While much earlier, at the very middle of the century, John Mason, a little-known dissenting minister, who was, like Sheridan, a teacher of elocution, quoting and scanning the lines—
And many an amorous, many a humorous lay,
Which many a bard had chanted many a day,
observes that this, "though it increases the number of syllables, sweetens the flow of the verse," "gives a sweetness that is not ordinarily found in the common iambic verse." It would be impossible to state more correctly or more definitely the case for the equivalent substitutional trisyllabic foot in English. But, as we shall see, it was to be nearly two generations before considerable poets boldly adopted (even then not always distinctly championing) the idea, and an entire century, if not more, before the principle was thoroughly accepted and understood.
Mitford.
Two deliberate prosodists, in two books published within a twelvemonth of each other, are memorable as (if not exactly starting) formulating, in a more elaborate way than had ever been done before, the one a mischievous and false, the other the only true method of dealing with prosody. Joshua Steele, in his Prosodia Rationalis (1775), is not always wrong; and William Mitford is not by any means invariably right—in fact, he partly shares Steele's error. But his Harmony of English Verse (1774) is even then to a great extent, and in its second edition, thirty years later, much more, occupied with a careful historical inquiry as to the actual successive forms of his subject from the earliest period. At first he had not even Tyrwhitt's invaluable Chaucer—which appeared in the year after Steele's book—to guide him: later he availed himself of the great accessions to the study of Middle and Elizabethan English which the intervening generation had seen. And so, though he believed too much in accent, and relied too much on the dangerous assistance of music, he frequently came right. He has no doubt (as it is astonishing that an historical student should have any doubt) about trisyllabic feet; he likes what he calls "aberration of accent," i.e. trochaic substitution; and he shows the possession of a fineness and cultivation of ear not as yet noticeable in any English prosodist, by observing the presence of anapæstic rhythm in the revived alliterative verse of Langland. Except the inadequate and perfunctory, as well as of necessity merely inchoate, sketches of Webbe and Puttenham, this was the first attempt really to take English poetry into consideration when studying English prosody; and it had its reward.
Joshua Steele.
On the other hand, Steele, who has been followed by many other prosodists of the same school, entirely neglected the historical contents of his subject, approaching it absolutely a priori, deciding that it is essentially a matter of music, and basing his scansions on purely musical principles. This led him to begin with an anacrusis in every case, and so to invert the whole rhythm of the line. He has been praised for his views on "time" in the abstract, and may deserve the praise; while he was certainly right in regarding pause as an important metrical constituent. But whatever merit there may be in his principles from an abstract point of view, his concrete practice is simply atrocious, and proves him to have had absolutely no ear for English verse whatever. He makes six feet or "cadences with proper rests," at least, and sometimes more, in every heroic line, so that he would scan one famous line thus—
O | happiness, | our | being's | end and | aim,
and he arranges the opening lines of Paradise Lost for scansion thus—