ON RHYTHM IN ENGLISH VERSE 165 



Assu'me th8 po'rt tff Mar's ' : and at his heels 



Lea'shed In' like houn'ds : should fani'me" swo'rd Snd fl're 



Crou'ch ftfr gmploy'mgnt ' : but par'dfrn gen'tlgs all'. 



These noble lines will serve aptly to introduce the difficulties 

 met with in English scansion, and to illustrate the mode now 

 suggested of meeting them. The practice according to which a 

 stress would be thrown on the conjunction i and ' in the first 

 line is to our ear singularly disagreeable; but, if a pause 

 followed by a weak syllable be allowed to count as a long 

 element (no new idea), this line and many which are similar to 

 it will be found to scan with perfect regularity. If the reader 

 will look back and forward he will find in this rule the explana- 

 tion of the long marks which appear over several insignificant 

 words, such as 'to' and 'of in examples already quoted. 

 Looking upon scansion as derived from a system of longs and 

 shorts, we shall see nothing forced in this claim, and we shall be 

 prepared to grant a further demand that when necessary a pause 

 may be allowed to do duty for a syllable, long or short. Thus, 

 in the third line above, scansion seems to us impossible unless 

 the pause be allowed to count as a long element. With this 

 licence we scan the line as an ordinary alexandrine. 



This conception of a pause as sometimes equivalent to a long 

 syllable helps us to understand why we contentedly accept an 

 eleventh and even a twelfth short syllable after the long element 

 of the fifth iamb. These short superabundant syllables do not 

 break the iambic flow of the verse, for with the final pause they 

 make one iamb the more, and yet this foot is not sufficiently 

 prominent to disturb our sense of number requiring the feet to 

 be grouped in sets of five. To scan an English line we must 

 further have leave to count any syllable long which receives 

 a secondary accent, or is in any way slightly more prominent 

 than its neighbour. We must have leave to count two short 

 syllables as one to treat elision as a reality and not a fiction, 

 which it certainly is ; and, finally, to count spondees as equi- 

 valent to iambs, possibly on the plea that we may, if we please, 

 lay rather more stress on the second syllable than the first. It 

 is probably better frankly to admit the spondee, and scan 

 Milton's well-known line as follows : 



Rock's ca'ves la'kes fen's bog's den's ; and sha'des t>f dea/th. 



