truly in the garden of poetry that which Pope ridiculed in the gardens of his day.

Grove nods at grove, each alley has its brother:
And half the platform just reflects the other.

We have seen, indeed, that Spenser occasionally violates this rule of uniformity (40); but dared he have so done in a series of lines, such as Drayton uses. Amid such rigour the ear could hardly endure the licence. Happily, therefore, the "Polyolbion" is the latest poem which our language affords constructed on this measure, although not the only poem; for the measure is as ancient in our language as the thirteenth century, in which lived Robert of Gloucester, whose historical poem on England might have led Drayton, antiquarian as he was, to adopt the same metre for his topographical poem on the same. So unfit, however, was it henceforward found, that it was not even revived among foreign importations at the period of the general debasement of our poetry by French imitators, under the auspices of the Frenchified Charles II., half a century later.

63. Even so strong a close as rhyme has not proved sufficient to prevent that running of one line into another, to which we have seen this measure to be peculiarly exposed (43): a further remedy, therefore, was applied by the French,

namely, the closing the sense with the line, and which, indeed, the nature of rhyme, strictly followed, requires. But this has naturally given rise to that antithetic cast and epigrammatic point, which so much pervades French poetry. One hemistich is balanced in sense, as well as in measure, against another, sometimes giving out a variation of the sense, like the clauses of Hebrew poetry, and sometimes charged with a heap of epithets belonging to a noun which is contained in the former hemistich, or with an apposition of nouns governed by verbs in the former. So far the measure is not unsuitable to the rhetorical flourish and declamatory strain which distinguishes the French theatre but for every other purpose, never was a measure so ill suited. It must, however, be allowed to have one great advantage in French verse which it has not in ours, and that is, the alternate mixture of masculine and feminine rhymes. This to a more certain degree prevents the confusion of one line with another.

64. When a line has been extended to a certain length, the mind and the breath are fain to make the principal cæsura as marked as the close. Hence the tendency of such measures to break into two. The limit at which this dismemberment takes place, depends on the character of th language. If its words be short, then, since the

quantity of sense to a line is limited, from the mind requiring a certain compass of meaning, no less than the ear of sound, its metrical lines will be shorter, and therefore will break sooner when stretched beyond the usual point. Thus in our tongue the words are like the stones in our buildings-small, and our structure of them breaks into small masses; while in the Greek and Latin they are like their marble blocks, which allow of large masses. Hence not only do the pauses in our verses coincide too much with the end of the feet; but also our longer measures cannot sustain themselves, but break asunder: and our Alexandrine now survives only in the lyric stanza of four lines and rhymes, such as occurs in Psalm cxlviii. 1:

Ye boundless realms of joy,
Exalt your Maker's fame :
His praise your song employ,
Above the starry frame.

But not the slightest tendency to such a breach is observable in the Greek trimeter; and that sonorous tongue can sustain tetrameters where we have never even ventured, as in the trochaic and anapæstic; or ventured in vain, as in the iambic, employed by Chapman.

65. Such a fact demonstrates that this measure has too lyrical a cast for our modern narrative

poetry. And yet, at the same time, it is too poor for lyrical poetry of a high order. We can only wonder at the taste which could endure any long continuation of it, whether used in its entire or broken form. Its marked cæsura and close make it more lyrical than the hexameter: the insignificance of its intermediate parts more prosaic than the trimeter. Hence its real character is that of mere ballad; and we may dismiss it from any further consideration upon the staple measures of versification.

82

CHAPTER IX.

ON THE PAUSES OF THE HEROIC.

66. THE heroic line of ten iambic feet, borrowed by us through Chaucer, if through none earlier, from the French, appears to owe its origin to the Latin hendecasyllable. This is more discernible in the Italian form of it, which consists of eleven syllables, and freely admits the trochee; as, for example, in the very first line of the "Jerusalem Delivered: "

Cánto l'ármi pietósi e'l Cápitáno:

the measure of which, according to the analogy of quantity, corresponds with

Aridā modo pumice expolītum,

of stress, with

Déxtram stérnuit ápprobátiónum ;

while the common run of the line is according to the stress in

Ad cœlum lépido vocáre vérsu.