In Mrs. Browning we find this metre, which might be taken also as five-foot iambic-anapaestic couplets, broken up by internal rhyme (according to the formula a ~3 b2 a ~3 b2 c ~3 d2 c ~3 d2, &c.) in A Drama of Exile (i. 3). For other specimens see Metrik, ii, §§ 244–8.
A number of other anisometrical combinations of verses will be mentioned in Book II, in the chapter on the non-strophic odes.
CHAPTER XVI
IMITATIONS OF CLASSICAL FORMS OF VERSE AND STANZA
§ 209. The English hexameter. Of all imitations of classical metres in English the best known and most popular is the hexameter. In the history of its development we have to distinguish two epochs—that of the first and somewhat grotesque attempts to introduce it into English poetry in the second half of the sixteenth century, and that of its revival in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The hexameter was introduced into English poetry by Gabriel Harvey (1545–1630), who, in his Encomium Lauri, attempted to imitate the quantitative classic verse in the accentual English language, paying attention as much as possible to the quantity of the English words.
Sir Philip Sidney followed with some poetical portions of his Arcadia written in this metre; Stanyhurst (1545–1618) translated the first four books of Virgil in quantitative hexameters; in 1591 Abraham Fraunce translated Virgil’s Alexis, and William Webbe, the metrist, turned into English the Georgics and two eclogues of the same poet, also in quantitative hexameters; but all these efforts had little success on account of the unfitness of English for quantitative treatment. Robert Greene also employed this metre in some of his minor poems, but followed the accentual system; on this account he was more successful, but he found no imitators, and during the latter part of the seventeenth century the metre fell altogether into disuse.
In one isolated case about the middle of the eighteenth century it was revived by an anonymous translator of Virgil’s first and fourth eclogues. But English hexameters did not begin to come into favour again before the close of the eighteenth century, when the influence of the study of German poetry began to make itself felt. Parts of Klopstock’s Messiah were translated by William Taylor (1765–1836) in the metre of the original. He also turned several passages of Ossian into hexameters (published in June, 1796, in the Monthly Magazine), and maintained that the hexameter, modified after the German fashion by the substitution of the accentual for the quantitative principle and the use of trochees instead of spondees, could be used with as good effect in English as in German. About the same time, Coleridge used the hexameter in some of his minor poems, Hymn to the Earth, Mahomet, &c., and Southey chose this form for his longer poem, A Vision of Judgement.