By all these things, and by the special influence of the poets to be mentioned in the early part of the next chapter, useful testimony was continuously given, to the effect that, after all, the decasyllabic couplet, especially in the prevailing form, was not the only metre, nor even the only important metre, in English. But its predominance continued, and its characteristics, as has been said, to some extent infected or inoculated its rivals. "Inoculated" rather than "infected," for, once more let it be repeated, this predominance undoubtedly beat into the English tongue, ear, and mind a sense of the importance of real and regular rhythm—a sense which, for another hundred years and more, has prevented, in the freest expatiation of released prosody, any kind of return to the disorder of the whole fifteenth century, and in some respects, at any rate, of the mid-seventeenth.
FOOTNOTES:
Lo! where Mæotis sleeps, and hardly flows
The freez|ĭng Tănă | is through a waste of snows.
The Dunciad, iii. 87, 88.
[98] In the actual case, of course, dissyllabic feet for trisyllabic; but this could not but suggest the converse process in dissyllabic verse. And the octosyllable was not used for light verse only; Dyer in Grongar Hill (1726) revived the Miltonic form of L'Allegro, etc., with an effect all the more certainly excellent, that it was demurred to by the mistaken critics of the time.
[100] Among whom Lord Roscommon deserves honourable mention.
[101] As by Watts the hymn-writer, John Philips, and Gay.