at ease in a shade plott
Makst thicke groues to resound with songes of brave Amarillis.

The following stanzas are from a Sapphic ode into which Webbe translated, or as we should say, transposed the fourth Eclogue of Spenser's Sheepheardes Calendar.

There are many faults in these verses; over quaintnesses of language, constructions impossible in English, quantities of doubtful correctness, harsh elisions, for Webbe has tried even elisions. Yet, if I may trust my judgment, all of them can still be read with pleasure; the sapphics may almost be called a success. This is even more true of metres, where these faults are less perceptible or more easily avoided, for instance, Asclepiads. Take the verses on solitariness, Arcadia, B. II. fin.

or the hendecasyllables immediately preceding,

It is obvious that a very little more trouble would have converted these into very perfect and very pleasing poems. Had Sir Philip Sidney written every asclepiad on the model of Where man's mind hath a freed consideration, every hendecasyllable like Where sweet graces erect the stately banner, the adjustment of accent and quantity thus attained might, I think, have induced greater poets than he to make the experiment on a larger scale. But neither he nor his contemporaries were permitted to grasp as a principle a regularity which they sometimes secured by chance; nor, so far as I am aware, have the various revivals of ancient metre in this country or Germany in any case consistently carried out the whole theory, without which the reproduction is partial, and cannot look for a more than partial success. Even the four specimens given in the posthumous edition of Clough's poems, two of them elegiac, one alcaic, one in hexameters, though professedly constructed on a quantitative basis, and, in one instance (Trunks the forest yielded, with gums ambrosial oozing, &c.) combining legitimate quantity (in which accent and position are alike observed) with illegitimate (in which position is observed, but accent disregarded) into a not unpleasing rhythm, cannot be considered as more than imperfect realizations of the true positional principle. Tennyson's three specimens are, at least in English, still unique. It is to be hoped that he will not suffer them to remain so. Systems of Glyconics and Asclepiads are, if I mistake not, easily manageable, and are only thought foreign to the genius of our language because they have never been written on strict principles of art by a really great master.

What, then, are the rules on which such rhythms become possible? They are, briefly, these:—(1) accented syllables, as a general rule, are long, though some syllables which count as long need not be accented, as in

blossoms, though only accented on the first syllable, counts for a spondee, the shortness of the second o being partly helped out by the two consonants which follow it; partly by the fact that the syllable is in thesi; (2) the laws of position are to be observed, according to the general rules of classical prosody: (a) dactyls terminating in a consonant like beautiful, bounteous, or ending in a double vowel or a diphthong like all of you, surely may, come to thee, must be followed by a word beginning with a vowel or y or h; dactyls terminating in a vowel or y, like slippery, should be followed, except in rare cases, by words beginning with a consonant; trochees, whether composed of one word or more, should, if ending in a consonant, be followed by a vowel,