II.

Twenty years ago, when the rhythmical romance of Thalaba was sent from Portugal to the press, I requested, in the preface to that poem, that the author might not be supposed to prefer the rhythm in which it was written, abstractedly considered, to the regular blank verse, the noblest measure, in his judgement, of which our admirable language is capable it was added, that the measure which was there used, had, in that instance, been preferred, because it suited the character of the poem, being, as it were, the Arabesque ornament of an Arabian tale. Notwithstanding this explicit declaration, the duncery of that day attacked me as if I had considered the measure of Thalaba to be in itself essentially and absolutely better than blank verse. The duncery of this day may probably pursue the same course on the present occasion. With that body I wage no war, and enter into no explanations. But to the great majority of my readers, who will take up the book without malevolence, and having a proper sense of honour in themselves, will believe the declarations of a writer whose veracity they have no reason to doubt, I will state what are the defects, and what the advantages, of the metre which is here submitted to their judgement, as they appear to me after this fair experiment of its powers.

It is not a legitimate inference, that because the hexameter has been successfully introduced in the German language, it can be naturalized as well in English. The English is not so well adapted for it, because it does not abound in like manner with polysyllabic words. The feet, therefore, must too frequently be made up of monosyllables, and of distinct words, whereby the verse is resolved and decomposed into its component feet, and the feet into their component syllables, instead of being articulated and inosculated throughout, as in the German, still more in the Greek, and most in the Latin measure. This is certainly a great defect.1 From the same cause the casura generally coincides with a pause in the sentence; but, though this breaks the continuity of the verse, it ought perhaps rather to be considered as an advantage; for the measure, like blank verse, thus acquires a greater variety. It may possibly be objected, that the four first feet are not metrical enough in their effect, and the two last too much so. I do not feel the objection; but it has been advanced by one, whose opinion upon any question, and especially upon a question of poetry, would make me distrust my own, where it happened to be different. Lastly, the double-ending may be censured as double rhymes used to be; but that objection belongs to the duncery.

On the other hand, the range of the verse being from thirteen syllables to seventeen, it derives from

It leads also to this inconvenience, that the English line greatly exceeds the ancient one in literal length, so that it is actually too long for any page, if printed in types of the ordinary proportion to the size of the book, whatever that may be. The same inconvenience was formerly felt in that fine measure of the Elizabethan age, the seven-footed couplet; which, to the diminution of its powers, was, for that reason,

that range an advantage in the union of variety with regularity, which is peculiar to itself. The capability which is thus gained, may perhaps be better appreciated by a few readers from their own sense of power, than it is exemplified in this experiment.

I do not, however, present the English hexameter as something better than our established metres, but as something different, and which therefore, for that reason, may sometimes advantageously be used. Take our blank verse, for all in all, in all its gradations, from the elaborate rhythm of Milton, down to its loosest structure in the early dramatists, and I believe that there is no measure comparable to it, either in our own or in any other language, for might and majesty, and flexibility and compass. And this is affirmed, not as the predilection of a young writer, or the preference of one inexperienced in the difficulties of composition, but as an opinion formed and confirmed during the long and diligent study, and the long and laborious practice of the art. But I am satisfied also that the English hexameter is a legitimate and good measure, with which our literature ought to be enriched.

"I first adventure; follow me who list!"

III.

I am well aware that the public are peculiarly intolerant of such innovations; not less so than the populace used to be of any foreign fashion, whether of foppery or convenience. Would that this literary intolerance were under the influence of a saner judgement, and regarded the morals more than the manner of a composition; the spirit rather than the form. Would that it were directed against those monstrous combinations of horrors and mockery, lewdness and impiety, with which English poetry has, in our days, first been polluted! For more than half a century English literature had been distinguished by its moral purity, the effect, and in its turn, the cause of an improvement in national manners. A father might, without apprehension of evil, have put into the hands of his children any book which issued from the press, if it did not bear either in its title-page or frontispiece, manifest signs that it was intended as furniture for the brothel. There was no danger in any work which bore the name of a respectable publisher, or was to be procured at any respectable bookseller's. This was particularly the case with regard to our poetry. It is now no longer so; and woe to those by whom the offence cometh! The greater the talents of the offender, the greater is his guilt, and the more enduring will be his shame. Whether it be that the laws are in themselves unable to abate an evil of this magnitude, or whether it be that they are re

divided into quatrains, (the pause generally falling upon the eighth syllable,) and then converted into the common ballad stanza. The hexameter cannot be thus divided, and therefore must generally look neither like prose nor poetry. This is noticed as merely a dissight, and of no moment, our poetry not being like that of the Chinese, addressed to the eye instead of the ear.

missly administered, and with such injustice that the celebrity of an offender serves as a privilege whereby he obtains impunity, individuals are bound to consider that such pernicious works would neither be published nor written, if they were discouraged as they might, and ought to be, by public feeling; every person, therefore, who purchases such books, or admits them into his house, promotes the mischief, and thereby, as far as in him lies, becomes an aider and abettor of the crime.

