(Observe how the alternation of central pause, strongly (|) and weakly (¦) or hardly at all (no mark) emphasised, knits and shades the verse; and how, in the first line, there is positive enjambment. Yet there is still no trisyllabic substitution. This type is continued and perfected in the great satires and didactic pieces for argument and attack, and in the Fables for narrative. It admits, to relieve monotony, the Alexandrine (Hind and Panther, i. 23, 24))—

Their corps[e] to perish, but their kind to last,
So much | the death|less plant | the dy|ing fruit | surpassed;

the triplet (ibid. a little further)—

Can I believe eternal God could lie
Disguised in mortal mould and infancy,
That the great Maker of the world could die?

both combined (Palamon and Arcite, ii. 560-562)—

There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor's thought,
And mid|wife time | the ri|pened plot | to mur|der brought;

and sometimes the fourteener (Medal, 94)—

Thou leapst o'er all eternal truths in thy Pindaric way.

(c) Passages from Garth, (1), and Pope, (2) and (3), to illustrate the mechanical character of the eighteenth-century couplet, the ease with which it can be shifted from decasyllabic to octosyllabic, and its peculiar construction of ridge-backed antithetic pause: