Historical Manual of English Prosody

BOOK III
HISTORICAL SURVEY OF VIEWS ON PROSODY

CHAPTER I
BEFORE 1700

In hardly any language are studious investigations into the form of verse likely to be early, and in a language with such a history as English they could not possibly be so. We have indeed, from the early fourteenth century, some remarks of Robert of Brunne on kinds of verse—"cowee" (Romance-six), "baston,"[130] "enterlace" (pretty obvious), etc., but with no explanation or discussion; and Chaucer himself (who, in this respect as in others, is slavishly followed by Lydgate[131]) makes apologies for roughness and inexperience.[132] In Gower (Conf. Am. iv. 2414) there is a reference, but after Chaucer and not yet quite satisfactorily explained, to the difference between "rhyme" and "cadence," while in the Scottish chronicler Wyntoun there is another reference[133] to "cadence." Again, in Chaucer we have the Parson's famous disclaimer of indulgence in "rum ram ruf," because the speaker is "a Southern man." But not one of these things makes the slightest pretence to be even a prosodic discussion, let alone a prosodic treatise; and it is not till towards the end of the third quarter of the sixteenth century—when a whole generation had already followed Wyatt in endeavouring to effect, in practice, the reform of the prosodic breakdown from Lydgate to Hawes, if not even to Barclay—that the first English prosodic treatise appears in the shape of Gascoigne's Notes of Instruction (1572-75). They had been a little anticipated in time by remarks of Ascham's, and perhaps of others, on a new fashion of classical "versing," on which more presently; but this, though essentially prosodic in character, had not yet formed the subject of a regular treatise, and its exponents implicitly or expressly declined all meddling with "beggarly rhyme," i.e. with the form of English poetry proper.

Gascoigne's little book[134] is very short, very practical, very sensible, and—except in one unlucky remark, which (or rather the misunderstanding of it) has done harm to the present day—in the main, perfectly sound. He dwells on the importance of accent and of the observation of it; and he was quite right, for even Wyatt had been very loose in this respect, and the desire to get out of the doggerel of the fifteenth century[135] had led novices in precision to strain the accent, in order that they might keep the quantity. But he insists also—and with more than a century of awful examples to justify him if he had cared to use them—on "keeping metre"—on not wandering from lines of one length or character to those of another as the rhyme-royalists of the preceding century constantly do. He gives rules for the pause, leaving rhyme-royal itself free in that respect. He mentions especially, besides rhyme-royal, "riding rhyme" (Chaucerian couplet), "poulter's measure" (the alternate Alexandrine and fourteener), and octosyllables. He deprecates poetic commonplaces ("cherry lips" and the like), and gives some positive rules for pronunciation ("Heav'n" is to be always monosyllabic).

The excepted unlucky point is his remark that "commonly nowadays in English rhymes we use no other than a foot of two syllables, whereof the first is depressed and made short, and the second elevated or made long." He says that "we have used in times past other kinds of metres," giving as example the anapæstic line—

laments the restriction to iambs, and shows a remarkable appreciation of Chaucer's "liberty that the Latinists do use," i.e. equivalent substitution, though he may not have quite correctly understood this.

The desire for order and regularity in all this is very noticeable, and perfectly intelligible to any one who has appreciated (see last Book) the hopeless breakdown, due to the neglect of these qualities, in English prosody between 1400 and 1530. Gascoigne's statement about the iamb is, moreover, true of the majority of his own contemporaries, though it overlooks such a writer as Tusser. But it would be a grievous mistake (and unfortunately it has often been committed) to accept this not quite accurate declaration of ephemeral fact—accompanied as it is, more especially, by another expression of regret for that fact—as a rule and principle governing Elizabethan and English poetry.

Gascoigne's little treatise was followed at no great intervals, but after his own death, by more elaborate dealings with the subject—some of them exclusively or mainly devoted to the new craze for classical metres, others treating the subject at large and merely referring to the "versing" attempts. The order of these compositions, with a very brief sketch of their contents, may now be given.

