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.

CHAPTER III
FROM SHAKESPEARE TO MILTON—THE CLOSE OF THE FORMATIVE PERIOD

The high and (it is believed) thoroughly well-deserved praise bestowed upon Spenser at the close of the last chapter must not lead the student to suppose that Spenser worked alone, that he was the sole restorer and perfecter of English prosody at this time, or even that his work included all that was necessary or desirable. That work, as has been pointed out, tended towards the complete restoration of regular and at the same time thoroughly musical and spirited verse, but it kept—except in the early experiments of the Shepherd's Calendar—to the regular side, avoiding much trisyllabic substitution as well as "triple time" generally, and eschewing, likewise, strictly lyrical movements save of the stateliest kind, very much "broken and cuttit"[80] verse, and the like.

As regards pure triple or anapæstic measures, no great advance was made until nearly the close of this present period, though a few isolated attempts can be quoted. But the principle of trisyllabic substitution was secured, once for all, by the development of blank verse, and the variation of lyric was fully maintained by the practice of a hundred poets, from the contributors, sometimes quite obscure, to the Miscellanies which came later than Tottel, through Sidney and others of the first great Elizabethan division, through Drayton and many more of the second, down to the famous group of "Caroline," "Cavalier," or "metaphysical" poets who were contemporary with Milton.

And first of blank verse.

The earliest examples of this great metre in Surrey were, naturally enough, very exact in syllabic length and somewhat monotonous in arrangement and effect. Deprived of the warning bell of rhyme, and having nothing but the structure of the verse itself to rely upon, the poet was almost inevitably tempted to make very sure of that structure by moulding it singly, and ensuring a distinct stop at the close. This rather aggravates than relieves itself in the satiric blank verse of Gascoigne (The Steel Glass) and the dramatic blank verse of Sackville and Norton (Gorboduc); while when the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, called the University Wits (Marlowe, Peele, Greene, and the rest), took up the vehicle for general theatrical practice, they never completely got clear of the same fashion—which Shakespeare himself adopted in his earliest attempts. Admiration, just in itself, for Marlowe has made some try to discover in him, and perhaps also in Peele (where there is really a little more of it), the trisyllabic substitution, the variation of pause, and the overrunning of sense and rhythm from line to line, which are necessary to break up this "single-mouldedness." But, except as to a very few passages where actual passion melts the ice, they deceive themselves. In the couplet (v. inf.) Marlowe did arrive at enjambment; in blank verse, hardly ever. The beauty of such verse as his in the more majestic, as Peele's in the sweeter kind, can hardly be exaggerated, but neither has yet got complete command of all means of achieving beauty.

The three chief means which they, on the whole, missed, and over which Shakespeare (profiting by their advance as far as they made it) gradually gained the mastery, have been indicated as the overrunning of the line, the variation of the pause, and, above all, the employment of trisyllabic feet. We can see Shakespeare step by step attaining these, as well as the more doubtful and dangerous redundant syllable, which in his last stage he rather abused, and which Beaumont and Fletcher and later dramatists were to abuse still more. All these means, but especially the three first (for redundance is compatible with single-mouldedness), break up the single-moulded line, and substitute for it (except in cases where it is specially wanted) the verse-clauses and verse-paragraphs, which it is the glory of Shakespeare to have perfected.

In his certainly earliest plays—The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost to some extent—single-mouldedness still appears strongly. But there are exceptions even in them; and these exceptions gradually pervade, mellow, and diversify the prosodic composition, till it attains the perfect accomplishment of As You Like It and Hamlet. Yet a fifth peculiarity and innovation—the lengthening and shortening of lines—though it may have originally been a mere easement or liberty, and is often much abused by other dramatists, becomes in Shakespeare's hands a fresh instrument of concerted music—the frequent regular Alexandrines relieving the decasyllable by direct contrast, and fragments being generally (v. sup.) so arranged as to give genuine fractions of the normal scansion itself.

