154 LITERATURE AND DRAMA 



fashion, the lines are not verse of any kind, but prose, which is 

 absurd. 



Our author is quite fearless in applying his theory even to 

 those examples which have been most obviously written to scan. 

 Thus he prints a verse from Gray as follows : 



When the British : warrior Queen, 

 Bleeding from the : Roman rods, 



Sought with an : indignant mien 

 Counsel of her : country's gods. 



The two dots indicate that Anglo-Saxon pause which he always 

 finds even when, as in the last three lines, any such pause in 

 the delivery would make the verse ridiculous. 



In fine, the new theory requires that we should often pause 

 where no pause is possible, call syllables accented on which no 

 stress falls, and others unaccented on which the plain meaning 

 of the words demands emphasis. It offers no criterion of 

 excellence nor any clue by which we might recover the almost 

 lost art of elocution. Under a new name we meet with the old 

 false law, classifying verse by the mere number of accents ; and 

 in place of scansion we are offered new and far more complex 

 rules which, notwithstanding their great laxity, are yet inap- 

 plicable to much good verse. We conclude that the new theory 

 is of small value. And yet we hold that Dr. Guest was guided 

 by historical research to the very threshold of the door, which, 

 had he opened it, would have disclosed all the secrets of English 

 rhythm and metre. 



In discussing the arrangement of his subject, he promises 

 to treat of a ' metre which resulted from modifying the longer 

 Anglo-Saxon rhythms by the accentual rhythm of the Latin 

 chants,' and again of other metres c which appear to be the 

 natural growth of the Latin rhythm modified by the native 

 rhythm of our language.' Here, as we think, is the root of the 

 whole matter. Two independent verse-systems have endowed 

 English poetry with power and beauty. Two series of rhyth- 

 mical elements, one classical and one native to the soil, co-exist 

 in each verse ; but this idea did not occur to Dr. Guest, for, as 

 we find in later chapters, he simply meant that certain modes 

 of old-fashioned verse were possibly suggested by Latin and 



