[145] Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Warter (London, 1856), i. 69.
[146] The evidence of this obsession is concentrated in Book I. chap. iv. pp. 74-101; but diffused over the entire treatise.
[147] This seems to have presented itself to him throughout as a matter of course, not requiring demonstration and hardly likely to be contested; it is perhaps most categorically affirmed at Book II. chap. iii. p. 184.
[148] This also is pervading. It "gathers itself up" most in the context just cited, and at pp. 301 and 400-402, the two last among the most surprising instances of complete misunderstanding of history by a real historical scholar.
[149] Perhaps it should be said that a "section" is a bundle of "accented" and "unaccented" syllables extending in possible bulk from three syllables with two accents (Guest's minimum) to eleven syllables with three accents. Of a pair of these, similar or dissimilar, a verse consists.
[CHAPTER III]
LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY PROSODISTS
Discussions on the Evangeline hexameter.
The amount of prosodic writing during the last seventy years has been very large. In the earliest and latest parts of the period it was principally devoted to the subject of English hexameters—in the first, in regard to the accentual attempts of Longfellow, to which Evangeline gave immense popularity; in the last, to the counter-attempts at "quantitative" versification, in which the feet are constructed, not with reference to accent or to the way in which the words are ordinarily pronounced, but to independent and even opposed temporal value derived from the special sound attached to the vowel ("īdol," long; "fĭddle," short, etc.), or, on semi-classical principles, to what is called "position." To analyse the individual views of critics on these two bodies of questions would be here impossible, and reference must be made to the larger History, to Mr. Omond's treatises, or to the original works, the most important of which will be found duly entered in the [Bibliography]. But we may summarise results under three heads.