In hardly any language are studious investigations into the form of verse likely to be early, and in a language with such a history as English they could not possibly be so. We have indeed, from the early fourteenth century, some remarks of Robert of Brunne on kinds of verse—"cowee" (Romance-six), "baston,"[130] "enterlace" (pretty obvious), etc., but with no explanation or discussion; and Chaucer himself (who, in this respect as in others, is slavishly followed by Lydgate[131]) makes apologies for roughness and inexperience.[132] In Gower (Conf. Am. iv. 2414) there is a reference, but after Chaucer and not yet quite satisfactorily explained, to the difference between "rhyme" and "cadence," while in the Scottish chronicler Wyntoun there is another reference[133] to "cadence." Again, in Chaucer we have the Parson's famous disclaimer of indulgence in "rum ram ruf," because the speaker is "a Southern man." But not one of these things makes the slightest pretence to be even a prosodic discussion, let alone a prosodic treatise; and it is not till towards the end of the third quarter of the sixteenth century—when a whole generation had already followed Wyatt in endeavouring to effect, in practice, the reform of the prosodic breakdown from Lydgate to Hawes, if not even to Barclay—that the first English prosodic treatise appears in the shape of Gascoigne's Notes of Instruction (1572-75). They had been a little anticipated in time by remarks of Ascham's, and perhaps of others, on a new fashion of classical "versing," on which more presently; but this, though essentially prosodic in character, had not yet formed the subject of a regular treatise, and its exponents implicitly or expressly declined all meddling with "beggarly rhyme," i.e. with the form of English poetry proper.

Gascoigne's little book[134] is very short, very practical, very sensible, and—except in one unlucky remark, which (or rather the misunderstanding of it) has done harm to the present day—in the main, perfectly sound. He dwells on the importance of accent and of the observation of it; and he was quite right, for even Wyatt had been very loose in this respect, and the desire to get out of the doggerel of the fifteenth century[135] had led novices in precision to strain the accent, in order that they might keep the quantity. But he insists also—and with more than a century of awful examples to justify him if he had cared to use them—on "keeping metre"—on not wandering from lines of one length or character to those of another as the rhyme-royalists of the preceding century constantly do. He gives rules for the pause, leaving rhyme-royal itself free in that respect. He mentions especially, besides rhyme-royal, "riding rhyme" (Chaucerian couplet), "poulter's measure" (the alternate Alexandrine and fourteener), and octosyllables. He deprecates poetic commonplaces ("cherry lips" and the like), and gives some positive rules for pronunciation ("Heav'n" is to be always monosyllabic).

The excepted unlucky point is his remark that "commonly nowadays in English rhymes we use no other than a foot of two syllables, whereof the first is depressed and made short, and the second elevated or made long." He says that "we have used in times past other kinds of metres," giving as example the anapÆstic line—

laments the restriction to iambs, and shows a remarkable appreciation of Chaucer's "liberty that the Latinists do use," i.e. equivalent substitution, though he may not have quite correctly understood this.

The desire for order and regularity in all this is very noticeable, and perfectly intelligible to any one who has appreciated (see last Book) the hopeless breakdown, due to the neglect of these qualities, in English prosody between 1400 and 1530. Gascoigne's statement about the iamb is, moreover, true of the majority of his own contemporaries, though it overlooks such a writer as Tusser. But it would be a grievous mistake (and unfortunately it has often been committed) to accept this not quite accurate declaration of ephemeral fact—accompanied as it is, more especially, by another expression of regret for that fact—as a rule and principle governing Elizabethan and English poetry.

Gascoigne's little treatise was followed at no great intervals, but after his own death, by more elaborate dealings with the subject—some of them exclusively or mainly devoted to the new craze for classical metres, others treating the subject at large and merely referring to the "versing" attempts. The order of these compositions, with a very brief sketch of their contents, may now be given.

In the winter of 1579-80, the date of the appearance of the Shepherd's Calendar, Spenser and his pragmatical friend Gabriel Harvey exchanged certain letters (which we have) dealing with the "versing" attempt that Spenser himself makes. An experiment in quantified trimeter refers to "rules" on the subject made by a Cambridge man named Drant, but does not (unfortunately) give them, and asks for Harvey's own. Harvey blows rather hot and cold on the matter, approving the system, but criticising the details.

