite early; the Alexandrine has never naturalised itself for continuous use in English; and the octosyllable, though its early appearance, the wealth of models for it, and its ease, fostered and sustained it, had the already mentioned drawback of lack of content. It was certain that, in a language which was showing itself so fortunately free from hide-bound qualities, the decasyllable would establish itself. It has been usual to say that, in couplet at any rate, Chaucer "took it from the French." As a matter of actual practice he may have done so; but in the order of nature and thought it was not in the least necessary for him to do it. Indeed, it would be almost literally true[64] to say that English had decasyllabic couplet before French—that it was an English invention.

For the time, however, the octosyllable was the staple for narrative, varied to no mean extent by the stanzas already described; while these stanzas, often of the most elaborate and complicated descriptions, were adopted from French (and perhaps Provençal) or extemporised by the taste and fancy of the writers. One famous collection[65] indicates the school of which our poets were scholars by alternating French poems with English. But this very collection shows amply that these same writers refused to undergo the syllabic constraints of French, and held to what were to be always the real, if frequently the unrecognised and sometimes the denied, principles of the New English in verse—that is to say, the constitution of the line by feet, not syllables—and the consequent possibility of obtaining equivalent lines by the substitution of feet, varying in syllabic constituence, but interchangeable in metrical value. Some examples of all these things will be found in the Scanned Conspectus; the student should search the books named in the notes for more, which he will find in the fullest abundance. What is important is that by this study he may and should discover the real and too commonly misunderstood relation of Chaucer to precedent English verse.

There is, however, another fact of the fourteenth century which it is not less important for him to recognise, and which also has been too often misunderstood, or at least not put in its proper place. This is the revival of alliterative-accentual verse.

As there are few things, in treating prosody, of greater weight than to keep carefully before the student the difference between controversial and uncontroversial points, it should be said at once that "revival" is not quite one of the latter. There have been some who have taken it for granted that the alliterative-accentual form never ceased out of the land. It may be so; there is even a sort of antecedent plausibility about the notion. But the important historical fact is that no such verse apparently exists of a probable date between about 1250 (the later form of Layamon itself, much further encroached upon by metre and rhyme) and about 1350. Somewhere about this latter time it does reappear; and before very long has its chief pure representative in Langland, at the same time as metre has its chief pure representative in Chaucer.

But this reappearance is conditioned and qualified by a very remarkable fact. There is, as has just been said, pure alliterative verse. It is not, indeed, an exact representation of the old A.S. line. It is somewhat longer than the shorter forms of that line, and very much shorter than the "extended" variety. In some cases, especially in the later examples, the alliteration is richer, extending to four, five, or even six syllables. Most noteworthy of all is the substitution, in the general rhythmical run, of anapæstic-iambic for trochaic basis—a fact the importance of which, in the general history of the morphology of English poetry and of the change from A.S. to M.E., cannot be exaggerated.

But it is also worthy of the most careful remark that, in a relatively large number of instances, the alliterative-accentual system is apparently unable to rely upon itself. It is tempted or driven to borrow metre, or rhyme, or both. Of the two best pieces in the alliterative division, outside Piers Plowman, Gawain and the Green Knight combines, with an unrhymed body or tirade, a rhymed "bob and wheel" in every stanza; while The Pearl, though alliterated almost to the highest possible strength, is strictly metrical and strictly rhymed throughout. Others form their stanzas of lines roughly rhythmed but fairly well rhymed.

By the last quarter of the fourteenth century, therefore, there were in England two contrasted and in a way rival, but, as has been said, overlapping, systems of versification: one a sort of atavistic revival, the other the result of a process—two centuries old to a certainty, and probably nearer four—of blending the characteristics of Low Latin and French prosody with those of Old English.

In the three chief poets of the later fourteenth century (Chaucer, Gower, and Langland) we have three object lessons as to the results of this process, which could not have been improved if the course of events had been exclusively devoted to the task of making these results, and the process itself, clear to the student. They had best be taken in reverse order.

