So general and so total a failure can be referred only to radical
misconception. In fact the English Prosodists have blindly followed
the pedants. These latter, like les moutons de Panurge, have been
occupied in incessant tumbling into ditches, for the excellent
reason that their leaders have so tumbled before. The Iliad, being
taken as a starting point, was made to stand instead of Nature and
common sense. Upon this poem, in place of facts and deduction from
fact, or from natural law, were built systems of feet, metres,
rhythms, rules,- rules that contradict each other every five
minutes, and for nearly all of which there may be found twice as
many exceptions as examples. If any one has a fancy to be thoroughly
confounded- to see how far the infatuation of what is termed
"classical scholarship," can lead a bookworm in the manufacture of
darkness out of sunshine, let him turn over for a few moments any of
the German Greek Prosodies. The only thing clearly made out in them is
a very magnificent contempt for Leibnitzs principle of "a sufficient
reason."
To divert attention from the real matter in hand by any further
reference to these works is unnecessary, and would be weak. I cannot
call to mind at this moment one essential particular of information
that is to be gleaned from them, and I will drop them here with merely
this one observation,- that employing from among the numerous
"ancient" feet the spondee, the trochee, the iambus, the anapaest, the
dactyl, and the caesura alone, I will engage to scan correctly any
of the Horatian rhythms, or any true rhythm that human ingenuity can
conceive.
Pages:
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264