2-1 S. VI. 137., Aug. 14. '58.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 



121 



LONDON, SATURDAY, AUGUST 14. 1858. 



INVOLUNTAHY VERSIFICATION. 



" Par nia foi," exclaims the citizen in Moliere's 

 play, delighted with his newly-discovered accom- 

 plishment, — "par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante 

 ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j'en sfusse 

 rien ! " Perhaps, to take the converse of M. Jour- 

 dain's case, there are not a few prose-writers in 

 our own language who would be equally surprised 

 to discover the variety of unsuspected metrical 

 combinations that might be extracted from their 

 own gravest compositions. Suppose, for instance, 

 that anybody had ventured to tell one of the most 

 vigorous of modern writers, the late AVilliam Cob- 

 bett, that in his racy Saxon style, thrown off 

 without stopping to pick out fine words, or round 

 off polished sentences, and yet so full of natural 

 melody, he had all along not unfrequently been 

 writing verse without knowing it ; or that, in those 

 charming "Eural Rides" of his, he had been 

 unconsciously perpetrating all sorts of classical 

 metres, — we may imagine the contemptuous in- 

 credulity of the old man, and the torrent of the 

 choicest mob-English with which he would have 

 overwhelmed the pedant who dared to talk to him 

 about the number of iambics and anapaests to be 

 found in his pages, or the happily proportioned 

 recurrence in his sentences of what the philoso- 

 pher of Salisbury maintained to be " the essential 

 ingredients of English prose, which, like salt in a 

 banquet, serves to give it a relish — the two Pseons 

 and the Cretic." 



And yet, however incomprehensible all this 

 would have been to the author of the Political Re- 

 gister, who had not a philological notion in his 

 head, it may not be uninterestmg to bring toge- 

 ther a few of those curious deviations into invo- 

 luntary metre which occasionally startle us in 

 the writings of the greatest masters of prose com- 

 ];osition. 



In the preface to Dryden's translation of Vir- 

 ion's Pusturals, the writer, comparing the harmony 

 and grace of the classic poets with modern pro- 

 ductions, observes, that " the Greek tongue very 

 naturally falls into iambic; and the diligent reader 

 may find six or seven and twenty of them in those 

 accurate orations of Isocrates. The Latin," he 

 adds, "as naturally falls into heroic: the begin- 

 ning of Livy's history ishalf a hexameter, and that 

 of Tacitus an entire one ; and the former histo- 

 rian, describing the glorious effort of a colonel to 

 break through a brigade of the enemy, just after 

 the defeat at Cannae, falls unknowingly into a 

 I Terse not unworthy Virgil himself: — 

 I ••' Hiec ubi dicta dedit, stringit gladium, cuneoriue 

 Facto per mcdiog , &c.' " 



To the hemistich of Livy and the Lexamctcr of 



Tacitus, he might have added the spondaic verse 

 with which, by a singular coincidence, Sallust 

 also commences his narrative of the Jugurthine 

 war : — 



" Bellum scripturus sum quod populus Romanus ; " 

 and another from the same historiao : — 



" Cnsai Pompeii veteres, fidosque clientes," 

 as well as that fine line from the Germania of Ta- 

 citus (which sounds very much like a quotation 

 from some Latin poet), in which he describes the 

 sacred grove of the Sennoncs, as 



" Arguriis palrum, et prisca formidine sacram." 



But, in truth, there are few of the classical prose- 

 writers in whose pages we may not discover these 

 " disjecti membra poetas." * Quintilian, however, 

 denounces strongly the occurrence of such casual 

 verses, or fragments of verse, — " Versum in ora- 

 tione fieri, multo fasdissimum est totum ; sicut 

 etiam in parte deforme : " Cicero, too, speaks of it 

 ns "valde vitiosura;" and elsewhere, while he 

 allows " numeris astrictam orationem esse debere," 

 adds, that it ought " carere versibus ; " and yet no 

 writer oftener falls into the practice himself. 

 Hexameter lines are met with in his writings, 

 and even his own favourite " esse videatur," which 

 closes so many of his periods, is the beginning of 

 an octonary iambic. Mr. Say, in his Essays on 

 the Harmony, Variety, and Power of Number s{\ 745), 

 thus describes, and at the same time exempli- 

 fies in English, the use and power of the iambic 

 and anapaest, with which Cicero flashes in the face 

 of guilty Catiline : — 



" It has at once a sharp .ind a sudden sound : the same 

 ■which men use when they pour out a torrent of words in 

 their anger." 



There is a sort of bastard hexameter, which is 

 of frequent occurrence in Latin prose-writers, 

 and is perhaps a more offensive blemish in point 

 of style than a legitimate verse, having the rhythm 

 of the hexameter without its quantity. It is a 

 curious fact, however, that this sort of slipshod 

 verse was gravely practised by some of the old 

 monkish writers. Commodianus, an ecclesiastical 

 writer in the beginning of the fourth century, and 

 a contemporary of Pope Sylvester, composed a 

 treatise against the Pagan idolatry in this " mid- 

 dle style," as Dupin calls it, " neither verse nor 

 prose." His work is entitled Instructiones, and 

 was printed from an ancient MS. by Eigaltius, in 

 1650. The following crabbed lines are a specimen 

 of this lawless method of versification : — 



" Respicis infeli.^ bonum discipliniE crelestis, 

 Et ruis in mortem, dum vis sine frxno vagari, 

 Perdunt te hixuria, et brevia gaiidia mundi 

 Unde sub inferno cruciabcris tempore toto." 



Even in the original language of the New Testa- 



♦ See Dissertatio de Versu inopinato in Prosft, by Fred. 

 Simon Locstcr. Lips. 1G88. 



