626 Transactions. 



structure of so much minstrel poetry, that it may properly be termed tlie 

 Romantic stanza by way of distinction ; and which appears so natural to 

 our language, that the very best of our poets have not been able to protract 

 it into the verse properly called Heroic without the use of epithets which 

 are, to say the least, unnecessary." In a note to this remark he adds, 

 " Thus it has been often remarked, that, in the opening couplets of Pope's 

 translation of the Iliad, there are two syllables forming a superfluous word 

 in each line, as may be observed by attending to such words as are printed 

 ill italics : — 



(3.) Achilles' wrath to Greece the direful spring 

 Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing ; 

 That wrath which sent to Pluto's gloomy reign 

 The souls of mighty chiefs in battle slain, 

 Whose bones, unburied on the desert shore, 

 Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore." 



Scott rebels against the expansion or limitation of thought to the average 

 of four lines — he should have said two lines. He also objects to the extra 

 unit in Heroic verse ; but the Heroic was the stepping-stone to Blank verse, 

 a metre that evolved to accommodate sentences of varying length, as the 

 Romance evolved to accommodate sentences of average length ; and as the 

 Romance metre will not tolerate sentences that run on from verse to verse, 

 so the best Blank verse will not tolerate verses that do not run on or over- 

 flow. Whilst, however, Scott rebels against the yoke, he bows to it ; for 

 his sentences, as in the example quoted from " The Lady of the Lake," are 

 nearly always comprised within two lines — a verse. Whilst, too, he rejects 

 the formal ballad as his vehicle, he constantly admits it to relieve the 

 monotony of the " Romantic stanza " (see in " The Lay of the Last 

 Minstrel," canto i, sections x, xii, xiii, xviii, xxiv, &c.). It will scarcely be 

 denied that Ballad verses of seven stresses are recited in one breath to one 

 verse ; and admitting this, it is admitted that the parent verse, the 

 Romance, was recited in a breath. Had Scott's tales been sung — as, indeed, 

 they were supposed to be sung in the Lay — Ballad metre would, without 

 doubt, have much more largely predominated. The eye, however, does 

 not require the rests required by the breath ; and the period elapsing 

 between the evolution of the Ballad form from the Romance and the time of 

 printing is so comparatively short that, whilst the Ballad had time to become 

 a most vigorous living form, the Romance also was given new life ere it had 

 joined the hexameter and runic stave as a fossil parent form. In the 

 formal ballad that Scott and others condemned, even despised — the ballad 

 whose form appeared to be of greater moment than its thought — the form 

 was, as it were, making root and wood ; it throve sturdily and persistently 

 among other and more tended forms, and upon its vigorous stock are now 

 grafted the finest flowering of British lyrics. 



4. A reason has already been given for supposing that the Romance 

 verse was shortened by the dropping of a unit to admit of a breath being 

 easily taken (see paragraph 8 of Section I). Were a breath taken after 

 each line of four stresses, as is usually done in Church congregations 

 (maugre Section I, paragraph 8), there would have been no need for any 

 shortening at all. The mere fact that there was a tendency to shorten 

 the eight-stressed verse shows that there was a tendency to take the whole 

 in one breath, and it is for this reason that the unit of verse-length has been 

 taken as the breath-sentence, or full verse of eight stresses, rather than as 



