Dear Mr Editor,—I hope you will be of opinion that I have, in my two preceding letters, proved the hexameter to be a good, genuine English verse, fitted to please the unlearned as well as the learned ear; and hitherto prevented from having fair play among our readers of poetry, mainly by the classical affectations of our hexameter writers—by their trying to make a distinction of long and short syllables, according to Latin rules of quantity; and by their hankering after spondees, which the common ear rejects as inconsistent with our native versification. If the attempt had been made to familiarise English ears with hexameters free from these disadvantages, it might have succeeded as completely as it has done in German. And the chance of popular success would have been much better if the measure had been used in a long poem of a religious character; for religious poetry, as you know very well, finds a much larger body of admirers than any other kind, and fastens upon the minds of common readers with a much deeper hold. Religious feeling supplies the deficiency of poetical susceptibility, and imparts to the poem a splendour and solemnity which elevates it out of the world of prose. I do not think it can be doubted that Klopstock's Messiah did a great deal to give the hexameters a firm hold on the German popular ear; and I am persuaded that if Pollok's Course of Time had been written in hexameters, its popularity would have been little less than it is, and the hexameter would have been by this time in a great degree familiarised in our language. Perhaps it may be worth while to give a passage of the Messiah, that your readers may judge whether a hexameter version of the whole would not have been likely to succeed in this country, at the time when the prose translator was so generally read and admired. The version is by William Taylor of Norwich.

The scene is the covenant made between the two first persons of the Trinity on Mount Moriah. The effect is thus described:—

It seems to me that such verses as these might very well have satisfied the English admirers of Klopstock.

You will observe, however, that we have, in the passage which I have quoted, several examples of those forced trochees which I mentioned in my first letter, as one of the great blemishes of English hexameters; namely, these—first time; bright orb; against God; hell's vaults. And these produce their usual effect of making the verse in some degree unnatural and un-English.

It is, however, true, that in this respect the German hexametrist has a considerable advantage over the English. Many of the words which are naturally thrown to the end of a verse by the sense, are monosyllables in English, while the corresponding German word is a trochaic dissyllable, which takes its place in the verse smoothly and familiarly. In consequence of this difference in the two languages, the Englishman is often compelled to lengthen his monosyllables by various artifices. Thus, in Herman and Dorothea—

In order that I may not be misunderstood, however, I must say that I by no means intend to proscribe such final trochees as I have spoken of, composed of two monosyllables, but only to recommend a sparing and considerate use of them. They occur in Goethe, though not abundantly. Thus in Herman and Dorothea, we have three together:—

None of these trochees, however, are so spondaic as the English ones which I formerly quoted, consisting of a monosyllable-adjective with a monosyllable-substantive—"the weight of his right hand;" or two substantives, as "the heat of a love's fire."

Yet even these endings are admissible occasionally. Every one assents to Harris's recognition of a natural and perfect hexameter in that verse of the Psalms—

The fact is, that though the English hexameter, well constructed, is acknowledged by an English ear, as completely as any other dactylic or anapÆstic measure, it always recalls, in the mind of a classical scholar, the recollection of Greek and Latin hexameters; and this association makes him willing to accept some rhythmical peculiarities which the classical forms and rules seem to justify. The peculiarities are felt as an allusion to Homer and Virgil, and give to the verse a kind of learned grace, which may or may not be pedantic, according to the judgment with which it is introduced. Undoubtedly, if the hexameter ever come to be as familiar in English as it is in German poetry, our best hexametrists will, like theirs, learn to convey, along with the pleasure which belongs to a flowing and familiar native measure, that which arises from agreeable recollections of the rhythms of the great epics of antiquity.

And, I add further, that the recollection of classical hexameters which will thus, in the minds of scholars, always accompany the flow of English hexameters, makes any addition to, or subtraction from, the six standard feet of the verse altogether intolerable. And hence I earnestly protest—and I hope you, Mr Editor, agree with me—against the license claimed by Southey, of using any foot of two or three syllables at the beginning of a line, to avoid the exotic and forced character, which, he says, the verse would assume if every line were to begin with a long syllable. No, no, my dear sir; this will never do. If we are to have hexameters at all, every line must begin with a long syllable. It is true, that this is sometimes difficult to attain. It is a condition which forbids us to begin a line with The, or It, or many other familiar beginnings of sentences. But it is a condition which must be adhered to; and if any one finds it too difficult, he must write something else, and leave hexameters alone. Southey, though he has claimed the license of violating this rule, has not written many of such licentious lines. I suppose the following are intended to be of this description:—

The two former lines might easily be corrected by leaving out the first syllable. The other is a very bad line, even if the licence be allowed.

