524 



Transactions. 



The result is that whereas in the full verse ot (18a) a paused, light unit will 

 be found,, a triple unit will be found, in the full verse of (18) : — 



(19.) a. I fear/ tliy kis/ses gen/tle mai/tien, thou ?iee/dest not/ fear mine/; 

 b. Then out/ spake bold 'Kork/tms, /the cap/tain of-' the gate/ : 



9. This extra syllable, hke the " den " of " maiden " in (18), may occur 

 at the end, of heroic and, blank verses, or at the end, of ballad verses, when 

 such verses are said, to have a feminine or weak ending. It is owing to 

 the gTeat preponderance of words of one syllable in the English language 

 that feminine-ended verses are not the normal ones, since words of more 

 than one syllable tend to take the accent on the last syllable but one. With 

 the view to ascertaining approximately the proportion of one-syllabled 

 words to words of more than one syllable occurring at the ends of verses, 

 the first five hundred verses of various poems have been taken, and their 

 endings tabulated. Thus, of " Paradise Lost " the first five hundred verses 

 of Book I have been analysed, the end words only being taken ; the first 

 five hundred of Act III, scene i, of Swinburne's " Chastelard " ; of " Endy- 

 mion," &c., as follows : — 



Table I. 



Again the same poems have been taken and the first five hundred words 

 analysed, including all words in the body as well as at the end of the verses,, 

 with the following result : — 



Table II. 



These tables show decisively the great preponderance of one-syllabled words 

 not only at the line-ends, but also in the body of the verse. The great dis- 

 parity between the number of two-syllabled words at the verse-ends and 

 in the body of the verso is easily accounted for when it is remembered that 

 by far the greater number of such words is accented on the first syllable,. 



