ten or twenty syllables. But it is improbable that any one could practise either without feeling their use as a corrective of monotony as well as a promoter of ease. I have never been able to persuade myself that the giving up of them was not one of those rather unreasonable, though it would seem quite inevitable, "tightenings up" of rule which have spoilt almost all games at one time or another. The triplet has no doubt a slight tendency to burlesque, and, if used often, throws the general effect out of character; but then it is the poet's business to guard against these results. Both in descriptive and argumentative verse it is of great importance, and has something of the effect of a parenthesis-that figure hated of the vulgar, and beloved by the elect. As for the Alexandrine, we have made the antiquity of that licence at least probable; and it is one which should never be given up either in blank verse or couplet; for while eminently useful in point of sense, it is invaluable for varying, without too much irregularity, the cadence and composition of the measure. To expand it still further to a fourteener, as Dryden has (v. supra) sometimes done, is indeed, perhaps, going too far; but in about the only instance of this which occurs in original and important work1 it seems likely that the common idea of "suiting the verse to the sense" had a good deal to do with the extravagance. The Alexandrine proper has no burlesque effect unless very clumsily handled. As for Pope's well-known "wounded snake" gibe, it is enough to reply that the poet has no business to let his snakes be wounded, and that nothing glides much more smoothly or briskly than an unwounded snake. It is indeed, perhaps, true that the peculiar weight and massiveness of Dryden's actual decasyllable enables it to stand the "thrust" of these additions better than a lighter and slighter staple may do. And yet it seems rather absurd to deny it the epithet "light." There is 1 Thou leapst o'er all eternal truths in thy Pindaric way. The Medal, 294. Dryden was pretty certainly thinking of Cowley's note quoted above. already nothing "heavy" about the passages which scorch and scathe for ever in the two Achitophels, and the Medal, and Mac-Flecknoe, or about the peculiarly graceful description of The Flower and the Leaf, which here owes nothing prosodically to the rhyme-royal of the original. The truth is that, barring the absence of that diviner æther which had left English poetry, and was scarcely to return till Blake conjured it back from some of the cloudy regions of his Forbidden Countries of prophecy, there is hardly anything wanting to Dryden's prosody. It not only did one thing supremely, even though that may not have been an absolutely supreme thing; but it did an astonishing number of things well, and more than well. One feels, however much one may worship the earlier Caroline fancy and the later Romantic imagination-however conscious one may be that Dryden is not Blake or Coleridge, Shelley or Keats, Tennyson or even Browning-a sort of indignation at having to apologise in any way for him. We may with him, prosodically as well as poetically, as a whole be on Earth and not in Heaven. But (as Browning has been mentioned) his Earth is so good that it seems a little impertinent, and more than a little ungracious, to inquire, while we are on it, whether Heaven is not best. NOTE ON ALEXANDRINES IN CONTINUOUS VERSE It may be objected to the remark on Pope (sup. p. 390) that he made ample amends to Dryden's Alexandrines elsewhere, in the equally well-known compliment to their "long resounding march and energy divine "-not to mention that his objection is specifically limited to end-lines. But it is clear from his Letter to Henry Cromwell, which is in part a sort of prose redaction of the passages in the Essay on Criticism, that this objection was wider. For he there condemns "the too frequent use of Alexandrines, which are never graceful but when there is some majesty added to the verse by them, or where there cannot be found a word in them but what is absolutely needful." One may indeed literally accept this statement; but if it is examined it will be found to amount to nothing more than that "Alexandrines are never good, but when they are good "-and so to intimate an evident prejudice against the use. It is somewhat curious that neither the partial return to Dryden after Pope's death, nor the completer reaction against Pope at the Romantic revival, dispelled this prejudice. I have endeavoured to show that in Chaucer, in Shakespeare, and even in Milton, Alexandrines may be admitted with no loss and great advantage. Yet, except Keats, most nineteenth-century poets have been shy of them: although Keats's own use in Lamia shows how excellent they may be. The fact probably is that, as has been hinted above, not all poetical building is strong enough to stand their thrust. 6 CHAPTER II CONTEMPORARIES OF DRYDEN IN LYRIC, PINDARIC, Arrangement-Relation in form to predecessors—“ Orinda Halifax-Mulgrave-Congreve-Walsh-The later Pindarics But some THE poets to be mentioned in this chapter have not Arrangement. usually held a great place in histories of English literature, nor perhaps have they deserved such a place. of them have been ranked rather too low even as poets, while as prosodists they (or at least the lyrists among them) are worthy of distinct if not very prolonged attention. The chapter would have gained not a little if we had separated the lyrical part of Dryden for its purposes; but that great poet has lost so much by the neglect to consider his lyrical work, not merely in addition to, but in connection with his other, that the scheme actually adopted seems preferable. Here we shall handle those contemporaries of his who dealt with his staple metres and styles-reserving Prior among the younger, and Butler among the elder, as captains of yet other hosts in the next. The first, or lyrical group, is a large one, and fringes out into minor poets and contributors to Drolleries and Miscellanies, and the famous Pills to Purge Melancholy (later in date, but mainly contemporaneous in stuff), after a very copious and floating manner. Its work, however, can be studied not only sufficiently, but perhaps best, in Relation in decessors. that of a few persons-the famous quartette of Restoration song-writers, Dorset, Rochester, Sedley, and Aphra Behn, heading others, from Mulgrave to Congreve, with a few isolated persons like Katherine Philips for the earliest period, Philip Ayres for the middle, and William Walsh for the last. Perhaps the prosodic note in regard to the persons to form to pre- be discussed in this chapter, lyric or not lyric, is that hardly one is of sufficient individuality to require much separate study. The interest which they possess is interest in relation to the great prosodic forms already developed, or in process of development, accordingly as they may show decadence or new beginning; and the new beginnings will be shown rather in the next chapter than in this. The very first question which should put itself to the student of prosody, who has set himself at the right point of view, is, "What is their attitude towards the two greatest forms of earlier Caroline lyric, the common measure and the octosyllabic quatrain?" And it so happens that these, with the enlarged forms of both which come from the addition of a couplet, or two interspaced lines, changing the quatrain into a sixain, are the chief, though not the only, forms that they use. The answer can be sufficiently general, though it will require a certain amount of proviso and qualification for individual instances. The peculiar grip of the measure which we have noted in the First Carolines has not gone; but it is going. For the observation of this, Katherine "Orinda." Philips is a peculiarly useful subject. "The matchless Orinda " lived but a very few years after the Restoration itself, but she died young; she was born in the very same year with Dryden, and she was not much the elder of Sedley and Dorset, both of whom survived into the eighteenth century. She is also, in temper, rather older than her date: serious, metaphysical, and if prosaic at all, prosaic because she cannot help it rather than otherwise. Yet the prose encroaches on her, will she nill she, in this metre of soar and throb. Her admirers put down her submission to the encroachments as a result of “artistic |