HEXAMETERS.
I have been examining a book by the POET LAUREATE, in which that learned and painstaking man puts forward for general acceptance a new theory and a new practice of metre in English poetry. It seems that our verse is accentual, whereas it ought to be quantitative—or it may be the other way about; my brain is in such a whirl with it all that I can't be certain which is right, but I am sure that one of them is, and so I leave you to take your choice. Failing that, you can buy Dr. BRIDGES' book, which is entitled Ibant Obscuri (Oxford University Press), and thus expresses my inmost convictions about our great official poet and his followers. We are henceforth to write hexameters in English on an entirely new plan, of which the result is that they lose all likeness to any hexameters previously encountered on the slopes of Parnassus or anywhere else and become something so blind and staggering and dreadfully amorphous that the whole mind of the reader rises up in revolt against them.
That, at any rate, is my condition at this moment after going through a course of them. I notice that the reviewers have been a little shy of these hexametric efforts. They have mostly described them as "interesting experiments" and have applauded Dr. BRIDGES for his adventurous industry and his careful scholarship, and thereafter they have skirmished on the outskirts and have shown a disinclination to come to grips with the LAUREATE on the main question whether these hexameters are a success or a failure. Now I have no hesitation whatever in admitting my metrical ignorance and at the same time in denouncing as a fiasco the experiment of Dr. BRIDGES. I have spent some time in struggling with his hexameters; I have attempted to track his dactyls to their lair; I have followed up what I took to be his spondees, and I am thankful to say that I have managed to survive.
Let me now give some examples, not composed, it is true, by the LAUREATE, but by myself. This is not an unfair proceeding, for it will serve to show the effect of Ibant Obscuri on a mind not too obtuse. I promise that the rules shall be observed. There shall be six feet in each line, dactyls or spondees, and the fifth foot shall be a dactyl and the sixth a spondee or a trochee. Are you ready? Go!
Apollo now came forth his course through the sky to fulfil;
In other words it was morning and most people got out of bed;
And fathers of families munched and grumbled at their breakfasts,
Denouncing their bacon and not to be mollified with their
Coffee or tea, as the case might be, and the housewives reproved them,
Saying 'twas impossible to control them with such an example.
Beyond the above I cannot go, but I must add that the lines are of the most perfect metrical lucidity and the purest melody when compared with some written by the LAUREATE in Ibant Obscuri.