Practically all the secrets and all the accomplishments shown—perhaps all the accomplishments possible—at this period are to be found in Shakespeare. The differences of the other dramatists are rather rhetorical than strictly prosodic; and the efforts sometimes made to construct special prosodies for them are mostly lost labour. Beaumont and Fletcher (who seem, from uncertain but pretty strong evidence, to have actually collaborated with Shakespeare in the Two Noble Kinsmen) develop his latest mood—that where, as in Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, there is much redundance.[81] They carried it much further than he did, and undoubtedly too far; though the great poetical power which both possessed saved them. On the other hand, Ben Jonson, all whose tastes were classical (i.e. in favour of restriction and order), adopted a rather hard and limited, though rhetorically fine, fashion of blank verse. On the others it would be unprofitable to enlarge much here. Massinger is perhaps interesting as working with the most obviously literary eye on his predecessors—a tendency which is continued in Shirley. But in the latter there is some, if not much, of a special degeneration which by Shirley's own later days had nearly destroyed dramatic blank verse itself, and which was only arrested by the substitution for it of the "heroic" couplet, as used in the plays called by the same name.

This degeneration, which is most evident in Davenant and Suckling, but which appears to some, though not to a great extent, in Shirley, and in most others of the play-writers up to the closing of the theatres, should be carefully compared with the initial stage of the measure in English. Then, as we saw, the absence of the guiding and preserving influence of rhyme made writers especially and excessively careful of exact syllabisation, of punctilious though monotonous rhythm, and of meticulous separation of one line from another. So also we have seen that, in the second or great period, the restrictions were loosened—that Shakespeare, preserving perfect metrical harmony, substituted an ordered licence for them all. But even he perhaps a little latterly, and his followers Beaumont and Fletcher much more, exceeded in the redundant syllable. The third generation, though including, as in the three cases specially mentioned above, men of no small poetic talent, made the common, the apparently inevitable, but the disastrous mistake of considering beauty not merely as directly connected with apparent irregularity, but as to be secured by irregularity itself. Much of their blank verse is extremely blank, but not verse at all; nor yet prose, but an awkward hybrid. Not a little is prose pure and simple. It is scarcely surprising that, after the Restoration, the metre should have been regarded as "too mean even for a copy of verses," and discarded, for more than a few years, in drama itself. Except the broken-down rhyme-royal of the fifteenth century (to which it bears a striking resemblance without the excuse there available) there is no more really disgraceful department of English poetry.

At the very time, however, when this disorganisation of dramatic blank verse was at its worst, and when it had as yet only been used on the rarest occasions for any other purpose, its great restorer began, though he did not for a long time continue, the process of restoration.

Milton's Comus (1634) exhibits him as a student, and consequently an imitator, of all the three preceding schools, excepting the contemporary degradation, which was impossible to such a born master of harmony. He has now caught, and often directly reproduces, the single-moulded line of Marlowe; and, on the other hand, he is almost equally inclined to the excessively redundanced endings of Beaumont and Fletcher, even to the extent of frequently making the last foot an anapæst.[82] Yet he not seldom closely approaches Shakespeare himself in the varied modulation, without excessive laxity, of his lines, and in the weaving of them, through overlapping, presence, absence and shifting of pause, and the like, into a verse paragraph. He inserts Alexandrines, but does not use verse-fragments much. And he begins a process—of which he was to be the greatest master—of adding to the colour, and enhancing the form, of lines by striking and important words, especially proper names. But fine as the blank verse of Comus is, it is, when we compare it with the lyrical close of the piece itself, evidently in the experimental stage. And it does not show the complete and assured command which is visible in the octosyllables and mixed lyrics.

When, later, he once more employed blank verse (and this time blank verse only) in Paradise Lost,[83] there was nothing of experiment left in it. The system, in whatever way it may be interpreted, is quite obviously one which the poet has completely mastered, and which he is using without the slightest doubt or difficulty. It has given the pattern for all narrative, in fact for all non-dramatic, blank verse since; it established, though not quite at once, the measure as one of the great staples for this general use; and though there have been times at which it was not generally popular, and persons by whom it was heartily disliked, there has been a sort of general consensus, sometimes grudging, but oftener enthusiastic, that it is one of the greatest achievements of English poetry.