The publication of a lascivious book is one of the worst offences that can be committed against the well-being of society. It is a sin, to the consequences of which no limits can be assigned, and those consequences no after-repentance in the writer can counteract. Whatever remorse of conscience he may feel when his hour comes (and come it must!) will be of no avail. The poignancy of a death-bed repentance cannot cancel one copy of the thousands which are sent abroad; and as long as it continues to be read, so long is he the pander of posterity, and so long is he heaping up guilt upon his soul in perpetual accumulation.

These remarks are not more severe than the offence deserves, even when applied to those immoral writers who have not been conscious of any evil intention in their writings, who would acknowledge a little levity, a little warmth of colouring, and so forth, in that sort of language with which men gloss over their favourite vices, and deceive themselves. What then should be said of those for whom the thoughtlessness and inebriety of wanton youth can no longer be pleaded, but who have written in sober manhood and with deliberate purpose?.. Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul! The school which they have set up may properly be called the Satanic school; for though their productions breathe the spirit of Belial in their lascivious parts, and the spirit of Moloch in those loathsome images of atrocities and horrors which they delight to represent, they are more especially characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety, which still betrays the wretched feeling of hopelessness wherewith it is allied.

1 "Summi poetæ in omni poetarum sæculo viri fuerunt probi: in nostris id vidimus et videmus ; neque alius est error a veritate longiùs quàm magna ingenia magnis necessario corrumpi vitiis. Secundo plerique posthabent primum, hi malignitate, illi ignorantia; et quum aliquem inveniunt styli morumque vitiis notatum, nec inficetum tamen nec in libris edendis parcum, eum stipant, prædicant, occupant, amplectuntur. Si mores aliquantulum vellet corrigere, si stylum curare paululum, si fervido ingenio temperare, si moræ tantillum interponere, tum ingens nescio quid et verè epicum, quadraginta annos natus, procuderet. Ignorant verò febriculis non indicari vires, impatientiam ab imbecillitate non differre; ignorant a levi homine et inconstante multa fortasse scribi posse plusquam mediocria, nihil compositum, arduum, æternum."Savagius Landor, De Cultu atque Usu Latini Sermonis, p. 197.

This evil is political as well as moral, for indeed moral and political evils are inseparably connected. Truly has it been affirmed by one of our ablest and clearest reasoners, that "the destruction of governments may be proved and deduced from the general corruption of the subjects' manners, as a direct and natural cause thereof, by a demonstration as certain as any in the mathematics There is no maxim more frequently enforced by Machiavelli, than that where the manners of a people are generally corrupted, there the government cannot long subsist,.. a truth which all history exemplifies; and there is no means whereby that corruption can be so surely and rapidly diffused, as by poisoning the waters of literature.

Let rulers of the state look to this in time! But, to use the words of South, if "our physicians think the best way of curing a disease is to pamper it,.. the Lord in mercy prepare the kingdom to suffer, what He by miracle only can prevent!"

No apology is offered for these remarks. The subject led to them; and the occasion of introducing them was willingly taken, because it is the duty of every one, whose opinion may have any influence, to expose the drift and aim of those writers who are labouring to subvert the foundations of human virtue and of human happiness.

IV.

Returning to the point from whence I digressed, I am aware not only that any metrical innovation which meets the eye of the reader generally provokes his displeasure, but that there prevails a particular prejudice against the introduction of hexameters in our language. The experiment, it is alleged, was tried in the Elizabethan age, and failed. though made under the greatest possible advantages of favour, being encouraged by the great patron of literature, Sir Philip Sydney, (in letters, as well as in all other accomplishments and all virtues, the most illustrious ornament of that illustrious court,) and by the Queen herself.

That attempt failed, because it was made upon a scheme which inevitably prevented its success. Νο principle of adaption was tried. Sydney and his followers wished to subject the English pronunciation to the rules of Latin prosody; but if it be difficult to reconcile the public to a new tune in verse, it is plainly impossible to reconcile them to a new 3 pronunciation. There was the farther obstacle of unusual and violent elisions; and more

This essay, which is full of fine critical remarks and striking thoughts felicitously expressed, reached me from Pisa, while the proof of the present sheet was before me. Of its author (the author of Gebir and Count Julian), I will only say in this place, that, to have obtained his approbation as a poet, and possessed his friendship as a man, will be remembered among the honours of my life, when the petty enmities of this generation will be forgotten, and its ephemeral reputations shall have passed away.

