NOTES BY PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY
1. I think most ears would take these as anapaestic throughout. But the introduction of Milton's
Drunk with Idolatry, drunk with wine
as a leit-motiv is of the first interest.
Description of it, l. 4, very curious. I should have thought no one could have run 'drunk with wine' together as one foot.
2. Admirable! I hardly know better trochaics.
3. Very interesting: but the terminology odd. The dochmius, a five-syllabled foot, is (in one form—there are about thirty!) an antispast ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ plus a syllable. Catalectic means (properly) minus a syllable. But the verses as quantified are really dochmiac, and the only attempts I have seen. Shall I own I can't get any English Rhythm on them?
4. More ordinary: but a good arrangement and wonderful for the date.
5. Not nonsense at all: but, metrically, really his usual elegiac.
6. This, if early, is almost priceless. It is not only lovely in itself, but an obvious attempt to recover the zig-zag outline and varied cadence of seventeenth century born—the things that Shelley to some extent, Beddoes and Darley more, and Tennyson and Browning most were to master. I subscribe (most humbly) to his suggestions, especially his second.
7. Very like some late seventeenth-century (Dryden time) motives and a leetle 'Moorish'.
8. Like 6, and charming.
9. A sort of recurrence to Pindaric—again pioneer, as the soul of S. T. C. had to be always.
10 and 11. Ditto.
13. Again, I should say, anapaestic—but this anapaest and amphibrach quarrel is ἄσπονδος.