It is therefore inevitable that the partisans of the various systems of that poetry on its formal side, of which accounts were given in the beginning of this Manual, should all try to vindicate it for their own views. Attempts are still made (though chiefly by foreigners who naturally cannot bring the necessary ear) to reduce Paradise Lost to a strict decasyllabic arrangement, no extra syllables being allowed at all. This, of course, is merely hideous, and involves numerous crass absurdities, such as the reduction of, "so oft" to "soft."[84]

The accentualists, as such, are not driven to equal straits unless they choose; indeed, though accentual prosody can never give an adequate account of Milton's verse, there is no reason why it should not give a partially correct one. If any one says that Milton employs a verse of five accents—these usually occurring at the even places of a normal line, but not infrequently varied in position, sometimes separated by more than one unaccented syllable, but usually by one only—he will give, in his own language and with his own limitations, a correct, though scanty and jejune, account of the thing. He will, however, in most cases be found going on, and entering upon very disputable matter. He will notice "licences," and will, in some cases, be inclined to deplore, or even denounce, the variation of accent just noted. He will also, in most cases, be found declining to accept the unaccented syllables as they stand—indeed he has no machinery ready for doing so without making them a disorderly crowd,—and will endeavour to dispose of them by some process of "elision," inventing extremely ingenious, but mostly arbitrary and sometimes self-confessedly inadequate, specifications of the employment of this. If he is of the class of accentualists who prefer the term "stress" and its applications, he will probably go much further still, and allow, or insist upon, the widest variation in the number of stresses, lines of five being indeed the average, but four, three, and, in some extreme cases, even two, being allowed.[85] Further intricate subdivisions will be found between believers in these theories who, while ruling out syllables from scansion by an elaborate system of metrical fictions, maintain that they are not to be dropped in pronunciation, and others who, as most people did unhesitatingly in the eighteenth century, as many did in the earlier nineteenth, and as a few boldly and consistently do still, drop the pronunciation altogether, spelling and pronouncing, as well as scanning, "am'rous," "om'nous," "pop'lar," "del'cate," and the like.

The foot system, on the other hand, as it always does, accepts Milton's verse exactly as it stands, takes no kind of liberty with it, and merely strives to discover its characteristics. This system finds (with the exception of a very few daring experiments, no one of which can be called wrong in principle, though there may be different opinions about the success of some of them in practice) nothing different from the general laws of English verse, as observed at all its best periods, and as visible, if only in the breach of them, at all, best and worst. Milton's normal line is a five-foot iambic:

̆   ̄   ̆   ̄   ̆   ̄   ̆   ̄   ̆   ̄

But for these iambics he will substitute trochees or anapæsts, sometimes perhaps tribrachs, very freely; and his use of the trochee for this purpose is more lavish and more audacious than that of any other English poet, so much so that he will allow two to follow each other at the opening of the line, and frequently adopts a choriambic ending by placing one at the fourth foot. On the other hand, he seldom has the final anapæst which we found in Comus, or perhaps the Alexandrine, though sometimes there are fractional lines. By dint of these variations—of which the trisyllabic (generally anapæstic) foot is the most frequent, the most successful, and, despite objections, the most certain—he attains great variety in his line, which he increases and utilises, for one great purpose, by the same devices of pause, diction, etc., formerly noticed in Comus, but in a more accomplished manner and to a higher degree.

The purpose is this, that by these, by equally elaborate and extraordinarily successful variation of the pause, by devices of diction, and by the use of brilliantly coloured and heavily weighted proper names and of others, he may construct a verse-paragraph similar to that which Shakespeare had already accomplished, but without the special characteristics of spoken verse. He altered his methods a little—though perhaps not so much as has been sometimes thought—in Paradise Regained, and still more in Samson Agonistes, where, however, the renewed dramatic intention has to be considered. And, on the whole, especially when taken in combination with his master Shakespeare, he established not merely the freedom and order of blank verse itself, but the whole principle of equivalent substitution in English prosody.