Langland represents, in the greatest perfection that can reasonably be expected, the attempt to preserve, or revert to, verse arranged without rhyme, without metre in the strict sense, and depending for its separation from prose upon alliteration, accent, and strong middle pause. In spite of himself, and in consequence of the state of the language, actually metrical lines—decasyllables, Alexandrines, and fourteeners—do appear; but, as a rule, he avoids them either with singular skill or with remarkable luck, and on the whole achieves a consistent medium, not so much dominated as permeated by a sort of anapæstic underhum of rhythm, but otherwise maintaining its independence. Being possessed of great literary and even distinctly poetical genius, he makes it a by no means unsuitable vehicle for his tangle of apocalyptic dreams, and no ill one for the occasional passages of a more mundane description which he interlards. But it is deficient in beauty, if not in vigour; it is clearly unsuited for many of the subjects of poetry; and to any one acquainted with metre and rhyme it constantly suggests the question and complaint, "Why are we to be deprived of these already-won beauties and conveniences, and cut off with this rough makeshift?"

As Langland represents the purely accentual division or phase of English prosody at this time, so does Gower represent the almost purely syllabic. He uses, with insignificant exceptions,[66] the old octosyllabic couplet; but he comes closer than any other English writer of the Middle English period to the strict French model. He does not, like his forerunners, and like even Chaucer, allow himself the seven-syllable line as a variation; and though he does, by the admission of those who are opposed to the system of this book, occasionally admit an "extrametrical syllable," and, according to that system, much oftener a trisyllabic foot, this interferes little with the general uniformity of his verse-run. Almost the only variations that he relies upon are frequent initial trochees an occasional balanced arrangement of the halves of the line—

contrasted with less strongly marked pauses, and especially a device whereby a full stop comes at the first line of two couplets separated by another, so that a sort of In Memoriam quatrain effect, with first and last lines blank, is obtained, as thus:

To this the present writer would add distinct trisyllabic feet where others see slur, as in—

The result, especially with syncopation of these trisyllables, is what some call "pre-eminent smoothness" of metre, others dominant monotony. The metre had proved itself of old well suited for actual narrative, and, as Gower can tell a story, when he has a good one to tell, the effect, as in the passages about Nebuchadnezzar, Medea, Ceyx and Alcyone, Rosiphelè, the "Trump of Death," and other persons and things, is quite excellent. But in the didactic and conversational parts it is often terribly tedious and lamentably limp.

Thus Langland, from yet another point of view, represents the rejection of the new English prosody altogether or as far as possible, and Gower, the timid imitation of French. Chaucer, on the other hand, despite his undoubted attention to French and Italian models, is in the direct line which we have been tracing, and represents, if not completely, yet to a very large extent, at once the development and the perfecting of the processes which we have described. It has indeed been urged by some that Chaucer probably knew nothing, or very little, of English poetry before his own day. But while, on the one hand, this is quite unproven, and not a little improbable, those who urge it do not seem to see that, even if it were so, it is comparatively irrelevant. It is not in the least necessary to suppose that Chaucer must have borrowed the Vernon MS. or another like it, carried it home to the rooms above Aldgate, "stirred the fire and taken a drink" as Henryson did later with his own Troilus, and then, after discussing to himself principles of versification, have decided that this was to be followed, that to be avoided, that again to be perfected and carried further. The main and undoubted facts remain that Chaucer was an Englishman of 1340(?)-1400; that he was the greatest Englishman of letters of his time; that he spoke and wrote the English language, and that thus, by what he would himself have called "the law of kind," he entered into the inheritance of all that had been done in this English matter by Englishmen for generations beforehand. As a matter of fact, there is plenty of evidence destructive of the contention referred to. He had read the Romances, or he could not have written Sir Thopas; he knew the alliterative poems, or he could not have made the famous reference to rum ram ruf in the Prologue to the Parson's Tale, which Gascoigne caught up. It is odd if he had not heard (even if he had not read) the plays that folk like his own Absolon played "upon a scaffold high." But, as has been said, it does not matter.

