| Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song First taught our English music how to span Words with just note and accent, not to scan With Midas’ ears, committing short and long. |
The poet of all youthful poets had a narrow escape from “dark forgetfulness” when from the uncouth Latin hexameters, his “Fairy Queen” took refuge in the melodious stanza of modern Italy. Stanyhurst has left a memorable woful version of Virgil, and the pedantic Gabriel Harvey had espoused this Latin intruder among the English muses. The majestic march of the Latin resounding lines, disguised in the miserable English hexameters, quailed under the lash of the satirical Tom Nash, who scourged with searching humour. “The Hexameter verse I grant to be a gentleman of an ancient house (so is many an English beggar), yet this clime of ours he cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough in; he goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gait which he vaunts himself with among the Greeks and Latins.”
A treatise on “the New Poetry,” or “the Reformed Verse,” for it assumed this distinction, was expressly composed by William Webbe, recommendatory of this “Reformation of our English verse.”[4] Some years after Dr. Thomas Campion, accomplished in music and verse, a composer of airs, and a poet of graceful fancy in masques, fluent and airy in his rhymes, seating himself in the critic’s chair, renewed the exotic system. Notwithstanding his own felicity in the lighter measures of English verse, he denounces “the vulgar and inartificial custom of RIMING, which hath, I know, deterred many excellent wits from the exercise of English poetry.”[5] He calls it “the childish titillation of rime.”
We may regret that Dr. Campion, who composed in Latin verse, held his English in little esteem, since he scattered them whenever he was called on, and not always even printed them. The physician, for such was Campion, held too cheap his honours as a poet and a musician; however, he was known in his days as “Sweet Master Campion,” and his title would not be disputed in ours. In dismissing his critical “Observations,” he has prefixed a poem in what he calls “Licentiate Iambicks,” which is our blank verse; it is a humorous address of an author to his little book, consisting only of nearly five leaves:—
| Alas, poor book, I rue Thy rash selfe-love; go spread thy papery wings; Thy lightness cannot helpe, or hurt my fame. |
The poet Daniel replied by his “Defence of Rime,” an elaborate and elegant piece of criticism, to which no reply was sent forth by the anti-rhymers.
It has often been inquired how came the vernacular rhyme to be wholly substituted for the classical metres, since the invaders of the Roman empire everywhere adopted the language of Rome with their own, for in the progress of their dominion everywhere they found that cultivated language established. The victors submitted to the vanquished when the contest solely turned on their genius.
A natural circumstance will explain the occasion of this general rejection of the ancient metres. These artificial structures were operations too refined for the barbarian ear. Their bards, who probably could not read, had neither ability nor inclination to be initiated into an intricate system of metre, foreign to their ear, their tastes, and their habits, already in possession of supremacy in their own poetic art. Their modulation gave rhythm to their recitative, and their musical consonance in their terminable sounds aided their memory; these were all the arts they wanted; and for the rest they trusted to their own spontaneous emotions.