But it was not in blank verse only that Shakespeare and Milton played, in prosody, almost more than the part which they played in poetry generally. In their other work it is quite as true of them that, from it, all the principles of English versification could be derived by intelligent study. Shakespeare's early long poems, Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece—the one in the six-line stanza, the other in rhyme-royal—rank as the greatest stanza-verse of the last decade of the sixteenth century except Spenser's; while his Sonnets are, not merely for their poetic spirit, the greatest in the English form, exhibiting remarkable individuality in the arrangement of the three quatrains, and an unmatched power of bringing the last couplet to bear suddenly, with the utmost prosodic as well as poetic effect. The largely shortened octosyllabic couplets, scattered about his plays and among the smaller (some of them technically "doubtful") poems, show equal mastery of that form, and have indeed inspired Fletcher, Wither, Milton, and all practitioners of it since. But the songs in the plays are, next to his blank verse, his greatest prosodic triumph. He has got in them all the contemporary variety and much more than the usual contemporary freedom, so that such pieces as those in The Tempest,[86] in Much Ado About Nothing, and in As You Like It[87] might, had they been attended to and understood, have saved the early critics of Tennyson and some other nineteenth-century poets from blunders about the "irregularity," "discord," "un-English character," etc., of their versification.

Except in this last respect (for he does not much indulge in triple-timed measures), Milton's examples are as striking, while they are more numerous. In grave stanza of purely iambic cadence but varied line-length, the ode on the Nativity is unsurpassed in our poetry. The octosyllabic couplets (with catalexis) of the Arcades, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso, and the already-mentioned latter part of Comus, stand at the head of their class. Lycidas, which is written in lines mainly decasyllabic, though sometimes of different length, arranged (except in the last stanza) on no identical principle, is a practically unique combination of rhyme and blank verse—the ends being sometimes left unrhymed, but generally rhymed, though on an apparently irregular system which never violates harmony, but makes—first each paragraph and then the whole poem—a piece of concerted music, a definite prosodic symphony or sonata. And lastly, the choruses of Samson Agonistes, when he had returned to rhyme, apply this system on more extensive principles[88] still, occasionally attempting quite new measures,[89] and getting the utmost possible result out of large variation of line-length in the same or in mixed cadences. Some of the experiments are less successful than others, and, on the whole, Samson displays a harder style of verse than the earlier poems; but it is equally important as exhibiting the true principles of English prosody. Indeed, when Milton had published it, he may be said to have closed the formative period of our versification, not in the sense that he had not left infinite things to be done, but that he had, after Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, almost completely indicated the principles of doing them.

But these principles had been illustrated by others during the lifetime of the two,[90] after fashions which even the most summary account of English prosody cannot leave unnoticed; and these fashions, with some general phenomena of this double lifetime, not always specially noticeable in Shakespeare and Milton themselves, must be indicated. The performances of these two "primates"—the one in the English, the other in the Italian form of the sonnet—make it unnecessary to say more of that form, though it was very largely practised in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and beyond all doubt helped much to discipline verse generally. And the same is true of the octosyllabic couplet, which, however, was very beautifully practised by the Jacobean poets Browne, Wither, and others. But more must be said of the stanza, of the decasyllabic couplet, the fortunes of which in this time were most momentous (and which, as it happens, was only occasionally practised by Shakespeare,[91] scarcely at all by Milton[92]), and of the various forms, so far as their multiplicity does not forbid, of lyric.

The novelty, splendour, and apparent difficulty of the Spenserian seem to have imposed on contemporaries to such an extent as to prevent them from copying it in typical form at all; while many years passed before it was attempted in slightly altered forms.[93] The favourite stanza in the later years of Elizabeth was the octave, chiefly in the Italian form, which was very largely written by Drayton, by Daniel, and many others, including Edward Fairfax in his very influential translation of Tasso. Rhyme-royal fell especially out of favour, though Milton used it in his early days, and Sir Francis Kynaston wrote a long poem in it as late as 1648. The decasyllabic quatrain, alternately rhymed, was used by Davies and others. Yet not merely Ben Jonson (v. inf.) but Drayton himself expressed weariness of the stanza generally, and this undoubtedly grew, though it continued to be used. The new favourite was the decasyllabic couplet.