For his work is there, and it is incontestably—whatever its author had read or not read—the logical and biological continuation and perfecting of all that had gone before from Godric and the Paternoster. He begins with the fluent octosyllable and the melodious and usefully stringent rhyme-royal, as well as other more or less elaborate stanzas. He communicates to the couplet[67] a greater combination of order and variety than it had ever known in English; he makes of the stanza,[68] in the case of rhyme-royal, the most perfect formal arrangement of verse that English had yet seen. Later he takes up,[69] very probably because he had written so many separate examples of it in rhyme-royal itself at the close of each stanza, the decasyllabic couplet, and makes of that something greater still—a metrical instrument or vehicle escaping at once the scanty content and slightly insignificant bearing of the octosyllable, the elaborateness and rather melancholy quality of rhyme-royal. In doing this it is inevitable that, as Spenser did in parallel case afterwards, he should lean rather towards precision than towards great laxity and luxuriance of form; for things needed order. But he sets the example of that variation of pause in rhyme-royal which was fortunately taken as a rule, and which preserved for English one of the very greatest means of metrical achievement. In the octosyllable he reproduced knowingly, and with definite apology, that "failing of a syllable" which gives acephalous or trochaic alternation, and which all the greatest masters of the metre, except (following Gower) William Morris, have imitated. And he broke up the lines very largely by conversation-fragments, by putting full stops at the end of the first line of a couplet, and by making a whole paragraph end at the same place.

But next to his provision of a perfectly finished stanza—in other words, of a complete, and pro tanto final, prosodic result—in rhyme-royal, the most important thing done by Chaucer in this department was the arranging and setting on foot of the decasyllabic couplet, which he began well in the Legend of Good Women, but carried on much better in the Canterbury Tales. Not half of his actual achievement here, and a very much smaller part of his promise and stimulus for the future, can be perceived by those who limit him to the decasyllable as such by devices of elision and syncope; still less by those who would have his varieties of line exactly to represent variations of the French decasyllable. The former proceeding is inadequate and defacing; the latter practically impossible, except as a bare and barren matter of arithmetic. You cannot imitate the prosodic effect of one language in another, even though you take the exact number of syllables and (as far as you can) divide the words, arrange the accents, etc., with the most slavish copying. The result will laugh at you prosodically; and while it is very unlikely to give you anything similar, it is nearly certain to give you something quite different.[70]

When Chaucer's verse in "heroic" or "riding rhyme" is examined, simply on its own merits and without regard to arbitrary theories of pronunciation, but with all necessary remembrance of the value of the final e, etc., it is seen to follow, in every respect, the general principles which we have seen evolving themselves in all English poetry hitherto, subject only to the general reforming or regimenting tendency which has been noticed. The normal line is beyond all question five-foot iambic, or decasyllabic with short and long syllable alternately. But there are a few instances[71] of so-called acephalous lines where the first syllable seems to have been missed—where, at any rate, there are only nine to account for, and where you consequently have to choose between a monosyllabic foot in the first place or trochaic cadence throughout. There is little doubt in the mind of the present writer that if these lines (which, after all, are very few) were deliberately written and meant to be kept, the reason of their existence was a false analogy with the octosyllable, where, as we have said, such acephalous lines, trochaic and heptasyllabic, do occur, and where they produce not only no ill, but a positively good effect. Unluckily the cutting down does not produce a good effect in the larger couplet; and if trochaic rhythm is permitted—in other words, if the missing syllable is shifted from the beginning to the end—it produces a very bad one. But they are, as has been said, in very small proportion, though there are too many of them to be simply "mended" out of existence.

Proceeding, we find, in a far larger number of instances, not a defect but an excess of syllables. As far as these syllables are found at the end of the line (in great measure caused by the final e) there is no difficulty and no dispute about them. They are allowed by everybody; and they come under that general law of almost (not quite) all prosodies which makes the final place of a line one of liberty. But it is different with those which come within the line, and with apparent extensions beyond the eleventh syllable. Many, perhaps most, prosodists would shut their eyes to the latter, regarding them as mere extra-redundances, and explain away those which occur within the line by elision before a vowel, by syncope or crasis or the like (see Glossary) when they come before a consonant.

