[92] Some quite boyish things, a beautiful passage of the Arcades, and a few couplets in Comus are the exceptions.
[93] By the two Fletchers, Giles reducing it to an octave ababbccc and Phineas to a septet ababccc.
[94] That of Sir John Beaumont (v. sup. p. [78] et inf. Book III.).
[95] This, like Marmion's Cupid and Psyche, Chalkhill's Thealma and Clearchus, and other pieces exemplifying the form, is a verse-romance, a kind for which that form has special, though dangerous, adaptation.
[96] The continuous anapæst appears, after Tusser, in Elizabethan poetry chiefly in popular ballad; and it is only about 1645 that literary poets, like Waller and Cleveland, take it up.
[CHAPTER IV]
HALT AND RETROSPECT—CONTINUATION ON HEROIC VERSE AND ITS COMPANIONS FROM DRYDEN TO CRABBE
Recapitulation.
It is desirable, if not absolutely necessary, at this point (circa 1660, which, though not in strict number of years or centuries, is in fact the central stage of English prosody) to halt and recapitulate what had been done since the formation of Middle English by the influence of Latin and French upon Old. The conditions of the blend having necessitated a new prosody, that prosody was, as was natural, slowly elaborated; but the lines which it was to take, in consequence of the imposition of strict form upon a vigorous and strongly characterised but rather shapeless material, appeared almost at once. Metre replaced the unmetrical rhythm of Anglo-Saxon; but this metre had to take forms greatly more elastic than the strict syllabic arrangement of French, and differently constituted from the also mainly syllabic arrangement of Lower Latin. And so, in the verse of the thirteenth and earlier fourteenth century, a foot-system, with allowance of equivalent substitution, makes its appearance—roughly, but more and more clearly. Nor is this at all affected by the alliterative revival of the last-mentioned period, which partly makes terms with metre and rhyme, partly pursues its own way—to reach its highest point with Langland, and to die away soon after the close of the fifteenth century. At the very same time with Langland himself, the pure metrical system is brought to its highest perfection by Chaucer. But this perfection depends on a state of the language which is "precarious and not at all permanent," and in the fifteenth century English metre, as far as the Southern and main division of the language is concerned, falls, to a great extent, into anarchy.