_ " VALERIUS'S " METRICAL EXPERIMENTS.* Ir has been assiduously

impressed on the public that English hexameters and the imitation of classical metres generally are subjects already exploded and worn out by experiments, begin- ning in the sixteenth century and ending in the nineteenth, of which instances are quoted of the same sort as Sir Philip Sidney's,—

• "Unto nobody, my woman salth, she'd rather a wife be Than myself, not though Jove were a suitor of hers. These be her words, but a woman's words to a love that is eager In winds or water's streams do require to be writ ;"

and afterwards, as Dr. Hawtrey's, Longfellow's, and Kings- ley's, e.g.,

"Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia ; "

"Into this wonderful land at the base of the Ozark Mountains;" "'There they found Andr.omeden. and Perseus, fairest of mortals;" or their German forerunner, Klopstock's,— " Wie es den tausendmal tausencl der todten Gottes einst seyn wird ; "

•

—while perhaps scarcely any remembrance remains of such old Italian lines as Sidney may have had to imitate, as we have somewhere seen :—

" Questa per estrema miserabile pistola mando A to che aproni miseramente noi."

For our part, we are obstinate enough to believe that none of these attempts have been made thoroughly by rule, or with enough of musical feeling or conscientious precision to either prove or dis- prove the metrical capacities of modern languages, though they may have established, each about its own author, facts of a some- what different character. And in these observations we must be

understood to leave out of account the specimens published by Our Laureate, and a few which are attributed to Mr. Spedding; we have nothing to say against the correctness and beauty of lines like,— " These lame hexameters, the strong-wing'd music of Homer,

Rich with unexpected changes, smooth, stately, sonorous,"

only they were apparently not intended to produce much positive effect on our literature, because their authors have carefully hinted that they find it somewhat difficult to write continuously with the • Poems in Classical Metres and Qesntftj, B " Valedno." London : Smith and Elder. 1$67. accuracy they have attained in a tour de force. But let us ask, in other cases, what is really and properly the hexameter which modern hexametrists have imitated ? Is it the Homeric or Virgilian verse, as it was read at Athens or al Rome, with its native long and short vowels, and its accents in Greek nearly as we write them (for there is some truth in the recognized accent marks, and only in a few words can they have been misplaced through dialectic changes), and in Latin as they are defined by the rules of Quintilianus ? Or is it the same verse as our system of classical education unluckily allows it to be read at Eton, in a language as different from the original as were from one another the two kinds of French distinguished by Chaucer, where he says of my lady the " Prioresse,"— " Good French she spoke of Stratford-atte-Bowe, For French of Paris was to hiro unknowe," a comparison which Mr. A. J. Ellis has developed with his usual phonotypic precision in the papers of the Philological Society ? It is the last question that we must answer in the affirmative. For as one schoolboy or collegian gets into the habit of reading the ancient epic verse so as to accentuate the first syllable of each foot "Anna virumgue cant)," &c.--so it is the first principle of most of these writers to get this rhythm a little more naturally in the modem line, as in

"Into this wonderful land at the base of the Ozark Mountains."

No doubt Sidney and his contemporaries professed more respect for quantity ; but then they have taken strange liberties with the pronunciation of our language. So in the third of the lines of Sidney we have just quoted, tha first vowel in woman is treated as long ( woe-man or woo-man). You may say that is ancient English usage ; but there is no such usage in the first line, where my woman is treated as a dactyl. And of Sidney's abilities we would speak with all respect ; but his works have reached us in a very unfinished state, and we think he wanted experience and practice to enable him to found a novel school of versification. But to come to another point, we are familiar with the rule that a group of- consonants (with certain exceptions), or even a doubled consonant, as in bellum, lengthens the syllable that it forms with the preceding vowel (in the same word, or sometimes in another). But we are too apt to take for granted that the Roman meant nothing more by his double 1 than we should have done ; and we fancy that Polly contains a similar syllable with Apollo, though not, forsooth I with polish, where it is the custom to write but one 1. The case is quite different; the two l's in Apollo should be pronounced as in Italian, Apolline, or almost as in our coolly, shell-less ; the second 1 in Polly is introduced by a mere stratagem of our orthography, that the reader or learner may not be led by obvious analogies to utter the word like pole-y. These considerations have been neglected by all our hexametrists except by Mr. Stebbing, and this neglect used to produce very queer anomalies, indeed when our orthography was in a more unsettled state. Thus Stanihurst, the translator of Virgil, not only makes the first syllable of sonnet long, but he actually lengthens forest, and other such words, by writing then forrest, and so on, at least where he happens to find it suits his convenience. It is strange that experiments conducted in this licentious fashion should have been held to prove that the English language has no quantities apart from its accents ; they rather prove to us, through painful experiences, that it has quantities to which a deaf ear has been turned by those who professedly paid most attention to them. To " Valerius " we owe cordial thanks for not having despaired of the possibility of writing English verse by quantity, and still more for having attempted it with much carefulness, and to a great extent with a true musical feeling ; he has furthermore embel- lished his efforts, we do not say by an eminently plastic imagination, but with enough of good taste and delicate sentiment to make his little book an agreeable one, in all respects, to read from the beginning to the end. We do not think his field of labour an insignificant one. English poets can write good blank verse without thinking much of quantity, or even of time in a looser sense, but their blank verse sadly wants variety. The revolution which Milton effected in using it for epic poetry has remained imperfect. Those versifiers who dispense with rhyme have mostly been forced to confine themselves to's single decasylla- bic pattern. If they have sometimes cut the rhythm into other various lengths, as Milton himself did in the Samson Agonistes, the effect has often been equivocal or comparatively poor. We agree with " Valerius," that fixed quantity is needed (perhaps with a few regular accents) to "give a precise character and definite constructive form" to our verse. We may show this by the success he obtains in a measure which would not, if rhyme were introduced, be by any mesas unfamiliar to English readers as far as regards the prevalent arrangement of the accents ; the well balanced quantities, however, of its iambs and spondees are characteristic of the classical metrist. We must confess we object to the first two lines of "The Swallow," as containing words of a class whose quantity " Valerius," like many others, has incorrectly estimated in accordance with the artificial spelling ; most of the others appear perfectly correct to us. The formula of the metre is — — — —