Next, in 1582, came the Preface to Richard Stanyhurst's translation of the Aeneid, a book famous for the strange language in which it is written, but, as far as its Preface is concerned, a very sober and scientific attempt to do an impossible thing. Stanyhurst endeavours to arrange a set of rules for determining the quantity of every syllable in English, not necessarily according to its Latin or other derivation, but on principles germane to the language itself. He does not and cannot succeed; but his attempt is interesting, and rather less contrary to facts than some recent attempts of the same kind.

He was followed, in 1586, by William Webbe, whose Discourse of English Poetry is notable for the enthusiasm displayed by the author towards Spenser (the Shepherd's Calendar had appeared some years previously); for his curiously combined enthusiasm as regards the classical metres which Spenser had tried and dropped; for the first published sketch of the history of English poetry (erroneous, but interesting); and for a certain number of desultory remarks on prosodic subjects, mostly brought round to the classical fancy, though showing the interest which these questions were exciting. But between Stanyhurst and Webbe one book of the kind had appeared, and another had been perhaps composed, though not printed, in the same year—1584.

The first was King James the Sixth of Scotland's Rewlis and Cautelis for the making of verse in his native dialect. Obligation has been traced in it to Gascoigne and to the great French poet Ronsard. It is very clear and precise, but of no wide interest, being simply an analysis of recent actual Scots verse with some peculiarities of terminology. It is our first methodical book of prosody, and some of its titles, such as "cuttit and broken" verse for the metres of very irregular line-length which were growing so fashionable, and which were to excite the displeasure of the eighteenth century, are distinctly useful. Not so perhaps another—"tumbling verse"—which is of uncertain application to alliterative-anapÆstic or to mere doggerel rhythm—which has complicated the question of "cadence" (v. sup.), (of this it has been, perhaps correctly, thought to have been intended as an English translation), and which was adopted rather arbitrarily by Guest (v. inf.).

The other book, written in or before 1584, though not published till 1589, was the most elaborate treatment of English prosody yet attempted, and continued to be so until Mitford's treatise (v. inf.) nearly two hundred years later. The Art of English Poesy, as it not too arrogantly called itself, has no certain author, but has been by turns attributed to two brothers, George and Richard Puttenham. It is, in the original, a treatise of some 257 well-filled pages. About half of these is indeed occupied by an immense list of the fancifully devised "Figures of Speech" which the Greek rhetoricians had excogitated, and which apply (in so far as they have any real application at all) not more to poetry than to prose. But the First Book contains an elaborate discussion or defence of poetry generally, ending with a sketch of English poets, probably, if not certainly, written earlier than Webbe's. And the Second is a very full and formal handling of the formal part of poetry, the discussion being carried so far as to include those artificial figures in squares, lozenges, altars, wings, etc., which more than one age fancied, but which, in English, hardly survived the satire of Addison. Puttenham, however, takes great pains to point out the exact form of different regular stanzas; arranges line-lengths; dwells on rhyme, pause, accent, and other matters of importance; considers the classical "versing" (though he does not like it); and, in short, treats the whole subject, as far as his lights and opportunities permit, in a really business-like manner. It was somewhat unfortunate that he came a little too soon, neither the Faerie Queene nor probably any of the greatest plays of the "University Wits" having appeared at the time he wrote—nothing, in short, of the best time and kind but the Shepherd's Calendar.

The later years of the sixteenth century were less fruitful in regular prosodic discussion, though the old wrangle about "versing"[137] continued at intervals between Harvey and Nash, and some scattered observations on prosody exist, by Drayton and others. But in the earliest years of the seventeenth the first-named dispute, after hanging about for more than half a century since Ascham's day, was laid to rest, for the time and (except in scattered touches) for nearly two centuries afterwards, by the poet Thomas Campion's tractate on certain new forms of verse (not hexameters) devised by himself, and the reply of another poet, Samuel Daniel, in his Defence of Rhyme. Campion, an exquisite master of natural rhymed verse, did not wholly fail with his artificial creations of "English elegiacs," "English anacreontics," etc.—metres based mainly on iambs and trochees, though with some trisyllabic feet grudgingly allowed. He not merely does not support the dactylic hexameter, but pronounces against it; and his main objection seems to lie against rhyme. He also, like Stanyhurst, attempts a scheme of English quantity, though he admits the abundance of "common" syllables with us. Daniel in his answer confined himself to generalities, but with the most triumphant effect—basing his defence of rhyme on "Custom and Nature"; alleging the omnipotence of delight which is unquestionably given by and received from rhyme; and asking why, when in polity, religion, etc., we notoriously and profoundly differ from the Greeks and Latins, we are to imitate them in verse? He points out, again with absolute truth, that Campion's own versification is mostly or wholly nothing but old forms stripped of rhyme, and urges the hopelessness of adjusting, even on the reformer's own system, English quantity to classical. With this the thing became, and was long wisely allowed to be, res judicata.

