obtain absolutely smooth verses by removing the irregularities of Shakespeare's verse by the use of the shortened forms of the speech of Shakespeare's time. It is not necessary to read:

'Tis sweet and com'dab' in your nature, Hamlet,

Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contum❜ly etc., but we can scan these and most of the similar verses with five bars, if we read the two syllables, which are to be slurred, in the time of one syllable:

'Tis sweet and cómmendable in your náture, Hámlet, The oppressor's wróng, the proud man's cóntumelý etc., ep. Omond, Engl. Metr. (1907), p. 126.

No definite rules with regard to elision or slurring can be given, this depends on the taste of the poet and the reader; cp. Omond, Study of Metre, p. 66f.:

"Fadladeen, the captious critic in Moore's poem, censures the disguised prince for using exquisite as a dissyllable; and Guest, in all seriousness, similarly upbraids Wordsworth and Coleridge for so using the word delicate. No critic now maintains this view. It is universally abandoned. Yet discussions still go on about how many syllables such a line may carry, what and how many 'trisyllabic feet' it may contain . . . To suppose that Shakespeare said del'cate is ridiculous; but this is a false deduction from a real fact. The fact is that the word delicate can be easily uttered to a duple beat, in the normal time of two syllables; and this gives our principle. Whatever syllables can be so uttered are legitimate. Fixed rules cannot be made, for circumstances alter words. The same syllables will be now admissible, at another time not The poet is arbiter for himself. He judges which syllables fulfil

this condition; we judge if he has judged aright. Mistakes are no doubt made both by writer and reader. The worst are made when a poet writes by rule instead of ear . . . But the general principle remains though writer or reader may misapply it in particular cases."

In the older period especially we often find a word extended by the insertion of a gliding sound between a stop and / or r, e.g. Engeland, rememberance, childeren, wonderous etc., so too fire, squire, our, hour, flower, etc., are often scanned as two syllables.

§ 209. Temporal Uniformity. Coincidence of Foot and Word.

When in spite of the liberties, which the poet takes (§§ 206. 208), the rhythmical scheme remains essentially unaltered, the cause is to be found in the fact that the individual feet or bars of the verse have temporal uniformity. Thus, when there is inverted accent (§ 206), the interval of time is not altered; and two unaccented syllables may come together, only when they can be uttered in the time usually taken by one (§ 208). Earlier English metrists have often neglected this important fact, and have therefore arrived at wrong conceptions with regard to the rhythmical structure of NE. verse; but Alden, The Time-Element in English Verse (Mod. Lang. Notes, Dec. 1899 and English Verse, pp. 391-409), Omond, Engl. Metrists, p. 240, Lewis, Principles, p. 16 and others have emphasised the fact,

The temporal uniformity is, of course, clearest in

such verses as:

Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow

(Shakespeare, Sonnets 106, 6),

And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies

(Milton, Par. Lost 2, 950), All joy, all glory, all sorrow, all strength, all mirth. All lutes, all harps, all viols, all flutes, all lyres

(Swinburne, Poet. Works 5, 298),

which closely follow the rhythmical scheme and may be shown by the formula xa xbx c x d x e (§ 187). But if such verses, in which there is a grammatical pause at the end of each foot, were to occur in great numbers, they would become very monotonous. Therefore even in classical poetry the coincidence of a foot of a verse with the beginning of a word was as far as possible avoided, e.g.;

Arma virumque ca no Troiae qui | primus ab oris,

But since in English most words begin with an accented syllable, and iambic verse, which is the most common, begins with an unaccented syllable, the too frequent coincidence of the foot with the beginning of a word is avoided; cp. Tennyson's With rosy slen der fingers back ward drew,

the scheme of which is x a x bx c x dx e.

In trochaic rhythm this coincidence is of course very frequent, e.g.

England mother | born of | seamen | daughter | fostered] of the sea (Swinburne), and this is perhaps the reason why trochaic rhythm

is rare in English and makes a monotonous impression; cp. Alden, Engl. Verse, p. 408.

In the case of iambic rhythm in NE., however, it must also be borne in mind that many monosyllabic proclitics such as prepositions, articles, adjectival pronouns compose a grammatical unity with the following noun, so too an adjective with a noun and a verb with its object, so that even in verses, which contain many monosyllables, the coincidence of foot and word or word-group is very limited, if one groups the words in 'speechbars'; cp. e.g.:

The-curfew tolls-the-knell | of-parting-day,

The-lowing-herd | winds-slow ly o'er-the-lea,
The-plough man home ward-plods | his-weary-way
And-leaves-the-world | to-darkness and-to-me.

Since the grammatical grouping of the words of the verse continually changes in a continous poem, it is precisely in the verse of five feet that we find a great variety of types, which can all be united in one common verse scheme, which they never fully suppress (§ 187). But Skeat (Chaucer's Works VI, LXXXIII ff.) and Bridges (Milton's Prosody, Oxford 1901, p. 88 ff.) are wrong in making the verse consist only and solely of these grammatical word-groups (monopressures or stressunits), of various length and stress, and thereby neglecting the uniform verse scheme, which forms the foundation. It is by a combination of both, by the conflict between the uniform rhythmical

scheme and the continually changing word-groups that the variety of the NE. verse arises.

In measuring the temporal uniformity of the individual feet the cæsura pauses, whether they occur within or at the end of a foot, are of course not to be reckoned. The poet can of course

omit a part of the rhythmical scheme, cp. e.g. Tennyson's

On thy cold gray stones, o sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

$ 210. Rime and Alliteration.

On rime of various kinds see §§ 136-150. Unrimed alliterative verse died out at the beginning of the sixteenth century; but many modern English poets use alliteration as an ornament to their verse.

NOTE 1. The following works deal with alliteration from the time of Chaucer: Lindner, The Alliteration in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Rostock 1876. — Mac Clumpha, The Alliteration of Chaucer, Leipzig 1888. Petzoldt, Über Alliteration in den Werken Chaucers mit Ausschluss der Canterbury Tales, Marburg 1890. Höfer, Alliteration bei Gower, Leipzig 1890. Lithgow, English Alliteration from Chaucer to Milton (Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, 2. Ser. 18, 2). Spencer, Alliteration in Spenser's Poetry, Zürich 1900. Zeuner, Die Alliteration bei neuenglischen Dichtern, Halle 1880. Seitz, Zur Alliteration im Neuenglischen, Itzehoe 1883. Opitz, Die stabreimenden Wortverbindungen in den Dichtungen W. Scotts, Breslau 1894. Steffen, Die Alliteration bei