"The swallow, lo the swallow, Brings back the rosy summer;

Brings back the days of hope and

Jocund delights of evening. When Hesperus, the fairest Of all the stars' arising, Beams through the leafy tree-tops,

Shines o'er the tranquil ocean."

If there is another class of words which he scans amiss (besides such combinations as the stars, which is a bad iambus) it is those in which ng produces the effect of a single con- sonant only—as ng in long is just equal (except in provincial dialects) to a in longer—a liquid gutturally modified, as we might maintain by the authority of the Phonetic Journal, if we had its types within immediate reach. From these con- siderations we find in the poems before us no inconsiderable number of lines which we hope to see modified in a second edi- tion, though enough correct writing, no doubt, remains to vindi- cate our author's principle of versifying, and even to make us sanguinely anticipate that he will hereafter exemplify it with

some brilliancy. • With regard to the metres he has selected, we are inclined to regret that the elegiac has a very prominent position. This is, at the best, a much less manly and vigorous form of verse than many others, though we suppose it must be considered peculiarly suitable to certain kinds of composition, as it perhaps is to our author's own cast of mind and style of thinking. But the tech- nical difficulties to which we must at the present day give promi- nence are formidable. Our author can write hexameters that are really excellent, witness in his first two pages :—

" There once gods wandered by groves and flowery borders.

• These plains once witness'd thy march, victorious hero. • Earth yields her foison, seas roll, and freedom awakened.

Earth knows no decrease, both wealth and victory yields she."

It will be admitted, however, that these hexameters are uniformly rhythtnized on a Latin model, and not on a Greek, that is to say, the accent, though free in the first feet, grows regular as we reach the end of the line, and never misses the penult, perhaps never the fifth syllable from the end. This is of course the dominant rhythm in Latin hexameters, but not exactly in Greek, for two of the earliest lines in Homer end in the words ;km and [3004 Now, we do not by any means object to " Valerius's" selecting his model hexameter from whichever of the classic languages he thinks proper, but are his pentameters as Latin as his hexameters? By no means ; for you can hardly find a Latin pentameter in which the last syllable is accented ; it is mostly the penult of the verse, occasionally the antepenult, that is so. Very possibly this usage was less recommended by positive euphony than it was enforced by the barytone structure of the Latin language ; at any rate, most Englishmen have an instinctive inclination to read pen- tameters with an accent on the last syllable. Perhaps the habit would be approved by those critics who believe all quantitative verse was read with a purely conventional accentuation, though we can hardly conceive such an artificial utterance to have accom- panied Greek verse in the tragic, or certainly not in the comic drama.

But in " Valerius's " pentameters, the accent ranges freely over the last three syllables, so making, we think, a variety that will be too perplexing to "the weaker brethren," whose ear is just beginning to accustom itself to the metre which is "caviare to the multitude" among us. Furthermore, his pentameters are not regularly divided ; the hemistich mostly begins, it is true, with the beginning of a word ; but the word may be one which our modes of speaking render it almost impossible to join more closely with those that follow it than those that precede. It is true " Valerius " seems to intimate that the Latin =aura is of no real use, except as it produces a certain balance of quantity and accent ; and, perhaps, a similar view has been expressed by Mr. Spedding. We think coesnra produces both the described effect in Latin verse, and some other effect independently of the structure of that language : why else should the Greek poet need it ?

All the good points we have remarked in Valerins's versification, and the weaker ones we have noticed in no hostile spirit, will be pretty well exemplified by the ten lines which he has entitled " Trajan's Pillar." Their correctness, as elegiac verses, is as yet unrivalled in English literature, though to exceed it may hereafter be nothing difficult ; their elegance may continue notable.

"See this stately column with Trajan's glorious exploits In sculptured form which rise a procession on high! Here vanquished nations and fierce barbarian armies Confess Rome's power, and follow the princely triumph. Through burning regions, where distant Media fosters Swift steeds and daring horsemen amidst the desert ; Or through waste marches, dark woods, by Dacian L3ter, Rome's eagles moved with Victory still to direct. In Trajan virtues of statesman, warrior, all were Joined for Rome's perfect mirror of haughty merit."