In the winter of 1579-80, the date of the appearance of the Shepherd's Calendar, Spenser and his pragmatical friend Gabriel Harvey exchanged certain letters (which we have) dealing with the "versing" attempt that Spenser himself makes. An experiment in quantified trimeter refers to "rules" on the subject made by a Cambridge man named Drant, but does not (unfortunately) give them, and asks for Harvey's own. Harvey blows rather hot and cold on the matter, approving the system, but criticising the details.

Next, in 1582, came the Preface to Richard Stanyhurst's translation of the Aeneid, a book famous for the strange language in which it is written, but, as far as its Preface is concerned, a very sober and scientific attempt to do an impossible thing. Stanyhurst endeavours to arrange a set of rules for determining the quantity of every syllable in English, not necessarily according to its Latin or other derivation, but on principles germane to the language itself. He does not and cannot succeed; but his attempt is interesting, and rather less contrary to facts than some recent attempts of the same kind.

He was followed, in 1586, by William Webbe, whose Discourse of English Poetry is notable for the enthusiasm displayed by the author towards Spenser (the Shepherd's Calendar had appeared some years previously); for his curiously combined enthusiasm as regards the classical metres which Spenser had tried and dropped; for the first published sketch of the history of English poetry (erroneous, but interesting); and for a certain number of desultory remarks on prosodic subjects, mostly brought round to the classical fancy, though showing the interest which these questions were exciting. But between Stanyhurst and Webbe one book of the kind had appeared, and another had been perhaps composed, though not printed, in the same year—1584.

The first was King James the Sixth of Scotland's Rewlis and Cautelis for the making of verse in his native dialect. Obligation has been traced in it to Gascoigne and to the great French poet Ronsard. It is very clear and precise, but of no wide interest, being simply an analysis of recent actual Scots verse with some peculiarities of terminology. It is our first methodical book of prosody, and some of its titles, such as "cuttit and broken" verse for the metres of very irregular line-length which were growing so fashionable, and which were to excite the displeasure of the eighteenth century, are distinctly useful. Not so perhaps another—"tumbling verse"—which is of uncertain application to alliterative-anapæstic or to mere doggerel rhythm—which has complicated the question of "cadence" (v. sup.), (of this it has been, perhaps correctly, thought to have been intended as an English translation), and which was adopted rather arbitrarily by Guest (v. inf.).

The other book, written in or before 1584, though not published till 1589, was the most elaborate treatment of English prosody yet attempted, and continued to be so until Mitford's treatise (v. inf.) nearly two hundred years later. The Art of English Poesy, as it not too arrogantly called itself, has no certain author, but has been by turns attributed to two brothers, George and Richard Puttenham. It is, in the original, a treatise of some 257 well-filled pages. About half of these is indeed occupied by an immense list of the fancifully devised "Figures of Speech" which the Greek rhetoricians had excogitated, and which apply (in so far as they have any real application at all) not more to poetry than to prose. But the First Book contains an elaborate discussion or defence of poetry generally, ending with a sketch of English poets, probably, if not certainly, written earlier than Webbe's. And the Second is a very full and formal handling of the formal part of poetry, the discussion being carried so far as to include those artificial figures in squares, lozenges, altars, wings, etc., which more than one age fancied, but which, in English, hardly survived the satire of Addison. Puttenham, however, takes great pains to point out the exact form of different regular stanzas; arranges line-lengths; dwells on rhyme, pause, accent, and other matters of importance; considers the classical "versing" (though he does not like it); and, in short, treats the whole subject, as far as his lights and opportunities permit, in a really business-like manner. It was somewhat unfortunate that he came a little too soon, neither the Faerie Queene nor probably any of the greatest plays of the "University Wits" having appeared at the time he wrote—nothing, in short, of the best time and kind but the Shepherd's Calendar.

