scarcely possible for a good reader, even when the verse is good, to run through half a dozen couplets without stumbling half as many times. All attempts, therefore, to frame poems with our brief, unfettered Saxon idioms, on the principles of those in the learned languages, must be hopeless. Men of the greatest skill have miscarried here; and I know not that success were desirable, since it could not be attained, except by enthralling with foreign fetters our free-born British speech.

Not having a modern example at hand,-though the enterprise has been effected with as much good speed as our slippery tongue would allow, by Dr. Southey, I shall offer a few lines of Sir Philip Sidney's, from a pastoral in his Arcadia; a book once celebrated by all the wits and beauties of an age of gallantry, though probably not read through by six of either class during the last half century :

"Lady, reserved by the heavens, to do pastors' companie honour,

Joyning your sweete voice to the rurall Muse of a desart,
Here you fully do finde this strange operation of love,

How to the woods Love runnes, as well as rides to the palace;
Neither he beares reverence to a prince, nor pity to a beggar,
But, like a point in the midst of a circle, is still of a nearnesse;
All to a lesson he draws, neither hills nor caves can avoid
him."

These lines are not amiss; but who could survive an Iliad of them? One great defect in our English tongue (heart of oak as it is in strength and toughness), is the paucity of spondees in its vocabulary. Without these, no hexameter can close well, or be well balanced in its progress. Under such a disa⚫bility, our language becomes supple and languid in ancient metres, instead of elastic and rebounding to its natural tone, after the utmost flexure or tension which the laws of such labours require.

Modern Metres and Forms of Verse.

It is not needful, nor would it be expedient, to trouble the audience before me with any detailed account of the different species of verse in our own and other contemporary languages. Suffice it to say, that though quantity is not altogether discarded, it is comparatively little employed in the construction of vernacular poetry. When happily managed, however, a slight infusion of it greatly enriches and ennobles some of our measures, especially in the hardy and intricate rhythm of blank verse; but it requires fine taste, and an imperial command of apt and confluent words, to venture far beyond the avoidance of crude elisions, such as make our beautiful English barbarous to the eye and horrid to the ear. Milton frequently innovates upon the high harmonies of his accented verse with the substitution of quantities; sometimes difficult at first sight to master, but generally admirable in effect, and heightening, even when harshest, the majesty of his strains -like a momentary crash of discord, thrown by the skilful organist, into the full tide of instrumental music, which gives intenser sweetness to what follows. Thus, when he represents Satan among his summoned legions,

"Godlike shapes, and forms

Excelling human,. princely dignities,

And powers that erst in heaven sat on thrones,"

he thus depicts their leader :

"He, above the rest,

In shape and gesture proudly eminent,

Stood like a tower:-his form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appear'd
Less than archangel ruin'd, and the' excess

Of glory' obscured."

Paradise Lost, book i.

In this brief clause there are no less than four

supernumerary syllables in so many successive lines, if verse is to be computed by the fingers, and not by melodious pulsations of sound, true to time, and touching the ear within a given space. This fine image would, indeed; resemble its prototype, as described in the sequel, and be "shorn of its beams," if, instead of" stood like a tow-er," we were to read, "stood like a tow'r;" for "all its original brightness," "all its original brightness;" but especially if we were to curtail the article, and for "glory," substitute "light;" saying for "the' excess of glory' obscured," ," "th' excess of light obscured;" which would be according to mere numerical metre.

Though a little out of place, as it crosses our way, I cannot refrain from pointing out a most singular prosopopoiea which occurs in this passage, but which is so eclipsed by the shaded splendour of the context as, perhaps, never before to have attracted critical notice:

"His form had not yet lost All her criginal brightness!"

Here the very person of the fallen angel is personified, as though that were but an accident of his nature, not himself, and "the intellectual being" were as distinct from it as the soul of man is from his body. This, indeed, is a necessary condition of presenting spirits in any mode apprehensible by the

senses.

Another line of Milton's has been quoted as full to overflowing with quantity:

"O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp."

Here thirteen distinct syllables occupy the time and place of ten only. But the boldest and most successful sally of the kind, in which he achieves a triumph for his mother tongue, and exalts it almost to rank with Homer's, occurs in the menace of the

spectre at hell-gates to Satan, attempting to pass them. Death,

"that other shape,

If shape it might be called, that shape had none
Distinguishable' in member, joint, or limb,"

thus threatens the arch-fiend :

"Back to thy punishment,

False fugitive! and to thy speed add wings,

Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue

Thy lingering, or, with one stroke of this dart,

Strange horror seize thee', and pangs unfelt before."

The hand of a master is felt through every movement of this sentence, especially towards the close, where it seems to grapple with the throat of the reader; the hard staccato stops, that well-nigh take the breath, in attempting to pronounce

66 or, with one stroke of this dart," are followed by an explosion of sound in the last line, like a heavy discharge of artillery, in which, though a full syllable is interpolated even at the cesural pause, it is carried off almost without the reader perceiving the surplusage,

"Strange horror seize thee', and pangs unfelt before."

I will not expatiate.

But these redundancies, though allowable in heroic, and commendable in dramatic, are seldom to be tolerated in lyric poetry; so that, on the whole, our verse must be modulated by accent, not by quantity, except in the free and frequent use of such words and phrases as "heaven, power, spirit," and a few others, which are feeble when employed as dissyllables, but enrich the harmony when employed as one; that is, when uttered distinctly, but in the time of one. The phrase " many a" is sanctioned by a similar license :

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

GRAY

Here "many a flower," five syllables, absolutely stands in the place of three; and a clear tongue will touch upon each so delicately that a common ear must feel the beauty of their full expression, and abhor the elision of a pretended supernumerary Vowel.

On the brevity of metrical lengths in modern languages, it may be added, that English iambic verse will seldom bear drawing out into more than ten syllables. Yet our elder poets composed long works in twelve, and even fourteen. Chapman's version of the Iliad is in the latter measure :

"Achilles' baneful wrath, O goddess! that imposed

Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls losed From breasts heroique; sent them far to that invisible cave That no light comforts, and their limbs to dogs and vultures gave."

Drayton's Polyolbion-a work once famous, though now scarcely known except by its uncouth name— is in twelves. It is, indeed, one of the most learned and ingenious poems in the language, and unique in literature; being a treasure-house of topographic, antiquarian, and traditional lore, which the heavy versification alone was sufficient to sink into neglect, even if public taste had not changed since the age of garrulity which it was written to instruct and entertain. The stag-chase in the forest of Arden is a masterpiece of its kind. These are the opening lines:

"Now when the hart doth hear The often-bellowing hounds to vent his secret leir, He, rousing, rusheth out, and through the brakes doth drive, As though up by the roots the bushes he would rive; And through the cumbrous thicks, as fearfully he makes, He, with his branched head, the tender saplings shakes, That, sprinkling their moist pearls, do seem to weep: When, after goes the cry, with yellings loud and deep, That all the forest rings, and every neighbouring place And there is not a hound but falleth to the chase;