NATIONAL STYLE 207 



simplification. Declined substantives, adjectives, articles, 

 relatives, participles, animate the diction of both poetry and 

 prose, and help to determine the logical order of sentences by 

 means of their terminal forms. 



Owing to the complicated pedigree of the English language, 

 our metrical systems offer insurmountable difficulties to the 

 analyst. We have to deal with verse which depends for its 

 effect on accent rather than quantity, and in which two 

 traditions that of Anglo-Saxon rhythm and that of classical 

 scansion by feet have become inextricably intertwined. In 

 addition to these double influences, the old alliterative forms 

 of poetry demand attention. The ear in English versification 

 is still reminiscent of lines which were governed by consonants 

 repeated in emphatic places of the metre. Blank verse of 

 highly elaborated structure combines three factors (native 

 rhythm, classical scansion, and alliterative appeal to the sense 

 of recurrent consonantal sounds) in proportions varying with 

 the poet's aim or instinct. It is impossible to analyse the 

 versification of Milton's ' Paradise Lost ' wholly by the laws 

 of Greek and Latin prosody. It is equally impossible to 

 explain it, as Dr. Guest in his learned treatise on English 

 Rhythms would have us do, by reference only to the sections 

 and the pauses of Anglo-Saxon measures. The peculiar 

 charm of Miltonic blank verse is due to the admixture of both 

 systems in a hybrid peculiar to England after the introduction 

 of humanistic studies. Again, it is impossible to overlook the 

 deliberate alliteration of such lines as the following : 



Far off from these a slow and silent stream, 

 Lethe, the river of oblivion, rolls 

 Her watery labyrinth, whereof who drinks 

 Forthwith his former state and being forgets, 

 Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain. 



The flexibility of English renders our versification not unlike 

 that of the Greeks. It is true that the uncertainty of our 

 syllabic utterance, and the insensibility of our ear to quanti- 

 tative values, preclude us from acclimatising metres (like the 

 hexameter), which depend upon dactyls and spondees. Yet 



