"I never inquired," he said, "who my father's creditors were-perhaps I ought to have done so; but I thought the knowledge could only pain me. I see it all now; how unjust, how ungrateful I have been! Poor Mary!"

We sat down, and talked over those points in Ormiston's conduct upon which Russell had put so unfavourable a construction. It was quite evident, that a man who could act with so much liberality and selfdenial towards others, could have had no interested motives in his conduct with regard to Mary Russell; and her brother was now as eager to express his confidence in Ormiston's honour and integrity, as he was before hasty in misjudging him.

Where all parties are eager for explanation, matters are soon explained. Russell had an interview with his sister, which brought her to the breakfast table the next morning with blushing cheeks and brightened eyes. Her misgivings, if she had any, were easily set at rest. He then wrote to Ormiston a letter full of generous apologies and expressions of his high admiration of his conduct, which was answered by that gentleman in person by return of post. Russell and he met, or what they How Mary said, must ever be a secret, for no one was present but themselves. But all embarrassment was soon over, and we were a very happy party for the short time we remained at Southampton together; for, feeling that my share in the matter was at an end-a share which I contemplated with some little self-complacency-I speedily took my departure.

If I have not made Ormiston's conduct appear in as clear colours to the reader as it did to ourselves, I can only add, that the late misunderstanding seemed a painful subject to all parties, and that the mutual explanations were rather understood than expressed. The anonymous payment to Russell's credit at the Bank was no longer a mystery: it was the poor remains of the College Tutor's little fortune, chiefly the savings of his years of office-the bulk of which had been lost through the fault of the father -generously devoted to meet the necessities of the son. That he would

have offered Mary Russell his heart and [Sept. hand at once when she was poor, as he hesitated to do when she was rich, none of us for a moment doubted, had not his own embarrassments, caused by the failure of the bank, and the consequent claims of his orphan nieces, to replace whose little income he had contracted all his own expenses, made him hesitate to involve the woman he loved in an imprudent marriage.

They were married, however, very soon-and still imprudently, the world said, and my good aunt among the rest; for, instead of waiting an indefall in, Ormiston took the first that finite time for a good college living to offered, a small vicarage of £300 ayear, intending to add to his income sometimes loves to have a laugh at by taking pupils. However, fortune the prudent ones, and put to the rout during Ormiston's " all their wise prognostications; for, year of grace while he still virtually held his fellowship, though he had accepted the living our worthy old Principal died loss only gave way to the universal somewhat suddenly, and regret at his (except, I suppose, any disappointed joy of every individual in the college, elected almost unanimously to the aspirants,) when Mr Ormiston was vacant dignity.

Mr Russell the elder has never returned to England. On the mind of such a man, after the first blow, and the loss of his position in the world, comparatively little effect. He lives the disgrace attached to his name had in some small town in France, having contrived, with his known clever management, to keep himself in comfortable circumstances; and his best existence, rather than wish for his friends can only strive to forget his return. His son and daughter pay him occasional visits, for their affechis errors. tion survives his disgrace, and forgets Charles Russell took a first class, after delaying his examination a couple of terms, owing to his illness, and is now a barrister, with a reputation for talent, but as yet very little business. However, as I hear the city authorities have had college plate in discharge of a disthe impudence to seize some of the

puted claim for rates, and that Russell is retained as one of the counsel in an action of replevin, I trust he will begin a prosperous career, by contributing to win the cause for the gown."

66

I spent a month with Dr and Mrs Ormiston at their vicarage in the country, before the former entered upon his official residence as Principal; and can assure the reader that, in spite of ten-it may be moreyears of difference in age, they are the happiest couple I ever saw. I may almost say, the only happy couple I ever saw, most of my married acquaintance appearing at the best only contented couples, not drawing their happiness so exclusively from each other as suits my notion of what such a tie ought to be. Of course,

I do not take my own matrimonial experience into account; the same principle of justice which forbids a man to give evidence in his own favour, humanely excusing him from making any admission which may criminate himself. Mrs Ormiston is as beautiful, as amiable, as ever, and has lost all the reserve and sadness which, in her maiden days, overshadowed her charms; and so sincere was and is my admiration of her person and character, and so warmly was I in the habit of expressing it, that I really believe my dilating upon her attractions used to make Mrs Francis Hawthorne somewhat jealous, until she had the happiness to make her acquaintance, and settled the point by falling in love with the lady herself.

LETTERS ON ENGLISH HEXAMETERS.

LETTER II.