The later years of the sixteenth century were less fruitful in regular prosodic discussion, though the old wrangle about "versing"[137] continued at intervals between Harvey and Nash, and some scattered observations on prosody exist, by Drayton and others. But in the earliest years of the seventeenth the first-named dispute, after hanging about for more than half a century since Ascham's day, was laid to rest, for the time and (except in scattered touches) for nearly two centuries afterwards, by the poet Thomas Campion's tractate on certain new forms of verse (not hexameters) devised by himself, and the reply of another poet, Samuel Daniel, in his Defence of Rhyme. Campion, an exquisite master of natural rhymed verse, did not wholly fail with his artificial creations of "English elegiacs," "English anacreontics," etc.—metres based mainly on iambs and trochees, though with some trisyllabic feet grudgingly allowed. He not merely does not support the dactylic hexameter, but pronounces against it; and his main objection seems to lie against rhyme. He also, like Stanyhurst, attempts a scheme of English quantity, though he admits the abundance of "common" syllables with us. Daniel in his answer confined himself to generalities, but with the most triumphant effect—basing his defence of rhyme on "Custom and Nature"; alleging the omnipotence of delight which is unquestionably given by and received from rhyme; and asking why, when in polity, religion, etc., we notoriously and profoundly differ from the Greeks and Latins, we are to imitate them in verse? He points out, again with absolute truth, that Campion's own versification is mostly or wholly nothing but old forms stripped of rhyme, and urges the hopelessness of adjusting, even on the reformer's own system, English quantity to classical. With this the thing became, and was long wisely allowed to be, res judicata.

In a sense this little book, or rather pamphlet, may be said to conclude the first batch or period of prosodic study in English. For the whole of the seventeenth century after it, though one of the most important practically in the entire history, sees very little theoretical discussion. Ben Jonson had, we are told, written a treatise against both Campion and Daniel, especially the last, praising couplets "to be the bravest sort of verses, especially when they are broken like hexameters," and against "cross-rhymes and stanzas." But we have not his own authority for this, which is only reported by Drummond, and the exact interpretation to be put upon "broken like hexameters" is absolutely uncertain. The surfeit of stanza[138] is, however, an obvious fact, and is borne witness to by Drayton, in the remarks above referred to, and by others—things culminating in the verse precepts of Sir John Beaumont (v. sup.) recommending the stopped distich in a form which is almost eighteenth century. Had Jonson finished his English Grammar and given the prosodic section which he promised, we should know more.

As it is, there is nothing of importance before the Restoration except the English Parnassus of Joshua Poole, published posthumously, with a remarkable Preface signed "J. D.," which in point of time might be—but which there is not the slightest reason except date and initials to suppose to be—Dryden's. This Introduction is partly historical and not ignorant, while the author shows good sense and taste by objecting to "wrenched" rhymes ("náture" and "endùre"), to the habit of "apostrophation" or cutting out syllables supposed to be extra-metrical, and substituting apostrophes,[139] which was infesting the printing of the day, and was, to the great corroboration of prosodic heresies, not got rid of for a century and a half. He dislikes, too, the heavily overlapped verses then prevalent.

Milton, inferior to no English poet in his practical importance as a master of prosody, and perhaps superior to all except Shakespeare, has nothing about it in the preceptist way, except his rather petulant outbreak against rhyme[140] in the advertisement to Paradise Lost (an outbreak largely neutralised by his own practice, not only earlier, but later), and the reference to "committing short and long" in Sonnet XIII.[141]

And Dryden almost repeats the tantalising conditions of Jonson's attitude to the subject. He tells us that he actually had in preparation a treatise on it; but nothing more has ever been heard of this, and, large as is the amount of his work in literary criticism, his references to this part of it are few and are mostly vague. He does indeed tell us that no vowel can be cut off before another when we cannot sink the pronunciation of it, and if this observation be extended to elision generally it is important.

But, on the whole, the most significant passages on prosody of the later seventeenth century are the work of a more obscure writer, Samuel Woodford, in his Prefaces to Paraphrases of the Psalms (1667) and the Canticles (1678). Here criticising, as no one else did, Milton from the prosodic point of view soon after date, he recognises and defends trisyllabic feet, but is disinclined to blank verse, regarding (and actually arranging) it as rhythmed prose. The references of Lord Roscommon and one or two others in verse, as well as of critics of shadowy notoriety like Rymer and Dennis in prose, are mostly trivial.

