1. The classical poets are authors preeminently familiarized to the educated English reader.
2. The notions imbibed from a study of the classical prosodies have been unduly mixed up with those which should have been derived more especially from the poetry of the Gothic nations.
3. The attempt to introduce (so-called) Latin and Greek metres into the Gothic tongues, has been partially successful on the Continent, and not unattempted in Great Britain.
[§ 652]. The first of these statements requires no comment.
The second, viz., "that the notions imbibed, &c." will bear some illustration; an illustration which verifies the assertion made in p. [505], that the English grammarians "sometimes borrow the classical terms iambic, trochee," &c., and apply them to their own metres.
How is this done? In two ways, one of which is wholly incorrect, the other partially correct, but inconvenient.
To imagine that we have in English, for the practical purposes of prosody, syllables long in quantity or short in quantity, syllables capable of being arranged in groups
constituting feet, and feet adapted for the construction of hexametres, pentametres, sapphics, and alcaics, just as the Latins and Greeks had, is wholly incorrect. The English system of versification is founded, not upon the periodic recurrence of similar quantities, but upon the periodic recurrence of similar accents.
The less incorrect method consists in giving up all ideas of the existence of quantity, in the proper sense of the word, as an essential element in English metre; whilst we admit accent as its equivalent; in which case the presence of an accent is supposed to have the same import as the lengthening and the absence of one, as the shortening of a syllable; so that, mutatis mutandis, a is the equivalent to [ˉ], and x to [˘].
In this case the metrical notation for—