DEAR MR EDITOR-I should like to offer you some more of my criticisms on the hexameters which have been written in English, and, by your good leave, will try to do so at some future time. But there are probably some of your readers who entertain the prejudices against English hexameters which we often hear from English critics of the last generation. I cannot come to any understanding with these readers about special hexameters, till I have said something of these objections to hexameters in general. One of these objections I tried to dispose of in a former missive; namely, that " we cannot have good hexameters in English, because we have so few spondees." There are still other erroneous doctrines commonly entertained relative to this matter, which may be thus briefly expressed;-that in hexameters we adopt a difference of long and short syllables, such as does not regulate other forms of English versification; and that the versification itself—the movement of the hexameter-is borrowed from Greek and Latin poetry. Now, in opposition to these opinions, I am prepared to show that our English hexameters suppose no other relations of strong and weak syllables than those which govern our other kinds of verse;-and that the hexameter movement is quite familiar to the native English ear.

The first of these truths, I should have supposed to be, by this time, generally acknowledged among all writers and readers of English verse: if it had not been that I have lately seen, in some of our hexametrists, a reference to a difference of long and short, as something which we ought to have, in addition to the differences of strong and weak syllables, in order to make our hexameters perfect. One of these writers has taken the model hexameter

"In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;" and has objected to it that the first syllable of column is short. But, my dear sir, it is not shorter than the first syllable of collar, or of the Latin collum! The fact is, that in hexameters, as in all other English verses, the ear knows

A

nothing of long and short as the foundation of verse. All verse, to an English ear, is governed by the succession of strong and weak syllables. Take a stanza of Moore's :

"When in death I shall calm recline,

O bear my heart to my mistress dear.

Tell her it lived upon smiles and wine,

Of the brightest hue while it linger'd here.”

I have marked the strong syllables, which stand in the place of long ones, so far as the actual existence of verse is concerned; though no doubt the smoothness of the verse is promoted by having the light syllables short also, that they may glide rapidly away. But this, I say, though favourable to smoothness, is not essential to verse: thus the syllable death, though strong, is short; I and while, though weak, are long.

Now this alternation, in a certain order, of strong and weak syllables, is the essential condition of all English verse, and of hexameters among the rest. Long and short syllables, to English ears, are superseded in their effect by strong and weak accents; and even when we read Greek and Latin verses, so far as we make the versification perceptible, we do so by putting strong accents on the long syllables. The English ear has no sense of any versification which is not thus constructed.

I had imagined that all this was long settled in the minds of all readers of poetry; and that all notion of syllables in English being long, for purposes of versification, because they contain a long vowel or a diphthong, or a vowel before two consonants, had been obliterated ages ago. I knew, indeed, that the first English hexametrists had tried to conform themselves to the Latin rules of quantity. Thus, as we learn from Spenser, they tried to make the second syllable of carpenter long; and constructed their verses so that they would scan according to Latin rules. Such are Surry's hexameters; for instance:

"Unto a caitiff wretch whom long affliction holdeth,

Grant yet, grant yet a look to the last monument of his anguish."

But this made their task extremely difficult, without bringing any gain which the ear could recognise; and I believe that the earlier attempts to naturalize the hexameter in England failed mainly in consequence of their being executed under these severe conditions, which prevented all facility and flow in the expression, and gave the popular ear no pleasure.

The successful German hexametrists have rejected all regard to the classical rules of quantity of syllables; and have, I conceive, shown us plainly that this is the condition of success in such an undertaking. Take, for instance, the beginning of Hermann und Dorothea :

"Und so sass das trauliche Paar, sich unter dem Thorweg

Ueber das wander de Volk mit mancher Bemerkung ergötgend
Endlich aber began der wüedige Hansfrau, und sagte

Sept! dort kommt der Prediger her; es kommt auch der Nachbar."

The penultimate dactyls in these lines, "unter dem Thorweg," "Bemerkung ergötgend,' ""Hansfrau und sagte," "kommt auch der Nachbar," have, in the place of short syllables, syllables which must be long, if any distinction of long and short, depending upon consonants and dipthongs, be recognised; but yet these are good and orderly dactyls, because in each we have a strong syllable followed by two weak ones. If we call such trissyllable feet dactyls, and in the same way describe other feet by their corresponding names in Greek and Latin verse, spondees, trochees, and the like, we shall be able to talk in an intelligible manner about English verse in general, and English hexameters in particular.

And I have now to show, in the second place, that English hexameters are readily accepted by the native ear, without any condition of a discipline in Greek and Latin verse. I do not mean to say that hexameters have not a

It must be observed, however, that the proportion between heavy and light, or strong and weak, in syllables, is not always the same. When a dissyllable foot occurs in the place of a trissyllable one, in a metre of a generally trissyllabic character, the light syllable may be conceived as standing in the place of two, and is therefore more weighty than the light syllables of the trissyllabic feet. Thus, if we say—

"Tell her it lived upon smiles and wine,”

the and is more weighty than it would be, if we were to say"Tell her it lived upon smiles and on wine."

