enlisting sympathy for the sufferer, the silent member in the dispute. Had he been able to approach this section of his work in a more receptive frame of mind, his exposition of his own views could not but have gained in solidity. As it is, being very ready to ridicule what he does not understand, he remains blind to numerous facts which he might have learnt from rivals.

Coming now to the centre of our subject, we must attack the difficult and dangerous question of the nature of prosody in its elements. What is poetical rhythm? What is the difference between reading and scanning a line of poetry, when we conduct both operations as we should? What are the laws of verse, and by what qualities are they determined in the materials of which a verse is made? Prof. Saintsbury distrusts these topics. Mill opened his famous 'Principles of Political Economy' with the remark that 'Everyone has a notion sufficiently correct for common purposes of what is meant by wealth.' Prof. Saintsbury could join him in asserting that it is no part of the design of this treatise to aim at metaphysical nicety of definition.' Everybody knows, he would say, that a piece of poetry is divided into lines, and that these lines are in their turn divided into feet: why go further, when to go further is to court confusion? He does, of course, himself go further; and the nature of the subject obliges him to do so. He holds that a line of English poetry is divided not only into feet, but into feet of a particular kind. What kind, we ask, and how related to the idea of the foot in general? It is only in an appendix to the third volume that he endeavours to tell us-with a conspicuous absence of success. Let us approach the matter from the end at which Prof. Saintsbury leaves it; we shall then be in a position to criticise the system of scansion he advocates, with a basis of understanding between the reader's mind and our own.

Whatever a foot may be, the time seems to have come when prosodists should agree to accept the mere term as innocuous and as established by usage. The foot would then be to poetry what the bar is to music-the rhythmical unit of verse, the first submission to harmony on the part of the syllables which by its virtue pace the line, as it were, on heel and toe. This idea suggests at

once that the syllables cleave together because of a disparity between them, some being fitted for the heel and some for the toe position. Such is indeed the case. And in languages where the syllables are treated as equal -in French, for instance-feet, in the strict sense, disappear and are replaced by a kind of tip-toe motion. Let the reader repeat to himself in a natural manner any sentence in any language with which he is intimate, and two obvious differences will strike him in the sound of the syllables in it. Some occupy a longer time than others; and some are emphasised, while others are not. Of these differences verse avails itself. If it employs the difference in time, we have a system reducible to feet composed of long and short syllables; if it employs the difference of emphasis we have a system of feet composed of accented and unaccented syllables.

In French, as we said, neither difference is recognised. The feet, if we are to call them feet, are all monosyllabic. This system, in its simplicity, brings clearly to light one of the chief laws of verse. Read aloud any line of French poetry

'Dans ton cœur | len|te|ment|tu|re|de| vien] dras¦ seul e'; and it is obvious that the supposed equality of stress and duration in the syllables is a fiction, that their duration varies, and that there are some on which the voice instinctively dwells. It is intended to do so. The general tendency of French being towards an even pronunciation, that tendency gives the language its metrical law. The law accepted, the syllables being all in theory regularised, every natural inequality of length and stress is at the poet's command for the purposes of variation and harmony.

Our next example must be drawn from a language employing feet, according to the stricter meaning of the term. But first let us note this point in regard to metrical law. There is necessarily an element in it of artifice, or fiction, or, one might almost say, of tyranny. The syllables in French are of various lengths and are stressed variously; they are bidden to be all equal, to be what they in fact are not. What is the power which can enforce their obedience? The reply is rhythm. Rhythm, our sense of rhythm, that is, demands a basis

of equality, of regularity; and where such a basis is not naturally to be found, rhythm can create it; it can impose itself upon recalcitrant material. Language is full of recalcitrances. The syllables vary in their length and stress by imperceptible gradations on a sliding scale of values which merge one into another. By rhythm they are equalised and classified. The unit of equality in French is the syllable; in most languages-at least in Greek, Latin, and English-the syllables are classified in two ways, as long and short, or stressed and unstressed; and the unit is formed of various combinations of these two. The foot is the unit, the smallest member of the line-body in which this equalising and co-ordinating influence is manifested. Consider the line