To the present writer these devices and shifts appear unnecessary, discordant, the reverse of natural, and alike the consequence and the cause of prosodic error. With regard to hiatus (i.e. the actual contact of vowels) it has to be fully admitted that there is a strong tendency in MSS. to sink one of them and to write not merely "tharray" for "the array," but even "in thalyghte" for "in thee alyghte." The habit continued for a long time, and we find even in Wyatt and Surrey "tembrace" for "to embrace" and so forth. But it is important to observe first that this habit is not constant, as we should expect it to be if it represented a definite and reasoned wish always to reduce two such syllables to one; and further, that it will not affect the other cases of syllables, such as the last of "Heaven" (which, however, pretty certainly was monosyllabic at this time and later), "ever" the -eth of the third person singular and plural, y in "many a," i- in scores of words, and the like.

To the present writer, once more, it is certain, and even indisputable, that whether Chaucer deliberately used trisyllabic feet or not, there are trisyllabic feet by nature and poetic right in Chaucer, for any one who chooses them. And he is of opinion, though not so strongly, that Chaucer allowed himself an occasional Alexandrine or twelve-syllabled line,[72] just as preceding writers had allowed themselves occasional ten-syllabled lines in octosyllabics. What is once more certain, and almost indisputable, is that his lines can be so scanned with euphonious effect, and that similar phenomena manifest themselves all the way up to his time.

Of his rhymes nothing necessarily need be said here. He often avails himself for rhyme, as well as for rhythm, of the choice between Teutonic and Romance accent—the former always seeking the beginning of the word, the latter generally the end. This was hardly even a licence at his period.

One much-vexed point it is, however, impossible to omit, though far more, in every sense, has been made of it than it is worth. It occurred many years ago to a distinguished scholar, the late Mr. Bradshaw of Cambridge, to make a test out of the rhyme of y and ye, which, he thought (despite a famous example in Sir Thopas[73]), never occurs in the work unquestionably Chaucer's. To the present writer the occurrence of the rhyme in Sir Thopas closes the question, and he would have much to say against the establishment of the test, even if Sir Thopas were acknowledged as not Chaucerian. But from the strict point of view of this book the whole thing is really irrelevant. It does not matter to us who wrote certain pieces of English poetry, but what the characteristics of those and other pieces of English poetry are. The student of prosody may and should note that in some pieces of this period the rhyme of y and ye certainly does occur, that in others it apparently does not; but beyond this he need not, and, as a student of prosody, should not, go.

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It might be supposed, especially in face of the unquestionable reputation which Chaucer had attained before his death—and which he maintained undisturbed, and hardly approached, for the entire period until Spenser's birth,—that his prosodic work, once done, would have been done once for all; that in points of form, though individual inferiority of poetic gift might show itself, there could be no great technical falling off. To think this, however, would be to ignore—as, in fact, men too usually do ignore, and have ignored—the necessary and intricate connection between language and prosody. Chaucer had raised the state of English versification to the highest point possible in his time; in fact, there are reasons for saying that he had screwed it up beyond the level possible to ordinary men. To mention nothing else, the exactness, and at the same time the rhythmical variety of his verse, depend on two special points—the valuing of the final e and the optional but carefully selected shift from French to English accentuation.[74] We know that, even in the mouths and on the pens of his own contemporaries, the e was breaking down, and that it "went" more and more during the fifteenth century; and we know likewise, though less certainly, that though, even at the close of the period with which we are dealing, French accentuation was still permissible to poets, an English standard was gradually establishing itself, violation of which was disapproved.[75] Moreover, the fact remains undeniable that the poetic quality of the followers of Chaucer, in Southern English of the literary kind, was low to a point unprecedented, and never yet again reached since.

The progress of prosody between Chaucer and Spenser divides itself, sharply but unequally in point of time, between a longer space (about a century and a quarter) from Chaucer to poets like Hawes, Skelton, and Barclay; a shorter (of about half a century or less) from Wyatt to Spenser. In the first division a subdivision—of matter, not time—has to be made between the literary poets in Southern English, the Scottish Chaucerians from James the First to Douglas or Lyndsay (if not even to Montgomerie, who died later than Spenser himself), and the ballad, carol, and other folk-song writers of the fifteenth century.

