Andersen. — Classificifioii of Verse. 491 



Here the first stanza contains seven each of duple and triple units ; the 

 second contains six triple and eight duple : what is the resultant metre ? 

 The fact is, it is impossible to say where duple metre ends and triple begins. 

 This is notably so in many of the older ballads ; for example, " The Loch- 

 maben Harper." " Jock o' the Tyde." " Hobbie Noble," " Kinmont Willie " 

 — all from Scott's " Border Minstrelsy." On the rise of the artificial school 

 of prosody all such " mixed " verse was considered not only faulty, but 

 vulgar, and was left to the mercies of the uneducated ; and their mercies 

 certainly proved tender, for to them we owe the preservation of our immortal 

 Imliads. The artificial school held that a'l units should be uniform — that 

 in a verse all should contain either two or three syllables. Furthermore, 

 it w^as considered impossible to rise to poetic heights in three-syllabled 

 metres, so that metre fell into disrepute. Dryden and Pope, the chief 

 exponent? of the artificial school, confined themselves almost entirely to 

 the two-syllabled metre. Dryden. according to Samuel Johnson, carried 

 to more perfect pitch the reform in English verse begun by Waller and 

 Denham. The following extract is from his Life of Dryden : '" After about 

 half a century of forced thoughts, and rugged metre, some advances towards 

 nature and harmony had been already made by Waller and Denham ; they 

 liad shown that long discourses in rhyme grew more pleasing when they 

 were broken into couplets, and that verse consisted not only in the number, 

 but in the arrangement of syllables." So important was the number of 

 syllables considered, that to write in verse was to write in numbers : Pope, 

 in whom the artificial style culminated. " Lisped in numbers, for the numbers 

 came." It is due to the fact that we have not yet cast off this yoke of 

 ^' number " that we look askance at a mingling of duple and triple metres ; 

 yet can we find fault with poems like Coleridge's " Christabel " or Shelley's 

 -'■ Sensitive Plant " ? 



4. Cowper, master of the anapest, was the first to revive the three- 

 syllabled metre ; and whilst he did not, perhaps, inteiitionally mingle the 

 two-syllabled and three-syllabled, from two of his finest examples of the 

 unapest, " The Rose " and " The Poplar Field," the following lines are 

 taken : — 



(9.) The rose had been wii^ih'd, just wash'd in a shower, 

 (10.) The poplars are fell'd ; farewell to the shade 



The poems of which these two are the opening lines are admittedly ana- 

 pestic ; vet a line of exactly similar construction — 



(11.) And ever his chere is sobre and softe, 



(C.A., Book I, " Pride," 1. 45.) 



— is iambic. It occurs in Gower's " Confessio Amantis." How can a 

 metre of identical construction bear one name in one context, another in 

 <inother ? It may l^e held that we do not know how such a line would 

 be read in Gower's time. It is not necessary to know this ; the cjuestion is, 

 how is it read now ? If it is read like Cowper's lines, is it not the same 

 metre ? The anomaly disappears if it is admitted that two-syllabled and 

 three-svllabled (duple and triple) metres are interchangeable — are, indeed, 

 two manifestations of the same unit. Then Gower's lines, 



(12.) Out of the temple he goth his way. 

 And she began to bid and ])ray, 



{V.A., Book I, " Pride," i. 359.) 



and (11) above offer no stumbling-block to scansion : the unit has protean 

 powers, and these are the powers contributing towards the endless variations 