And if again we say—

"Tell her it liv'd on smiles and on wine,"

the on is more weighty than the same syllable in upon. Hence, in these cases, smiles and, lived on, approach to spondees. But still there is a decided preponderance in the first syllables of each of these feet respectively.

I have hitherto considered dactylics with rhyme; of course the measure may be preserved, though the rhyme be omitted, either at the end of the alternate lines; as

When in my tomb I am calmly lying,

O bear my heart to my mistress dear:
Tell her it liv'd upon smiles and nectar
Of brightest hue, while it lingered here:

Or altogether; as

Bid her not shed one tear of sorrow

To sully a heart so brilliant and bright;
But drops from fond remembrance gather,
And bathe for ever the relic in these.

In the absence of rhyme, each distich is detached, and the number of such distiches, or long lines, may be either odd or even.

I shall now take a shorter dactylic measure; and first, with alternate rhymes.

Tityrus, you laid along,

In the shade of umbrageous beeches,
Practise your pastoral song,

As your muse in your solitude teaches.
We from the land that we love,
From all that we value and treasure,
We must as exiles remove :
While, Tityrus, you at your leisure,
Make all the woods to resound
Amaryllis's name at your pleasure.

We see, in this example, that the rhyme is a fetter to the construction. In this case, it is necessary to have three distichs which rhyme, in order to close the metre with the sentence.

We detach these distichs, or long lines, from each other, by rejecting the use of rhyme between successive distichs. We might make the two parts of the same long line rhyme thus:

Tityrus, you in the shadow Of chestnuts stretcht in the meadow,

Practise your pastoral verses In strains which your oat-pipe rehearses.

We, poor exiles, are leaving All our saving and having;

Leaving the land that we treasure: You in the woods at your pleasure

Make them resound, when your will is, The name of the fair Amaryllis.

But these rhymes, even if written in one long line, are really two short lines with a double rhyme; and this measure, besides its difficulty, is destitute of dignity and grace.

I have arranged this variation so that the incomplete feet at the end of one line and the beginning of the next in each distich, as well as the rest, make up a complete dactyl; and thus, the measure runs on through each two written lines in a long line of seven dactyls and a strong syllable. But it will be easily perceived, that if the feet had been left incomplete at the end of each written line, the pause in the metre would have supplied what was wanting, and would have prevented the verse from being perceived as irregular. Thus these are still true dactylic lines :

When in my tomb I shall calmly recline
O carry my heart to my conqueror dear;
Tell her it lived upon smiles and on wine
Of brilliant hue, while it lingered here.

I will now arrange the same passage so as to reduce it entirely to dissyllable feet, which alters the character of the versification.

When in death I calm recline,

O bear my heart to her I love;
Say it liv'd on smiles and wine
Of brightest hue, while here above.
Bid her shed no tear of grief

To soil a heart so clear and bright;
But drops of kind remembrance give
To bathe the gem from morn to night.

As the dissyllable feet may be divided either as dactyls or as anapæsts, so the dissyllable feet may be divided either as trochees or as iambuses. Thus we may scan either of these ways

O bear my heart to | her I love,

O bear my heart | to her I love.

But in this case, as in that of dissyllable feet, the metre is more decidedly trochaic, because each line, (that is, each distich, as here written,) begins with a strong syllable.

When in death I | calm recline.

The animated trochaic character, when once given by a few lines of this kind, continues in the movement of the verse, even when retarded by initial iambuses; as,

"Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee

Jest and youthful jollity:

Quips and cranks and wanton wiles,

Nods and becks and wreathed smiles;

Such as dwell on Hebe's cheek,

And love to live in dimple sleek,

Sport that wrinkled care derides,

And laughter holding both his sides."

Here the weak syllables And, And, do not materially interrupt the trochaic verse. They may be taken as completing the trochee at the end of the preceding line.

In these verses, and in all English verses, there are no spondees, or feet consisting of two strong syllables. No foot in English metre has more than one strong syllable, and the weak syllables are appended to the strong ones, and swept along with them in the current of the metre. The equality between a trissyllable and a consecutive dissyllable foot, which the metre requires, is preserved by adding strength to the short syllable, so as to preserve the balance. Thus, when we say——

Bear my heart to my mistress dear,

There is a strength given to bear, and mistress, which makes them metrically balance carry and conqueror in this verse,

Carry my heart to my conqueror dear.