The Grammar of English Grammars - Goold Brown

OBS. 6.—Of Dactylic verse, our prosodists and grammarians in general have taken but very little notice; a majority of them appearing by their silence, to have been utterly ignorant of the whole species. By many, the dactyl is expressly set down as an inferior foot, which they imagine is used only for the occasional diversification of an iambic, trochaic, or anapestic line. Thus Everett: "It is never used except as a secondary foot, and then in the first place of the line."—English Versification, p. 122. On this order of verse, Lindley Murray bestowed only the following words: "The DACTYLIC measure being very uncommon, we shall give only one example of one species of it:—

Fr=om th~e l~ow pl=eas~ures ~of th=is f~all~en n=at~ure,
Rise we to higher, &c."—Gram., 12mo, p. 207; 8vo, p. 257.

Read this example with "we rise" for "Rise we," and all the poetry of it is gone! Humphrey says, "Dactyle verse is seldom used, as remarked heretofore; but is used occasionally, and has three metres; viz. of 2, 3, and 4 feet. Specimens follow. 2 feet. Free from anxiety. 3 feet. Singing most sweetly and merrily. 4 feet. Dactylic measures are wanting in energy."—English Prosody, p. 18. Here the prosodist has made his own examples; and the last one, which unjustly impeaches all dactylics, he has made very badly—very prosaically; for the word "Dactylic," though it has three syllables, is properly no dactyl, but rather an amphibrach.

OBS. 7.—By the Rev. David Blair, this order of poetic numbers is utterly misconceived and misrepresented. He says of it, "DACTYLIC verse consists of a short syllable, with one, two, or three feet, and a long syllable; as,

'D~istr=act~ed w~ith w=oe,
'I'll r=ush ~on th~e f=oe.' ADDISON."—Blair's Pract. Gram., p. 119.

"'Y~e sh=eph~erds s~o ch=eerf~ul ~and g=ay,
'Wh~ose fl=ocks n~ev~er c=arel~essl~y r=oam;
'Sh~ould C=or~yd~on's h=app~en t~o str=ay,
'Oh! c=all th~e p=oor w=and~er~ers h=ome.' SHENSTONE."—Ib., p. 120.

It is manifest, that these lines are not dactylic at all. There is not a dactyl in them. They are composed of iambs and anapests. The order of the versification is Anapestic; but it is here varied by the very common diversification of dropping the first short syllable. The longer example is from a ballad of 216 lines, of which 99 are thus varied, and 117 are full anapestics.

OBS. 8.—The makers of school-books are quite as apt to copy blunders, as to originate them; and, when an error is once started in a grammar, as it passes with the user for good learning, no one can guess where it will stop. It seems worth while, therefore, in a work of this nature, to be liberal in the citation of such faults as have linked themselves, from time to time, with the several topics of our great subject. It is not probable, that the false scansion just criticised originated with Blair; for the Comprehensive Grammar, a British work, republished in its third edition, by Dobson, of Philadelphia, in 1789, teaches the same doctrine, thus: "Dactylic measure may consist of one, two, or three Dactyls, introduced by a feeble syllable, and terminated by a strong one; as,