In this first division of English prosodists there is observable a want of thoroughness—at first sight perhaps strange, but easily explicable—which makes most of their work little more than a curiosity. The only book which attempts to grapple somewhat methodically with the whole subject—that attributed to Puttenham—labours under two fatal disadvantages. The first is that the writer has a most imperfect knowledge, or rather an almost unmixed ignorance, of what has come before him; and the second is that he naturally cannot know what will come after him, while what actually did come immediately after him happens to be one of the greatest bodies, in bulk and merit and variety, of English poetry. The two most gifted persons who think of treating it, Jonson and Dryden, do not actually do so; and it may be more than doubted whether, had they done so, ignorance of the past would not still have stood in their way. It is true that Dryden's obiter dictum, that you must not elide what you must pronounce, is a sort of ark of salvation which carries all the elements of a sound prosody in it. But it is not certain that the writer quite saw its full bearing, and that bearing was certainly not seen by others. On the other hand, Gascoigne's innocent but unlucky remark about the single two-syllabled foot expresses an opinion which, though wholly erroneous, undoubtedly did prevail very widely throughout the whole period. The evidence of its falsity was indeed constantly accumulating in blank verse during the first half of the seventeenth century, in definite trisyllabic metres during the second. But this evidence was ignored or disobligingly received; and when, at the very beginning of the eighteenth, Bysshe once more attempted formulation of prosodic orthodoxy, he arranged a code which, as long as it was observed, half maimed the sinews and half throttled the song of English poetry.

CHAPTER II
FROM BYSSHE TO GUEST

In 1702, just after the beginning of the new century, there appeared a book which, though it received little directly critical notice, and was spoken of with disapproval by some who did notice it, was repeatedly reprinted, and which expressed, beyond all reasonable doubt, ideas prevalent largely for a century or more before it, and almost universally for a century or more after it. This was the Art of Poetry of Edward Bysshe. The bulk of it is composed of dictionaries of rhyme, etc. But a brief Introduction puts with equal conciseness and clearness the following views on English prosody.

"The structure of our verses, whether blank or in rhyme, consists in a certain number of syllables; not in feet composed of long and short syllables." He works this out carefully—explaining that verses of double rhyme will always want one more syllable than verses of single; decasyllables becoming hendecasyllables, verses of eight syllables turning to nine, verses of seven to eight. "This must also be observed in blank verse." Then of the several sorts of verses. Our poetry, he thinks, admits, for the most part, of but three verses—those of ten, eight, or seven syllables. Those of four, six, nine, eleven, twelve, and fourteen are generally employed in masques and operas and in the stanzas of lyric and Pindaric odes. We have few entire poems composed in them; though twelve and fourteen may be inserted in other measures and even "carry a peculiar grace with them." In decasyllabic verse two things are to be considered—the seat of the accent and the pause. The pause ought to be at the fourth, fifth, or sixth syllable. The strongest accent must be on the second, fourth, and sixth. But he says nothing about accent in the last four places; indeed he is less explicit about the second half of the line throughout. And he says less about accent generally than about pause, though he is sure that "wrong placing" of it is as great a fault in English as a false quantity was in the classical languages. To make a good decasyllable you must be careful that the accent is neither on the third nor on the fifth—a curious crab-like way of approaching the subject, but bringing out in strong relief the main principle of all this legislation, "Thou shalt not." The verse of seven syllables, however, is most beautiful when the strongest accent is on the third.

More curious still is his way of approaching trisyllabic metres. As such, he will not so much as speak of them. "Verses of nine and eleven syllables," it seems, "are of two sorts." "Those accented on the last save one" are merely the redundant eights and tens already spoken of. "The other [class] is those that are accented on the last syllable, which are employed only in compositions for music, and in the lowest sort of burlesque poetry, the disagreeableness of their measure having wholly excluded them from grave and serious subjects." These are neither more nor less than anapæstic three- and four-foot verses; though for some extraordinary reason Bysshe does not even mention the full twelve-syllable form under any head whatever. I suppose the "lowness and disagreeableness" of the thing was too much for him, and as he had disallowed feet he had, at any rate, some logical excuse in making nothing of them. He admits triplets in heroic, and repeats his admission of Alexandrines and fourteeners. "The verses of four or six syllables have nothing worth observing," though he condescends to give some from Dryden.

Under the head of "Rules conducing to the beauty of our versification," and with the exordium, "Our poetry being very much polished and refined since the days of Chaucer, Spenser, and other ancient poets," we find that you must avoid hiatus; always cut off the e of "the" before a vowel; never allow such collocations as "thy iambics" or "into a book"; never value such syllables as "amazèd" and "lovèd," but always contract them; avoid alliteration; never split adjective from substantive, or preposition from verb, at the end of a line. "Beauteous" is but two syllables, "victorious" but three. You must not make "riot" one syllable as Milton does.[142] You may contract "vi'let" and "di'mond," and if you do, should write them so. "Temp'rance," "diff'rent," etc., are all right; and you may use "fab'lous" and "mar'ner." But Bysshe acknowledges that "this is not so frequent." And he rejects or doubts some of the more violent and most hideous apostrophations, such as, "b'" for "by," but has no doubt about "t'amaze," "I'm," "they've," and most others. Rhyme is not very fully dealt with, but for the most part correctly enough—so far as Bysshe's principles go. Stanzas of "intermixed rhyme" (like rhyme-royal, the octave, and the Spenserian) "are now wholly laid aside," for long poems at least. Shakespeare invented blank verse to escape "the tiresome constraint of rhyme." Acrostics and anagrams "deserve not to be mentioned."

If any one has read this account carefully he will perceive at once what Bysshe's ideals and standards are. They put the strict decasyllabic couplet, with no substitution, no overrunning of lines, a fixed middle pause, and as nearly as possible an unvaried iambic cadence, into the principal place—if not quite the sole place of honour—in English poetry. They frown upon stanzas, upon varied metres of any kind, and even upon unvaried anapæestic or "triple" measures. Strict syllabic scansion, with a consideration of accent, is the only process allowed; and even Dryden, just dead, and still regarded as the greatest of English poets, is directly though gently reproached for too great variety and laxity, as well as indirectly blamed for using "low" and "disagreeable" forms. The author seems to have been a very obscure person, of whom little or nothing is known; but any one who really knows English poetry will see that he practically expresses the mind that dominated it during almost the whole of the eighteenth century.

Either from Bysshe's starting the question; or from the same general influence which made him start it; or from the supposed tendency, not to be too hastily accepted, of a lull in creative poetry to be followed by an access of criticism—there is, from this time onward, no lack of prosodic work. John Brightland, in an English Grammar (1711), opposed Bysshe on the subject of accent; and he was also spoken of disparagingly by Charles Gildon, who produced two books, The Complete Art of Poetry (1718) and the Laws of Poetry (1721). Gildon was a pert and rather superficial writer who deservedly came under the lash of Pope; and, though neither quite ignorant nor quite stupid, he initiated a course of error which has never yet been stopped, by confusing prosody with music and arranging it by musical signs. Between Bysshe and his two critics Dr. Watts had, in the preface to his Horae Lyricae, given some prosodic remarks indicating discontent with the monotony of the couplet, an appreciation (not unmixed with criticism) of Milton, and other good things. But, before long, the question whether Accent or Quantity governs English verse—often complicated with the attempt to interpret this latter by musical notation—absorbed an altogether disproportionate amount of attention. The works of Pemberton (1738), Mainwaring, Foster, Harris, Lord Kames, Webb, and Say (1744) must be consulted by exhaustive students of the subject, and will be found duly commented upon in the larger History by the present writer. But they hardly need detailed notice here, any more than the later lucubrations of Lord Monboddo, Tucker, Nares, Fogg, and others. Their general tendency—which was indeed, as has been said, the general tendency of the century, correctly harbingered by Bysshe—was to concentrate attention on the heroic line, and indeed to regard it as strictly iambic, trisyllabic feet being wholly rejected, and even trochaic substitution either rejected likewise, as by Pemberton, or regarded as a more or less questionable licence. But the subject was also handled by persons of more literary importance, and in some cases, though not in all, of more insight and more knowledge.

The most remarkable exponent of the general prosodic ideas of the century is undoubtedly Dr. Samuel Johnson, who, though he wrote no special prosodic treatise, dealt with the subject in his Dictionary, in the Rambler (especially in connection with Milton), and in his Lives of the Poets. Except that Johnson does admit feet—or at least their names—his doctrine in the Dictionary hardly differs from Bysshe's as to the syllabic norm of lines, the strict regularity of accent constituting "harmony," and the duty of compounding superfluous syllables by elision, synalœpha, etc. He applies these doctrines in the Lives, and still more in his papers on Milton, Spenser, etc., in the Rambler. The spondees in Milton's lines—

and the trochees in his

and in Cowley's

are condemned as "inharmonious." He objects to Milton's "elisions"—that is to say, the devices necessary on his own system to avoid trisyllabic feet—and so to these feet themselves. He thinks the Spenserian stanza, Lycidas, and the end of Comus bad, because the lines and rhymes are not regularly arranged. In short, he is an unhesitating—and almost the greatest—believer in the sheer, alternately accented, middle-paused, syllabically limited decasyllable; though, with perhaps inevitable inconsistency, he does admit that, without variation of accent, the series of sounds would be not only very difficult but "tiresome and disgusting," while maintaining at the same time stoutly that this variation "always injures the harmony of the line considered by itself."

The inconveniences of this rigid system were not, however, entirely unnoticed. At an uncertain time, but probably between 1740 and his death, the poet William Shenstone urged, in a posthumously published Essay, the beauty of what he called "virtual dactyls"—that is to say, words like "watery" and "tottering,"—distinctly arguing that "it seems absurd to print them otherwise than at full length"—the "otherwise" being the established practice, based upon definite theory, of the century.

Johnson's friend the elocutionist Sheridan, in his Art of Reading (1775), calls it absurd (as it certainly is) to regard "echoing" as metrically "ech'ing." And, later, the poet Cowper, though using ambiguous and irresolute terminology on the subject, admits the "divine harmony" of Milton's "elisions"—by which, he explains in the most self-contradictory way, "the line is lengthened."

While much earlier, at the very middle of the century, John Mason, a little-known dissenting minister, who was, like Sheridan, a teacher of elocution, quoting and scanning the lines—

observes that this, "though it increases the number of syllables, sweetens the flow of the verse," "gives a sweetness that is not ordinarily found in the common iambic verse." It would be impossible to state more correctly or more definitely the case for the equivalent substitutional trisyllabic foot in English. But, as we shall see, it was to be nearly two generations before considerable poets boldly adopted (even then not always distinctly championing) the idea, and an entire century, if not more, before the principle was thoroughly accepted and understood.

Two deliberate prosodists, in two books published within a twelvemonth of each other, are memorable as (if not exactly starting) formulating, in a more elaborate way than had ever been done before, the one a mischievous and false, the other the only true method of dealing with prosody. Joshua Steele, in his Prosodia Rationalis (1775), is not always wrong; and William Mitford is not by any means invariably right—in fact, he partly shares Steele's error. But his Harmony of English Verse (1774) is even then to a great extent, and in its second edition, thirty years later, much more, occupied with a careful historical inquiry as to the actual successive forms of his subject from the earliest period. At first he had not even Tyrwhitt's invaluable Chaucer—which appeared in the year after Steele's book—to guide him: later he availed himself of the great accessions to the study of Middle and Elizabethan English which the intervening generation had seen. And so, though he believed too much in accent, and relied too much on the dangerous assistance of music, he frequently came right. He has no doubt (as it is astonishing that an historical student should have any doubt) about trisyllabic feet; he likes what he calls "aberration of accent," i.e. trochaic substitution; and he shows the possession of a fineness and cultivation of ear not as yet noticeable in any English prosodist, by observing the presence of anapæstic rhythm in the revived alliterative verse of Langland. Except the inadequate and perfunctory, as well as of necessity merely inchoate, sketches of Webbe and Puttenham, this was the first attempt really to take English poetry into consideration when studying English prosody; and it had its reward.