In a sense this little book, or rather pamphlet, may be said to conclude the first batch or period of prosodic study in English. For the whole of the seventeenth century after it, though one of the most important practically in the entire history, sees very little theoretical discussion. Ben Jonson had, we are told, written a treatise against both Campion and Daniel, especially the last, praising couplets "to be the bravest sort of verses, especially when they are broken like hexameters," and against "cross-rhymes and stanzas." But we have not his own authority for this, which is only reported by Drummond, and the exact interpretation to be put upon "broken like hexameters" is absolutely uncertain. The surfeit of stanza[138] is, however, an obvious fact, and is borne witness to by Drayton, in the remarks above referred to, and by others—things culminating in the verse precepts of Sir John Beaumont (v. sup.) recommending the stopped distich in a form which is almost eighteenth century. Had Jonson finished his English Grammar and given the prosodic section which he promised, we should know more.

As it is, there is nothing of importance before the Restoration except the English Parnassus of Joshua Poole, published posthumously, with a remarkable Preface signed "J. D.," which in point of time might be—but which there is not the slightest reason except date and initials to suppose to be—Dryden's. This Introduction is partly historical and not ignorant, while the author shows good sense and taste by objecting to "wrenched" rhymes ("nÁture" and "endÙre"), to the habit of "apostrophation" or cutting out syllables supposed to be extra-metrical, and substituting apostrophes,[139] which was infesting the printing of the day, and was, to the great corroboration of prosodic heresies, not got rid of for a century and a half. He dislikes, too, the heavily overlapped verses then prevalent.

Milton, inferior to no English poet in his practical importance as a master of prosody, and perhaps superior to all except Shakespeare, has nothing about it in the preceptist way, except his rather petulant outbreak against rhyme[140] in the advertisement to Paradise Lost (an outbreak largely neutralised by his own practice, not only earlier, but later), and the reference to "committing short and long" in Sonnet XIII.[141]

And Dryden almost repeats the tantalising conditions of Jonson's attitude to the subject. He tells us that he actually had in preparation a treatise on it; but nothing more has ever been heard of this, and, large as is the amount of his work in literary criticism, his references to this part of it are few and are mostly vague. He does indeed tell us that no vowel can be cut off before another when we cannot sink the pronunciation of it, and if this observation be extended to elision generally it is important.

But, on the whole, the most significant passages on prosody of the later seventeenth century are the work of a more obscure writer, Samuel Woodford, in his Prefaces to Paraphrases of the Psalms (1667) and the Canticles (1678). Here criticising, as no one else did, Milton from the prosodic point of view soon after date, he recognises and defends trisyllabic feet, but is disinclined to blank verse, regarding (and actually arranging) it as rhythmed prose. The references of Lord Roscommon and one or two others in verse, as well as of critics of shadowy notoriety like Rymer and Dennis in prose, are mostly trivial.

In this first division of English prosodists there is observable a want of thoroughness—at first sight perhaps strange, but easily explicable—which makes most of their work little more than a curiosity. The only book which attempts to grapple somewhat methodically with the whole subject—that attributed to Puttenham—labours under two fatal disadvantages. The first is that the writer has a most imperfect knowledge, or rather an almost unmixed ignorance, of what has come before him; and the second is that he naturally cannot know what will come after him, while what actually did come immediately after him happens to be one of the greatest bodies, in bulk and merit and variety, of English poetry. The two most gifted persons who think of treating it, Jonson and Dryden, do not actually do so; and it may be more than doubted whether, had they done so, ignorance of the past would not still have stood in their way. It is true that Dryden's obiter dictum, that you must not elide what you must pronounce, is a sort of ark of salvation which carries all the elements of a sound prosody in it. But it is not certain that the writer quite saw its full bearing, and that bearing was certainly not seen by others. On the other hand, Gascoigne's innocent but unlucky remark about the single two-syllabled foot expresses an opinion which, though wholly erroneous, undoubtedly did prevail very widely throughout the whole period. The evidence of its falsity was indeed constantly accumulating in blank verse during the first half of the seventeenth century, in definite trisyllabic metres during the second. But this evidence was ignored or disobligingly received; and when, at the very beginning of the eighteenth, Bysshe once more attempted formulation of prosodic orthodoxy, he arranged a code which, as long as it was observed, half maimed the sinews and half throttled the song of English poetry.