The history of the first division is the history of the breakdown just referred to. Except in the so-called Chauceriana—pieces such as "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale," "The Flower and the Leaf," "The Court of Love," etc., once attributed to Chaucer himself, but cast out on various kinds of evidence ranging from practically conclusive to very doubtful—and sometimes even in such poets as Lydgate and Occleve, who for no very small portion of their lives were Chaucer's own contemporaries, downwards, seem to be struck with metrical palsy or metrical blindness. Examples, given in the Scanned Conspectus above, will show the way in which they confuse different metres, vary the lengths of their lines not by intentional substitution but by sheer muddlement, violate rhythm and cadence—turn, in fact, the perfect harmony of their master into a cacophony which is not even prosaic. Sometimes, especially in Occleve, by rigid counting of syllables, they escape worse blunders, though they seldom make real music. Generally, even this resource fails them, and there is no worse chaos than in Hawes, one of the latest and not one of the least of them; while Skelton, perhaps the acutest intelligence of all, takes refuge in frank, not clumsy, and intentional doggerel.

To this spectacle of disorganisation and decay the Scottish followers of Chaucer (who, generally with acknowledgment as eager and hearty as that of their English comrades, take him for their master) present what may at first sight seem an astonishing and almost unintelligible contrast. With final e's allowed for (or in case of necessity touched in), the Kingis Quair, traditionally ascribed, and never with solid reason denied, to James the First, is a piece of rhyme-royal as soundly constructed, and as well fitted and polished, as if it were Chaucer's own. Henryson, in his following of Chaucer's Troilus, and in his other poems, never breaks down in metre, but handles every form that he touches with equal precision and charm. Even more may be said of Dunbar, whose lyrics possess the peculiar grace only given by metrical accomplishment, who can manage alliterative metre more smoothly than Langland and with not less vigour, and who, if he wrote the "Friars of Berwick," is, next to Chaucer himself, the greatest master of the early (Middle English) heroic couplet. Of the verse-chroniclers, Wyntoun, though not very poetical, uses octosyllabic couplet, with not infrequent equivalence, effectively enough, and Blind Harry writes very strict decasyllabic couplet with cæsura at the fourth syllable, after the French model. The earlier sixteenth-century writers, Douglas and Lyndsay, if not perhaps quite impeccable, appear so beside Hawes and his fellows; while the two latest strictly Scots poets, Scott and Montgomerie, manage most complicated measures—reminding us of early French and Provençal, or of those of the English fourteenth century in lyric and drama—with unerring accuracy and finished grace. Of this strange contrast the simple fact of writing in a different dialect, requiring more care in imitation, may supply some explanation; the other fact, that this dialect was rather a literary convention than a vernacular speech, some more; and the higher quality of individual genius, more still; but a margin of surprise remains.

It is difficult to say whether that margin is reduced or widened by the fact that a contrast, almost as striking, is found between the English literary poetry of the period and the "folk-song," sacred and profane. It is probable that the bulk of our older ballads date from the earliest fifteenth century or the very close of the fourteenth. The latter would seem to be true of the "Robin Hood" ballads; the former is pretty certainly true of "Chevy Chase." We have also from the fifteenth century a large body of carols, or sacred poems for singing.

Now in these, though they naturally vary much in poetic merit and in prosodic accomplishment, it is remarkable that this latter scarcely ever falls to the level of the worst literary poetry, and never falls in exactly the same way. The ballad-writers invariably, and the carol- and hymn-writers very commonly, preserve the English licence of equivalence in the fullest fashion; and this seems to relieve their motion of the staggering and fatal cramp which rests on their superiors in formal literary rank. They sing naturally: they do not aim at, and break down in, a falsetto. Although it would be impossible to have anything in a worse condition, as far as copying goes, than our oldest version of "Chevy Chase," its natural ballad motion carries it safe through all the corruptions and defacements; the sacred song of "E.I.O." is admirable metre; the Carol of the Virgin, "I sing of a maiden," is matchless in quiet metrical movement; and the famous "Nut-brown Maid," which is certainly not later than this century, deserves the same praise in more rapid melody.