On the other hand, Steele, who has been followed by many other prosodists of the same school, entirely neglected the historical contents of his subject, approaching it absolutely a priori, deciding that it is essentially a matter of music, and basing his scansions on purely musical principles. This led him to begin with an anacrusis in every case, and so to invert the whole rhythm of the line. He has been praised for his views on "time" in the abstract, and may deserve the praise; while he was certainly right in regarding pause as an important metrical constituent. But whatever merit there may be in his principles from an abstract point of view, his concrete practice is simply atrocious, and proves him to have had absolutely no ear for English verse whatever. He makes six feet or "cadences with proper rests," at least, and sometimes more, in every heroic line, so that he would scan one famous line thus—

and he arranges the opening lines of Paradise Lost for scansion thus—

It must be perfectly evident to any one who will read these examples, even to himself, but still more aloud, not merely that they entirely destroy the actual cadence and rhythm of the actual verses, but that they provide a new doggerel which is absolutely inharmonious, unrhythmical, and contrary to every principle and quality of English poetry. It would doubtless be possible to accommodate them with a tune; in fact, any one who has ever looked at a "set" song will see how they correspond to it. But then any one who has ever looked at a set song must, in a majority of cases, have been convinced at once that musical arrangement has nothing to do with prosodic.

It was inevitable that the "Romantic" movement—one of the principal causes and features of which was a demand for variety, while another was its disposition to return to older modes—should be largely concerned with prosody; but, with some notable exceptions, this concernment did not take the form of actual prosodic deliverances or discussions.

Gray, one of the chief precursors of the movement, had projected a regular history of English poetry, and has left invaluable notes under the general head of Metrum—notes in which he goes back, deliberately and directly, to Middle English, discovers therein the origin and nature of the metre of Spenser's February, etc., and has very good remarks about others. But it was not till the stir of the revolutionary period that much more was done, and even then more was done than said.

The German explorations of William Taylor of Norwich induced English writers to follow the German attempt at accentual hexameters; and another of the Norwich group, Frank Sayers, not merely wrote, but expounded and defended in prose, rhymeless metres of a choric character; both being—in part, if not mainly—revolts from the mechanical heroic couplet.

Before the end of the century, long before Coleridge published the explanatory note on Christabel metre, and not improbably before he had even thought of that note, Southey had not only used trisyllabic equivalence in his Ballads, but had formally and independently defended it as such in a letter to his friend Wynn.[143]

Wordsworth says very little about metrical detail in his famous Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads and its successors—appearing to think, and indeed in one place asserting, that "harmony of numbers" comes of itself to a person who has other poetical qualifications.

His two just-mentioned friends, however, lodged, at a slightly later period, two of the most important preceptist documents of English prosody, though they were documents differing very widely in the extent and character of their importance. These were Coleridge's note on the metre of Christabel, and Southey's Preface to the Vision of Judgment. The latter is too long to give, and is written from a mistaken point of view; but it, and the much-ridiculed poem which it accompanied, undoubtedly restarted the practice of attempting to write English hexameters, which has been continued, with some intervals and some episodes, but at times most busily, ever since. The former must be given at length, and some comment made on it:—

"The metre of the Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle, namely, that of counting, in each line, the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion."

What Christabel metre really was has been expounded earlier, and its author's account of it is not a little surprising. When he called its principle "new" he must have forgotten—not exactly the Middle English writers, whom he very likely did not know, nor perhaps Gray, though the latter's remarks on Spenser's February were actually published before Christabel, but—Spenser himself and Chatterton (both of whom he certainly knew, if not Blake also), as well as the very ballad-writers whom he had himself imitated in the Ancient Mariner. His mention of "accents" and not "feet" argues an erroneous and inadequate theory which leaves much of the beauty of his own work unexplained; while it can be shown from the text itself that the variation of syllables, though metrically beautiful, often does not correspond at all with any special point of sense, passion, imagery, or anything else. But his practice more than cured any wound which his theory may have inflicted.