[CHAPTER I]
BEFORE 1700
Dearth of early prosodic studies.
In hardly any language are studious investigations into the form of verse likely to be early, and in a language with such a history as English they could not possibly be so. We have indeed, from the early fourteenth century, some remarks of Robert of Brunne on kinds of verse—"cowee" (Romance-six), "baston,"[130] "enterlace" (pretty obvious), etc., but with no explanation or discussion; and Chaucer himself (who, in this respect as in others, is slavishly followed by Lydgate[131]) makes apologies for roughness and inexperience.[132] In Gower (Conf. Am. iv. 2414) there is a reference, but after Chaucer and not yet quite satisfactorily explained, to the difference between "rhyme" and "cadence," while in the Scottish chronicler Wyntoun there is another reference[133] to "cadence." Again, in Chaucer we have the Parson's famous disclaimer of indulgence in "rum ram ruf," because the speaker is "a Southern man." But not one of these things makes the slightest pretence to be even a prosodic discussion, let alone a prosodic treatise; and it is not till towards the end of the third quarter of the sixteenth century—when a whole generation had already followed Wyatt in endeavouring to effect, in practice, the reform of the prosodic breakdown from Lydgate to Hawes, if not even to Barclay—that the first English prosodic treatise appears in the shape of Gascoigne's Notes of Instruction (1572-75). They had been a little anticipated in time by remarks of Ascham's, and perhaps of others, on a new fashion of classical "versing," on which more presently; but this, though essentially prosodic in character, had not yet formed the subject of a regular treatise, and its exponents implicitly or expressly declined all meddling with "beggarly rhyme," i.e. with the form of English poetry proper.
Gascoigne.
Gascoigne's little book[134] is very short, very practical, very sensible, and—except in one unlucky remark, which (or rather the misunderstanding of it) has done harm to the present day—in the main, perfectly sound. He dwells on the importance of accent and of the observation of it; and he was quite right, for even Wyatt had been very loose in this respect, and the desire to get out of the doggerel of the fifteenth century[135] had led novices in precision to strain the accent, in order that they might keep the quantity. But he insists also—and with more than a century of awful examples to justify him if he had cared to use them—on "keeping metre"—on not wandering from lines of one length or character to those of another as the rhyme-royalists of the preceding century constantly do. He gives rules for the pause, leaving rhyme-royal itself free in that respect. He mentions especially, besides rhyme-royal, "riding rhyme" (Chaucerian couplet), "poulter's measure" (the alternate Alexandrine and fourteener), and octosyllables. He deprecates poetic commonplaces ("cherry lips" and the like), and gives some positive rules for pronunciation ("Heav'n" is to be always monosyllabic).
His remark on feet.
The excepted unlucky point is his remark that "commonly nowadays in English rhymes we use no other than a foot of two syllables, whereof the first is depressed and made short, and the second elevated or made long." He says that "we have used in times past other kinds of metres," giving as example the anapæstic line—
No wight | in this world | that wealth | can attain;[136]