This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 edition. Excerpt: ... chapter vii.--metres of english verse. I. general principles. Hav1ng considered the elements which make up our versification, it remains to treat English Metres themselves. The task is not easy. There is an infinite amount of contradiction about the very foundations of our verse. Mr. Ruskin asserts that stress "may be considered as identical with quantity" (preface to his Eng. Prosody). Mr. Henry Sweet, while granting that accent tends to lengthen a short syllable, and lack of accent tends to shorten a long syllable, says emphatically that quantity can not "be identified with stress." The union of quantity and accent is only a tendency; and Schipper's statement (quoted on p. 138) may be accepted as true. In all cases, we should base a metrical rule on observed facts; not, as the late Mr. Lanier did in his Science of English Verse, force a theory on all possible facts, whether carefully analyzed and tested, or not. Thus, there is much justice in Mr. Ruskin's statement that "the measures of verse... have for second and more important function that of assisting and in part compelling clearness of utterance, thus enforcing with noble emphasis, noble words, and making them, by their audible symmetry, not only emphatic but memorable"; but it is only a statement, an observation, --nothing upon which we may found any rule. The only method that can lead to good in the study of English verse is to make the study historical and analytical. Every conclusion must be based on a careful study of facts. Then we have this difficult matter of nomenclature. Certain names for "feet" in classical metres--iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl--were long ago applied to English verse. But every one knows, or ought to know, that the classical iamb or dactyl is...