It has been said that this couplet, despite its splendid success, and the abundance of varied model for it in Chaucer, was not much used (and never used well save perhaps in The Friars of Berwick) by his successors. It acquired, however, without any clearly traceable cause, a considerable hold on the early drama; and, when it was ejected from this, it revenged itself by turning the stanza out to a large extent in non-dramatic verse. Drayton, in the passage referred to, speaks of the attraction of "the gemell," i.e. "the twinned line," and practised it not a little. Jonson, we are told, thought couplets (made in a fashion the specification of which is unfortunately not clear) "the bravest sort of verses." He did not, however, write them very largely; but Drayton did. And while Marlowe set a magnificent example in Hero and Leander, and others employed the measure independently, the same sort of influence in its favour, which was noticed formerly as exercised in Chaucer's case by the final couplets of rhyme-royal, was beyond all question now exercised afresh by those of the fashionable ottava. In fact, the already-mentioned Tasso of Edward Fairfax (1600) is one of the recognised originals of a particular form—the stopped or self-ended couplet. This the octave, like the English sonnet, which doubtless had influence too, especially encourages. Drayton and others wrote as Chaucer, we saw, had written, almost indifferently in both kinds, at least so that neither has marked and dominant character. But Marlowe, in striking contrast to his blank-verse practice, decidedly preferred, and practised exquisitely, the opposite or "enjambed" variety.

By degrees, however, there grew up in the seventeenth century what has been perhaps not incorrectly described as a "battle of the couplets"—certain poets definitely employing one form, others the other; while in at least one case[94] the preference is distinctly and combatively avowed. As a sect, clearly marked, the enjambers or disciples of Marlowe are the older. Their most distinguished representatives are, in the earlier part or first quarter of the century, William Browne, George Wither—who in the piece called Alresford Pool produced one of the most beautiful separate examples of the kind,—a rather mysterious person named John Chalkhill, to whom Izaak Walton was godfather and usher; in the second and at the beginning of the third, the dramatist Shakerley Marmion and William Chamberlayne. The latter's poem of Pharonnida[95] is the longest example of the style, and in flashes and short passages the most poetical of all; but it also exhibits the defects of that style most flagrantly. These defects come from the fact that the poet—allowed to neglect his rhyme as a warning bell of termination of something, and to use it as a mere accompaniment—allows his clauses and sentences to run into a sometimes quite bewildering prolixity, and very frequently neglects even that modified restriction of the line itself to some distinct form and outline which both good blank verse and this form of couplet equally require. The result, assisted by the ugly fancy of the time for apostrophated elisions, sometimes comes near to the contemporary degradation of blank verse itself which has been mentioned.

There can be no reasonable doubt that these excesses and defects stimulated attention to the stopped form of the couplet; and as little that this attention was, though not unmixedly, decidedly beneficial to English verse. It was becoming, and had soon become, desirable, not merely that such things as this excessive enjambment in couplet and as the degeneration of blank verse should be corrected, but that the valuable and indeed inestimable assertion of the right to trisyllabic substitution which blank verse had once more brought out, and which was prompting the use once more of purely or mainly trisyllabic measures, should be met, and for a time at any rate restrained, by the counter-assertion of the necessity of rhythmical smoothness and regularity. The language—though there is no reason to believe that the general pronunciation of Shakespeare's time was so different from ours as some have thought—was still going through changes of accent and the like; and, as yet, general notions on prosody were rare, for the most part very ignorant of the actual history of English poetry, and as a rule badly expressed. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the form—even the music—of the stopped and as nearly as possible normal decasyllabic couplet should appeal to many. The accepted growth of it is marked traditionally by the names of Fairfax, Sandys, and, above all, Waller, from whom Dryden (not to be noticed in detail till the next chapter) derived his pattern. But the clearest notion both of the principles and of the attraction of the form is to be obtained from the lines of Sir John Beaumont, quoted and discussed elsewhere.

For the present, however, the stopped couplet—even as such, and in comparison with its rival—was struggling not so much for mastery as for recognition, and Ben Jonson's idea of its being (if he really thought so) "the bravest of all" was nowhere near general acceptance. In particular, the production of lyric between Spenser's time and the Restoration—if not even considerably later—was immense in quantity, almost unique in variety, and never surpassed in poetical merit, though until late in the period it mostly, except in Shakespeare and a few others, confined itself to dissyllabic feet.[96]