NATIONAL STYLE 209 



The hybrid nature of English prosody renders emphasis a 

 main feature of our versification. Accentual rhythm formed 

 the original and native groundwork of English prosody. 

 This soon began to be modified by scansion. Learned poets, 

 familiar with the quantitative systems of antiquity, allowed 

 their ear to be governed in the act of composition by memories 

 of Greek or Latin metres. Yet exactitude in the quantitative 

 structure even of iambics has not been insisted on, and con- 

 sequently the most remarkable effects may be produced in 

 English by violations of classical rules which would have 

 made an Attic audience shudder. No other literature more 

 often illustrates than ours the metrical and rhetorical impor- 

 tance of a word placed so as to surprise the hearer's sense or 

 to arrest his attention by some bold irregularity. Notice the 

 value of the verb streams in this line of Marlowe : 



See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament. 



English prose is also hybrid ; but in some respects the 

 amalgam has not been made so successfully as in the case of 

 poetry. Starting with the simplicity of Anglo-Saxon and 

 early English style, where the leading characteristics of our 

 syntax are already defined, prose underwent a thorough 

 French remodelling during the reigns of the Norman and 

 Angevine monarchs. The result of this first period of fusion 

 is visible in the style of Sir Thomas Malory's ' Morte 

 d' Arthur ' ; it may be illustrated by the passage in which 

 King Arthur departs for his last journey across the waters of 

 the west : 



' Now put me into the barge,' said the King ; and so he did softly ; 

 and there received him three queens with great mourning, and so those 

 three queens set them down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid 

 his head. And then that queen said, ' Ah ! dear brother, why have ye 

 tarried so long from me ? Alas ! this wound on your head hath taken 

 overmuch cold.' And so then they rowed from the land, and Sir Bedi- 

 vere beheld all those ladies go from him ; then Sir Bedivere cried, ' Ah 1 

 my lord Arthur, what shall become of me now ye go from me, and leave 

 me here alone among mine enemies ? ' ' Comfort thyself,' said King 

 Arthur, ' and do as well as thou mayest, for in me is no trust for to trust 

 in ; for I will into the vale of Avilion for to heal me of my grievous 