'Arma virumque ca|no Tro|jae qui primus ab|oris.'|

This is quantitative verse; its syllables either long or short; the long all equally long and equal to two of the short, which are all equally short. If they are to be co-ordinated these opposites must combine; and we here see them entering into two kinds of combinations, the dactyl (-) and the spondee (--). Here then, in the concrete, we have true feet. Their equality of duration is obvious. A not quite so obvious, yet more important, characteristic in them is their similarity in shape. The line before us is a dactylic' hexameter; as such it can never harbour an anapæst (-), for the anapæst violates a necessary condition of its rhythm, viz. that the long syllable should precede. The first syllable of every foot in the hexameter must be long. Similarly in iambic verse (--) the typically inadmissible foot is the trochee (--), a foot of the same duration as the iamb; but the spondee, though longer, is readily interchanged, its similarity in shape overcoming and equalising the inequality of duration. In quantitative verse, then, the foot is more than a combination of syllables lasting a given length of time; it is also a combination qualified by the order in which its syllables are arranged to enter into or set up a particular kind of rhythmical motion.

Such rhythmical motion, which implies a rhythmical ictus or beat, is an essential of all verse. Within limits, which shifting intuitions must prescribe, it can, even when the law of the verse is quantitative, override

quantitative inequalities in the units. The way in which the time is distributed is of more importance than the precise amount of it. It does not matter what is the length of the intervals, provided that they seem the same. And this is the fact upon which accentual verse lays hold. Rhythm depending upon a sequence of theoretically equal time-divisions, that time may be either found in the syllables or imposed upon them. In accentual verse it is imposed. There is, after all, but a slight difference in duration between the longest long and the shortest short syllable in any language. If we agree to disregard their length, the stresses that fall upon some of them can be used to determine the motion of the line; and about these stresses the syllables may again cluster into feet. Take the lines

'Hálf a league, hálf a league,]
Hálf a league |ónward.'|

It is very obvious that the longest syllable here is 'league,' and the shortest 'a.' This disparity is metrically irrelevant. A recurring accent on the word 'half' determines the nature of the rhythm; its motion is in triplets; and, if we examine the poem stanza by stanza, we shall find that the natural division of this first line is the true one, and that it is the first syllable of the triplet which is accented. The scansion

‘Hálf a league, hálf|a league,' etc.,

applicable to the line, is inapplicable to the stanza. The word half,' again, is one which might be unaccented, the word 'league' might bear an accent, though we know that in this case it is not so. Here we have two striking and fundamental distinctions between the accentual system and the quantitative. The quantity of a syllable, the scansion of a quantitative line, are something inalienable from them, something they possess in their own right or assume in obedience to decisive regulations. But for its accent a syllable depends, in numerous ways too shifting and interchangeable to be specified, upon the nature and meaning of the syllables about it. The quantity is a part of the syllable; the accent is a part of the word or the sentence. An element of uncertainty is thus introduced into accentual scansion. And a second

distinction results. Whereas, on the quantitative system, we can build the syllables into feet and the feet into lines, on the accentual system we must deduce the lines from the stanzas or paragraphs, the feet from the lines, and, to a great extent, value the syllables according to their relation to the feet into which they enter.

The reader may, if he will, make the leading features of each of the two systems clear to himself by resort to a simple experiment. If he will strike on a piano any note a score of times or so without varying either the force or the speed of the strokes, he will experience no effect of rhythm. But if he double the duration of every second note or of the first in every three, he has rhythm at once, and he will observe that the note which lasts longer will seem louder. If, on the other hand, keeping the notes roughly equal in duration, he gives double strength to every second or every third stroke, again he will have rhythm; and now he will observe that, even though he be careless as to the precise duration of the notes, the louder ones will establish that illusion of equality which is all that rhythm requires. Finally, if he combines double duration and double strength, he soon produces a caricature. The bearing of this is obvious. The rhythm which results from uniformly varying the length of the sounds is the model of quantitative verse; and here the regular alternation of long and short gives a semblance of accent. The rhythm which is given by the recurrent stress is the model of accentual verse, the stress giving, as it recurs, a semblance of equality to unequal units. Combine the two methods and the result is farce.

This last observation anticipates the next division of the subject-the nature of poetic rhythm in its relation, not now to the foot, but to the line or stanza. Here again the point may be most easily grasped with the help of a musical illustration. Accent and quantity operate in music with complete freedom. A note has, in its own right, neither duration nor intensity. It is played as loud and lasts as long as the composer bids. Rhythm has thus no opposition to contend against in the material of the art, nothing, so to speak, stubborn or opinionated (as words are), which it must subdue. Therefore, as the sounds proceed, their rhythm can adapt and readapt