These compositions, however, though they did a precious office in preserving the true principles of English prosody, could not exercise immediate influence; and the disorganising of literary versification was no doubt partly cause and partly consequence of the continuance of the alliterative revolt which did not die till after Flodden—indeed, not till after Musselburgh (Pinkie). But, indirectly, this revolt encouraged fresh developments of English metre itself. The old fourteener had taken new and lively form in such pieces as Gamelyn[76] (late fourteenth century) and Beryn (middle fifteenth), and through it and other things—the musical adaptations of songs and hymns and the like—there was arising, in dramatic literature especially, a disorderly, imperfect, but very important notion of wholly "triple-timed" or anapæstic metre. In fact, it is not excessive to regard the English fifteenth century as a period when all elements of prosody were thrown into a sort of cauldron, sack, sieve, or lucky-bag, in which, as according to the different metaphors suiting these objects, they were to be boiled down, shaken together, sifted out, and taken as fortune would have it, to supply the stock of a new venture in more orderly and polished verse-manufacture when actual speech had settled itself once more.

At what period, in what manner, and by what persons exactly, conscious discontent with this confusion and dilapidation was made manifest, is not known. That it was felt consciously about the middle of the sixteenth century we do know positively from a passage in the Mirror for Magistrates; and later still we find the precepts of Gascoigne virtually, if not always expressly, directed against it. But, as has been hinted, even Skeltonic evinces an earlier attempt to escape from it in practice as far back as the first quarter of the century; while, at an uncertain time for first efforts, during the second, and then ever increasingly during the third, till the death of Gascoigne himself, poetical practice proclaims the fact, even more emphatically than any preceptist rules of criticism could do. Indeed, there has hardly ever been any mistake, and it is difficult to think that by persons possessed of ears and eyes any could be made, about the surprising revolution manifest in the verse of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and of his younger disciple, Henry Howard, known by his courtesy title as the Earl of Surrey. Instead of the weltering and staggering discords of the poets from Lydgate onward, we come back to verse almost as clear, regular, and harmonious as Chaucer's, though with a much more modern pronunciation and accent, to which it occasionally seems to have some difficulty in reconciling itself. The final e has in most cases disappeared, though it is probably there in a few cases, and in a few others has settled itself into y.[77] The inordinate variety of syllables in the line, not explicable by any trisyllabic foot, is reformed. Indeed, the need of the reform is so strongly felt that the poets run into the opposite error—salutary for the time—of excessive syllabic uniformity.

There can be no question that Wyatt, and, through or after him, Surrey, were enormously helped, if not originally stimulated to reform, by the existence of new, exact, and attractive foreign models derived, at any rate originally, from a new language. French had hitherto been almost the only source of such models, and it had lost its virtue—not least perhaps because ballades and other formal devices, though excellent in themselves, had been practised all through the period of disorganisation. Italian supplied, in the sonnet, terza rima, and blank verse, fresh models, in the attempt to imitate which precision of syllabic and rhythmical arrangement almost inevitably enjoined itself. To write either sonnet or terza in shuffling doggerel would destroy the particular form; to write blank verse in such a way (as was actually shown a hundred years afterward by the later "Elizabethan" dramatists) is to lose all form; so that the instinct of preservation kept the new experimenters right. Precisely why they adopted another form which is not Italian at all—the poulter's measure of alternate Alexandrine and fourteener—is not so easy to decide; but it may very reasonably be taken to be an attempt to regularise two of the shapes to which the doggerel of the time and its predecessor most nearly approximated. It is not a very good form (though when it splits up into "short measure" it has some merits), and even in the hands of two such poets as Wyatt and Surrey it is terribly sing-song. But this very sing-song carried regularity with it. Of the imported measures terza has never suited English very well, though numerous attempts have been made at it by poets sometimes of supreme quality. On the other hand, the sonnet—not the commonest Italian form at first, but that also later—has made itself thoroughly at home; and blank verse—not much more of a success in Italian itself than terza in English—has, in English, grown to be one of the greatest metres in the world's prosodic history.

