points.

ear.

perfectly justifiable as experiments on my theory, which passes them over, duly visés, to the higher tribunal of the The same is the case with an occasional accumulation of trisyllabic feet, sometimes running close to the tribrach, and with the other accumulation, close together, of redundantly ended lines. I dare say I may be wrong in disliking these, but at any rate I am not "doing injustice by a law." My law licenses them all.

Conclusion on There are, fortunately, points of Milton's prosody uncontentious which lie apart from this peculiar and probably irreconcilable debate. His use of pause is unique. Like Shakespeare, he will put it anywhere or nowhere, so as to achieve those "periods of a declaimer" which disturbed Dr. Johnson, bereft of his accustomed warning-bell of rhyme to tell him he was reading poetry. But (and I do not think that this has been quite so much noticed as it should have been) Milton does not, like Shakespeare, make the lines embrace and intertwine in the marvellous manner which constitutes the final secret of blank verse of the particular kind, and which, as a matter of fact, has never been quite recovered. His old fancy for the selfenclosed line of the Marlowe group seems in a manner to have persisted, though he subdues it wonderfully to the purposes of the verse paragraph. His use of that paragraph was no doubt suggested (though, it may be, quite unconsciously) by Shakespeare; but the contrast of dramatic and narrative requirements, as well as something in the two men, differentiates it. It is not Milton's way to wind up a paragraph to the highest soar of possibility and then let it "stoop" suddenly as in those ineffable triumphs of versification which close Othello. The verse paragraphs of Milton are more like the prose paragraphs of Hooker, which rise, keep level perhaps for a time, and then gently slope to their conclusion. Sometimes he arrests the slope a little before the actual lower limit; but he seldom finishes off with an artificial flourish,

the original. Others are open to no sound objection, and some are beautiful exceedingly. But they are beauties, not indeed in the least " monstrous in kind, but somewhat hazardous in the individual instance.

as Thomson, in imitating him, too often did. We shall have to wait for Tennyson before we can find any thirdsman for Shakespeare and Milton in the use of this device; but it was Milton who distinctly indicated it as a special resource to English poets.

In another he has no rival in English; while Hugo, the only possible one elsewhere, is much more uncertain in his use of it, and sometimes grotesque. This, it need hardly be added, is the use of the proper name. If we combine the tenets of the austerer sects or wings of Christianity on both sides, the doctrine that intense enjoyment of carnal things is sin with that of Purgatory, it is to be feared that Milton must have found the "milder shades" not so mild in respect of his indulgence in this pleasure. He simply intoxicates himself, and all his readers who have the luck to be susceptible of the intoxication, with the honey, or rather the "Athole brose," of this marvellous name-accompaniment. To the comparatively simple instances of it in Comus and Lycidas may be added :—the Hebraic titles of the demon-gods and their shrines almost at the opening of Paradise Lost; the Fable- or Romance-names later; the shorter passage in Satan's voyage, and that couplet almost equalling the earlier in Lycidas

Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides

And Tiresias and Phineus-prophets of old;

the inhabitants of Limbo; the earthly Paradises in Book IV.; others, though perhaps less conspicuous, in the central Books, down to the geographical illustrations of the bridge-building of Sin and Death, and those others of the change of nature after the Fall, and the gorgeous catalogue of what was not seen from the Mount of Speculation to which the archangel took Adam. The taste, too, seems to have grown upon him, for short as is Paradise Regained it contains-in the passage of the tempter's feast, in the panoramas of Parthia, with the final reference to the Orlando, and the parallel ones of Rome and Athens-masterpieces of the kind, sometimes

extra-illustrated with alliteration as in the famous and delightful

Knights of Logres and of Lyonesse,

Lancelot and Pelleas and Pellenore,

which Tennyson imitated less wisely than well.

And so let us leave, with words in which all may agree, the last of the Four Masters of English Prosody.

CHAPTER II

THE BATTLE OF THE COUPLETS

The main currents of mid-seventeenth-century prosody-The use of the couplet-The pioneers-Fairfax-Sir John BeaumontSandys-The first main practitioners-Waller-Characteristics of his smoothness-His other metres-Their moral as to the couplet-Cowley-His curious position-His couplet generally -The Davideis-His own principles-His lyrics-Denham -The opposite or enjambed form-Chalkhill, Marmion, and Chamberlayne-The constitutive difference of the two stylesDangers of enjambment-Note on the two couplets.

currents of

prosody.

THAT Milton is the greatest single figure prosodically, as The main he is poetically, in the mid-seventeenth century, is un- mid-sevendeniable. But his prosodic influence was not actually teenth-century exerted till long after this time, and he does not represent any of the actual prosodic movements or phenomena which were most characteristic of the day. These movements or phenomena were, in the main, threeall of great importance—the Battle of the Couplets, the break-up of Blank Verse, and the culmination of Lyric, To them we must now turn.

The present chapter will be arranged in accordance with the general method of presenting, as far as possible, a chronologically continuous account of the prosodic performance of individuals, but of grouping, with a certain "before-and-after" licence, exemplars of specially remarkable prosodic developments. That is to say, it will refer to some things which saw the light during the period of the last Book, and, it may be, to some that have been already mentioned there, in order to survey

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The use of the couplet.

intelligibly what is perhaps the main prosodic phenomenon of the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century-the emergence of the decasyllabic couplet as the staple metre of English poetry; the flourishing side by side for a while of its two forms, the overlapped and the self-contained; and the final triumph of the latter. This last stage we shall not here reach; the other two will be our immediate province.

We have seen in the first volume that the couplet, if not of the very beginnings-the earth-born originals—of strictly English prosody, makes attempts to be born as early as the Orison of Our Lady, figures in the "heap" of twelfth- and thirteenth-century measures, and shows itself pretty frequently, if accidentally, in Hampole and in the anonymous poems of the Vernon and other MSS. during the fourteenth. It is finally established by Chaucer in something like both its forms, or rather in a form which very readily becomes either, though the temporary prevalence of the redundant syllable is against the sharpest-cut outline of ridge-backed stop.

We saw, further, that this latest and in a sense greatest triumph of Chaucer's art was comparatively little followed by his actual followers, and that those who did attempt it were almost more unlucky than with rhyme-royal. In fact, nothing shows the "staggers" of this period quite so well (and therefore so ill) as the couplet, and nothing could, unless it were blank verse, which was not then written. The octosyllable is so short, has so many licences, and can be so easily botched off after a fashion, with cliché rhymes and expletives, that it offers little difficulty to the mediocris poeta; and rhymeroyal itself is long enough to give that poet a sort of chance (in the old provincial phrase) of "odding it till it comes even." But the couplet is at once long enough to admit, and too short to hide, the most gruesome deformities and anomalies. The early practice of it in the next century on the stage probably did not a little good, for nobody could speak couplets like some of Lydgate's without being sensible of their ugliness. And as soon