Wordsworth.
Wordsworth says very little about metrical detail in his famous Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads and its successors—appearing to think, and indeed in one place asserting, that "harmony of numbers" comes of itself to a person who has other poetical qualifications.
Coleridge.
His two just-mentioned friends, however, lodged, at a slightly later period, two of the most important preceptist documents of English prosody, though they were documents differing very widely in the extent and character of their importance. These were Coleridge's note on the metre of Christabel, and Southey's Preface to the Vision of Judgment. The latter is too long to give, and is written from a mistaken point of view; but it, and the much-ridiculed poem which it accompanied, undoubtedly restarted the practice of attempting to write English hexameters, which has been continued, with some intervals and some episodes, but at times most busily, ever since. The former must be given at length, and some comment made on it:—
Christabel, its theory and its practice.
"The metre of the Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle, namely, that of counting, in each line, the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion."
What Christabel metre really was has been expounded earlier, and its author's account of it is not a little surprising. When he called its principle "new" he must have forgotten—not exactly the Middle English writers, whom he very likely did not know, nor perhaps Gray, though the latter's remarks on Spenser's February were actually published before Christabel, but—Spenser himself and Chatterton (both of whom he certainly knew, if not Blake also), as well as the very ballad-writers whom he had himself imitated in the Ancient Mariner. His mention of "accents" and not "feet" argues an erroneous and inadequate theory which leaves much of the beauty of his own work unexplained; while it can be shown from the text itself that the variation of syllables, though metrically beautiful, often does not correspond at all with any special point of sense, passion, imagery, or anything else. But his practice more than cured any wound which his theory may have inflicted.
Prosodists from 1800 to 1850.
In comparison with Southey's and Coleridge's remarks, and still more with the practice of the latter in Christabel and the Ancient Mariner, the preceptist prosody of the extreme end of the eighteenth century, and the first third of the nineteenth becomes, except for exhaustive students of the subject, a mere curiosity, and not a very interesting one. Prosodic remarks, mostly erroneous or inadequate, found their way into popular handbooks, such as Walker's Dictionary (almost wholly wrong) and Lindley Murray's Grammar (partially right). The musical theories of Steele were taken up by others, such as Odell, Roe, and, above all, the republican lecturer Thelwall, who, escaping the consequences of his earlier extravagances, became a teacher of elocution. The new Reviews gave opportunity for occasional critical remarks on the subject—the most notable of which was the Quarterly review, by Croker, of Keats's Endymion,—usually embodying the cramped and ignorant doctrinairism of the preceding century. Southey's hexameters started a large amount of writing on that subject. In 1816 John Carey, compiler of the best-known Latin Gradus and author of many "cribs" and school editions, repeated most of the errors of Bysshe, but did grudgingly allow trisyllabic feet; and in 1827 William Crowe, a minor poet and Public Orator at Oxford, wrote a treatise of English Versification—good in method, but bad in principle—condemning the adjustment of very short to longer lines, etc. Nothing of this period comes in importance near to that second edition of Mitford (1804, with most of the historical matter added) which has been noticed.
Guest.