and the trochees in his
Uncropped fālls tŏ the ground,
and in Cowley's
And the soft wings of peace cōvĕr him round,
are condemned as "inharmonious." He objects to Milton's "elisions"—that is to say, the devices necessary on his own system to avoid trisyllabic feet—and so to these feet themselves. He thinks the Spenserian stanza, Lycidas, and the end of Comus bad, because the lines and rhymes are not regularly arranged. In short, he is an unhesitating—and almost the greatest—believer in the sheer, alternately accented, middle-paused, syllabically limited decasyllable; though, with perhaps inevitable inconsistency, he does admit that, without variation of accent, the series of sounds would be not only very difficult but "tiresome and disgusting," while maintaining at the same time stoutly that this variation "always injures the harmony of the line considered by itself."
Shenstone.
The inconveniences of this rigid system were not, however, entirely unnoticed. At an uncertain time, but probably between 1740 and his death, the poet William Shenstone urged, in a posthumously published Essay, the beauty of what he called "virtual dactyls"—that is to say, words like "watery" and "tottering,"—distinctly arguing that "it seems absurd to print them otherwise than at full length"—the "otherwise" being the established practice, based upon definite theory, of the century.
Sheridan.
Johnson's friend the elocutionist Sheridan, in his Art of Reading (1775), calls it absurd (as it certainly is) to regard "echoing" as metrically "ech'ing." And, later, the poet Cowper, though using ambiguous and irresolute terminology on the subject, admits the "divine harmony" of Milton's "elisions"—by which, he explains in the most self-contradictory way, "the line is lengthened."
John Mason.