It should be at once seen that these processes of reform involved an almost inevitable—a certainly very natural—"drawing-in of the horns" of verse, which was positively beneficial in practice, but which led to rather disastrous mistakes in theory. On the one hand, so far as Italian admits of foot-distribution, it is distributable only into dissyllabic feet in the metres affected.[78] On the other, the utter disorganisation of English verse which had prevailed might well seem to have been caused by the neglect to observe accurate division into such feet—a division which, in our language, will always chiefly favour the iamb, or foot with the first syllable short and the second long. Accordingly we find that in Wyatt and Surrey themselves; in their companions when (long after the death of the first, and nearly a decade after that of the second) their work came to be published in Tottel's Miscellany; in the huge rubbish-heap of the Mirror for Magistrates with its one pearl of price in Sackville's contributions; and in the poets of the third quarter of the sixteenth century—George Turberville and Gascoigne himself—this iambic rhythm is omnipresent, though the line-length and other combinations may be largely variable. There is, it is true, one remarkable exception in the Georgic poet Tusser, who uses frequent and accurate anapæst; but the nature of his subject, the homeliness of his diction, and the character of his intended readers, may have been thought to put him out of strictly poetical consideration. When Gascoigne—merely as narrating and regretting a fact, not announcing, as some have erroneously thought, a principle—stated the limitation, his fact was for the most part a fact, and had been so for more than a generation.

It would, however, be a gross mistake in criticism, as well as a piece of unpardonable ingratitude, to find fault with these poets for their prosodic limitation. It was their business to limit and be limited—to substitute, at whatever cost of temporary restriction of freedom, order for the abominable disorder of the preceding century, rhythm for its limping or staggering movement, harmonious and well-concerted metrical arrangement for its hubbub of halting verse or scarcely more than even half-doggerelised prose. And they did this. When, as in the cases of Wyatt, Surrey, and Sackville, they were men of real and genuine poetic gift they did much more; though the two first were still hampered by the uncertainty of pronunciation. From this Sackville is comparatively free; though the deliberate archaism in him no doubt assists this freedom, and may have suggested something similar to Spenser. Even Turberville and Gascoigne, though their strictly poetic powers are less, manage to produce, by no means seldom, sweet and harmonious measures. And all do the inestimable work of drilling, regimenting, and preparing the raw and demoralised state of English prosody so that it may be ready to the hands of a real master and commander.

Such a master and commander duly presented himself in Spenser. Naturally enough—and even commendably enough on the principle of proving all things and holding fast that which is good—he spent a little time on classical "versing"; only to give it up so completely that (as is not the case with his friend Sidney) no single example of it, or of any approach to it, occurs in his actual poetical works. He must have spent much more on experiments in English verse proper, before the ever-famous and admirable Shepherd's Calendar appeared in the winter of 1579-80.

For poetical excellence, combined with prosodic regularity, there had been nothing like this since Chaucer; for poetical excellence combined with prosodic variety it may be questioned whether Chaucer himself—his whole work being set against this novice's essay—can show anything equal. Spenser had not yet ventured to publish (though it is more than probable that he had sketched it out[79]) his immortal stanza, and he did not issue till later any exact and complete followings of Chaucer's riding rhyme. But he uses (the exact order is for special reasons not followed) a very fine six-line stanza (decasyllables rhymed ababcc); slightly altered Romance-six with fresh substitution and redundance in the short lines; various stanzas much "cuttit and broken" (i.e. of very varied line-length and rhyme-order); the Chaucerian octave; common ballad measure; and another metre, much discussed and not universally agreed upon, but, on the more probable interpretation of it, one of the most interesting in the whole history of English poetry.

