FOOTNOTES:
[15] The most recent, perhaps, and the most unfortunate competitor is "stress-unit"—for there are most certainly feet (i.e. constitutive divisions of lines) which include no stress at all.
[16] A full account of these would occupy a book bigger than the larger History. Among the latest and most curious attempts on the subject is one to mark off certain metrical rhythms as "accentual," certain others as "quantitative." This (which partly results from the superfluous anxiety to discover and isolate the sources of length and shortness) makes something very like a chimera or a hotch-potch of English verse.
[17] In metrical quantity, not in vowel sound.
[18] Of Anglo-Saxon and very early Middle English poetry. See Scanned Conspectus and [Book II].
[19] Except, to speak paradoxically, when it is nothing at all. The pause-foot or half-foot, the "equivalent of silence," is by no means an impossible or unknown thing in English poetry, as, for instance, in Lady Macbeth's line, I. v. 41—
Under | my bat|tlements. | ʌ Come, | you spirits,
where | spĭrīts, | though not actually impossible, would spoil the line in one way, and "come," as a monosyllabic foot, in another.
[20] The exceptions, and probably the only ones, are to be found, if anywhere, in some modern blank verse, where two tribrachs, or a tribrach and an iamb or anapæst, succeed each other.
[21] It is difficult to see how this effect can be avoided by those who think that accents or stresses, governing prosody, vary in Milton from eight to three.
[22] Having already called it "an odious piece of pedantry," the critic (Blackwood's Magazine, April 1849) adds: "What metre, Greek or Roman, Russian or Chinese, it was intended to imitate we have no care to inquire: the man was writing English and had no justifiable pretence for torturing our ears with verse like this."
[23] Such as "Under the Greenwood Tree."
[24] For cautions and additions, as well as explanations, see [Glossary], especially under "Foot," "Stress-unit," "Quantity," etc.