For the same reason it must be considered a very bad fault to have supernumerary syllables, or syllables which would be supernumerary if not cut down by a harsh elision. A final dactyl, requiring an elision to make it fit its place, appears to me very odious. Southey has such:—

And no less does the ear repudiate all other violent elisions. I find several in the other translation of the Iliad referred to in your notice of N. N. T.'s. And I am sure Mr Shadwell will excuse my pointing out one or two of them, and will accept in a friendly spirit criticisms which arise from a fellow feeling with him in the love of English hexameters. These occur in his First Iliad.

Such crushing of words is intolerable. Our hexameters, to be generally acceptable, must flow on smoothly, with the natural pronunciation of the words; at least this is necessary till the national ear is more familiar with the movement than it is at present.

I believe I have still some remarks upon hexameters in store, if your patience and your pages suffice for them: but for the present I wish to say a word or two on another subject closely connected with this; I mean pentameters. The alternate hexameter and pentameter are, for most purposes, a more agreeable measure than the hexameter by itself. The constant double ending is tiresome, as constant double rhymes would be. Southey says, in his angry way, speaking of his hexameters—"the double ending may be censured as double rhymes used to be; but that objection belongs to the duncery." This is a very absurd mode of disposing of one objection, mentioned by him among many others equally formal and minute, which others he pretends to discuss calmly and patiently. The objection is of real weight. Though you might tolerate a double ending here and there in an epic, I am sure, Mr Editor, you would stop your critical ears at the incessant jingle of an epic in which every couplet had a double rhyme. On the other hand, an alternation of double and single endings is felt as an agreeable form of rhythm and rhyme. We have some good examples of it in English; the Germans have more: and the French manifest the same feeling in their peremptory rule for the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes. And there is another feature which recommends the pentameter combined with the hexameter. This combination carries into effect, on a large scale, a principle which prevails, I believe, in all the finer forms of verse. The principle which I mean is this;—that the metrical structure of the verse must be distinct and pure at the end of each verse, though liberties and substitutions may be allowed at the beginning. Thus, as you know, Mr Editor, the iambics of the Greek tragedians admit certain feet in the early part of the line which they do not allow in the later portions. And in the same manner the hexameter, a dactylic measure, must have the last two feet regular, while the four preceding feet may each be either trissyllabic or dissyllabic. Now, this principle of pure rhythm at the end of each strain, is peculiarly impressed upon the hexameter-pentameter distich. The end of the pentameter, rigorously consisting of two dactyls and a syllable, closes the couplet in such a manner that the metrical structure is never ambiguous; while the remainder of the couplet has liberty and variety, still kept in order by the end of the hexameter; and the double ending of the strain is avoided. I do not know whether you, Mr Editor, will agree with me in this speculation as to the source of the beauty which belongs to the hexameter-pentameter measure: but there can be no doubt that it has always had a great charm wherever dactylic measures have been cultivated. Schiller and GÖethe have delighted in it no less than TyrtÆus and Ovid: and I should conceive that this measure might find favour in English ears, even more fully than the mere hexameter.

But, in order that there may be any hope of this, it is very requisite that the course of the verse should be natural and unforced. This is more requisite even than in the hexameter; for, in the pentameter, the verse, if it be at variance with the natural accent, subverts it more completely, and makes the utterance more absurd. But it does not appear to be very difficult to attain to this point. In the model distich quoted by Coleridge—

the pentameter is a better verse than the hexameter. Surry's pentameters often flow well, in spite of his false scheme of accentuation.

I will here terminate my criticisms for the present, but I will offer you, along with them, a specimen of hexameter and pentameter. It is a translation from Schiller, and could not fail to win some favour to the measure, if I could catch any considerable share of the charm of the original, both in versification, language, and thought. Such as the verses are, however, I shall utter them in your critical ear—and am, dear Mr Editor, your obedient,