This arrangement, which is found in the "February," "May," and "September" pieces, but most characteristically in the part of "February" devoted to the tale of "The Oak and the Brere" (Briar), has been thought by some to be evidence that Spenser misunderstood Chaucer's "riding rhyme" owing to the disuse of the final valued e and other changes, these pieces presenting the result of the misconception. Unfortunately for this notion, the pieces themselves contain large numbers of consecutive decasyllabics perfectly well filled and rhythmed; while Spenser later wrote another piece, Mother Hubberd's Tale, which is in impeccable "riding rhyme" from first to last. He is also, not merely in his later work, but in the other nine-twelfths of the Calendar itself, an equally impeccable master of every rhythm and metre that he tries, so that it is practically inconceivable that he should here have been stumbling blindfold, or wandering aimlessly, between perfect decasyllabic couplets, perfect octosyllabic couplets, and doggerel anapæstic lines inconsistent with both. On the other hand, there had been in English, as we have seen, from Genesis and Exodus downwards, a variety of octosyllabic couplet which had admitted anapæstic equivalence freely, which reappeared in the Romances, and which, though not favoured by Chaucer or Gower or their immediate followers, had persevered in various places down to Spenser's own time. It seems to the present writer, as it did to Gray a hundred and fifty years ago, and has to many others since Christabel, though Coleridge himself strangely did not notice it, that Spenser here followed his elders, and anticipated Coleridge himself, in choosing equivalenced octosyllable to vary his non-equivalenced decasyllable. And on this theory we have in Genesis and Exodus, the Shepherd's Calendar, and Christabel, the three main piers of a great bridge which unites the earliest and the latest ages of English prosody, and which carries that prosody's most vital and differential principle.

The result, however, of Spenser's experiments was that, for his chief poem the Faerie Queene, he chose none of the metres in which he had thus experimented, nor any which had been previously employed by poets, English or other, but invented (the possible stages of the invention being given elsewhere) the magnificent Spenserian stanza of eight decasyllables and an Alexandrine. With this he got more room than in either rhyme-royal or the octave—an unsurpassed medium for the individual descriptive effects in which he delighted, and yet one which could combine itself (for the purpose of larger description or of narrative) into most attractive sequence. He did not, however, confine himself to this in his later poems, but showed himself a master, not merely of the octave in both its forms and of the couplet, but also of two extensive verse combinations more elaborate than the Spenserian itself, but less original, and both really suggested, as the Spenserian was not, by Italian. The first was the sonnet, which, after the successors of Wyatt and Surrey had been apparently afraid to venture on it, had been taken up by Sidney and Watson probably about the same time that he was himself at work upon his Calendar, and in which he did very beautiful things. The other was the still more extensive and complicated arrangement, suggested no doubt by the Italian canzone, which he employed in the Epithalamion and Prothalamion—stanzas of unequal line-length and intertwisted rhyme-order which sometimes extend to a score of lines or thereabouts.

Spenser did not, after the Shepherd's Calendar, attempt the lighter kind of lyric, nor anything in trisyllabic measures; while he seems distinctly to eschew trisyllabic substitution in others, though it appears sometimes. But this was, in fact, a condition of his completing, and informing with full poetic spirit, the prosodic reform of the second and third quarters of the century. He left English poetry once more provided—and indeed had furnished it long before his too early death—with a perfect form of verse, and with a nearly perfect form of poetic diction. This diction, which was almost as much his own work as his stanza, was at the time, and has been since, much misunderstood. Ben Jonson called it "no language"—an insidious proposition which, under the truth that it is no language that was at the time, had been before, or has since been the living speech of any person or group, conveys the falsehood that it is therefore unfit for poetry. It is probable that Chaucer's was, though slightly mixed, much nearer the actual language of his own time, and for that very reason it grew obsolete, and, until it was studied from the antiquarian point of view, carried the verse with it. Spenser's blend of actuality, archaism, dialect, borrowings from French and Italian, and the like, provided a literary medium which, though parts of it too have become antiquated, has as a whole provided patterns for all subsequent poets. The most disputable of his devices, though it has a certain quaint charm of its own, is what is called his "eye-rhyme"—a system of altering the spelling of some words so that they may not only sound alike on the voice but look alike on the page.

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