150 LITERATURE AND DRAMA 



equivalent to feet composed of long and short syllables. The 

 ancient foot measured an interval of time, whereas in English 

 verse we allow, and indeed demand, that successive feet called 

 by the same name shall occupy dissimilar and irregular periods. 

 Notwithstanding this broad distinction, it is found that our 

 English iambs, trochees, and anapaests arranged in accordance 

 with classical laws produce lines possessing many of the quali- 

 ties which ancient grammarians attribute to the analogous clas- 

 sical metres ; but lines in which an attempt is made to combine 

 spondees and dactyls in classical fashion are not very successful. 

 So long as scanning was looked upon as a formal matter, 

 having very little connection with the sound of well-spoken sen- 

 tences, the heroic line commonly used in blank verse was with 

 no hesitation treated as a simple iambic of five feet. With the 

 aid of a little licence, all difficulty found in scanning lines in 

 this or any other metre was easily explained away. Indeed, 

 our language is so wonderfully flexible that no theorist has any 

 difficulty in bending the vast majority of examples under his 

 own special yoke ; and when he comes upon some more than 

 usually stubborn verse he says the line is bad, though Milton, 

 Pope, or Shakespeare may have written it. Mr. Goold Brown, 

 in his ' Grammar of English Grammars,' gives examples of all 

 sorts of metres classically scanned, and quotes the following lines 

 from * Paradise Lost ' to illustrate the catalectic iambic penta- 

 meter. A vertical line is used both by Dr. Guest and Mr. 

 Goold Brown to denote that an accent falls on the preceding 

 syllable : 



No soon|-er had) th' Almight|-y ceas ? d| but all] 

 The mul|-titude| of an|-gels with| a shout 

 Loud as| from num|-bers with|-out num|ber, sweet 

 As from| blest voi -ces ut|-tering joy| heav'n rung, &c. 



Far be it from us to decide which of these so-called feet the 

 grammarian considered to be iambs, which trochees, and which 

 perhaps spondees. By an effort of the will we may conceive 

 that ( titude ' and ' gels with ' are in some way like iambs ; 

 though, if we are to call the second syllables of these feet ac- 

 cented, the word accent must receive a definition of much- 

 embracing amplitude. 