2 South.

3 For example:

Neither he bears reverence to a prince, nor pity to a beggar. That to my advancement their wisdoms have me abased. Well may a pastor plain; but, alas ! his plaints be not esteemed.

over, the easy and natural order of our speech was distorted by the frequent use of forced inversions, which are utterly improper in an uninflected language. Even if the subjects for the experiment had been judiciously chosen, and well composed in all other respects, these errors must have been fatal; but Sydney, whose prose is so full of imagery and felicitous expressions that he is one of our greatest poets in prose, and whose other poems contain beauties of a high order, seems to have lost all ear for rhythm, and all feeling of poetry, when he was engaged in metrical experiments.

What in Sydney's hands was uncouth and difficult, was made ridiculous by Stanihurst, whose translation of the four first books of the Eneid into hexameters is one of the most portentous compositions in any language. No satire could so effectually have exposed the measure to derision. The specimens which Abraham Fraunce produced were free from Stanihurst's eccentricities, and were much less awkward and constrained than Sydney's. But the mistaken principle upon which the metre was constructed was fatal, and would have proved so even if Fraunce had possessed greater powers of thought and of diction. The failure therefore was complete 2, and for some generations it seems to have prevented any thought of repeating the experiment.

Goldsmith, in later days, delivered 3 an opinion in

õpprest with ruinous conceits by the help of an outcry. Despair most tragical clause to a deadly request. Hard like a rich marble; hard but a fair diamond.

its favour, observing, that all the feet of the ancient poetry are still found in the versification of living languages, and that it is impossible the same measure, composed of the same times, should have a good effect upon the ear in one language, and a bad effect in another. He had seen, he says, several late specimens of English hexameters and sapphics, so happily composed, that they were, in all respects, as melodious and agreeable to the ear as the works of Virgil and Horace. What these specimens were I have not discovered: . . the sapphics may possibly have been those by Dr. Watts. Proofs of the practicability of the hexameter were given about twenty years ago, by some translations from the Messiah of Klopstock, which appeared in the Monthly Magazine; and by an eclogue, entitled The Showman, printed in the second volume of the Annual Anthology. These were written by my old friend Mr. William Taylor of Norwich, the translator of Burger's Lenora: . . of whom it would be difficult to say, whether he is more deservedly admired by all who know him for the variety of his talents, the richness and ingenuity of his discourse, and the liveliness of his fancy, or loved and esteemed by them for the goodness of his heart. In repeating the experiment upon a more adequate scale, and upon a subject suited to the movement, I have fulfilled one of the hopes and intentions of my early life.

genius of the English language will not admit of Greek or Latin measure; but this, we apprehend, is a mistake owing to the prejudice of education. It is impossible that the same measure, composed of the same times, should have a good effect upon the ear in one language, and a bad effect in another. The truth is, we have been accustomed from our infancy to the numbers of English poetry, and the very sound and signification of the words disposes the ear to receive them in a certain manner; so that its disappointment must be at

Tetrasticon :

See ye the blindefoulded pretie God, that feathered arches,
Of lovers miseries which maketh his bloodie game?
Wote ye why his mother with a veile hath covered his face?
Trust me, leaste he my love happily chance to behold.
With so little knowledge of facts, and so little regard to
accuracy, are confident assertions sometimes made!

Gabriel Harvey was one of the great promoters of the attempt; and Spenser, who was his intimate friend, is believed to have sanctioned it by his opinion,.. certainly not by his example. That great master of versification has left only one piece which is not written in rhyme. It was printed in Davison's Poetical Rhapsodie, and is inserted in Warton's Observations on the Faery Queen, vol. ii. p. 245. The author has called it an Iambic Elegy, but neither by any rule of quantity, or violence of accentuation, can it be reduced to iambics.

rudiments of education, we acquire, as it were, another ear for the numbers of Greek and Latin poetry; and this being reserved entirely for the sounds and significations of the words that constitute those dead languages, will not easily accommodate itself to the sounds of our vernacular tongue, though conveyed in the same time and measure. In a word, Latin and Greek have annexed to them the ideas of the ancient measure from which they are not easily disjoined. But we will venture to say, this difficulty might be surmounted by an effort of attention and a little practice; and in that case we should in time be as well pleased with English as with Latin hexameters."-Goldsmith's Essays, vol. ii. p. 265. 4 Mr. Park (Censura Literaria, vol. iv. 233.) mentions an attempt to revive what he calls "this obsolete whimsey by an anonymous writer in 1737, who translated the first and fourth Eclogues of Virgil, &c. into hexametrical verse, and prefixed a vindication of his attempt, with directions for the reader's pronunciation."

I venture to hope that this excellent English scholar will no longer think the scheme of writing English hexameters a mere whimsey. Glad indeed should I be, if my old acquaint ance were to be as well pleased with the present attempt as I have been with some of his Morning Thoughts and Midnight

nos neveux s'en serviront pour l'agrandir, ou les supprimeront comme superflues. Si mon autorité est nulle dans l'avenir, peu importera que je me sois trompé sur ce point: mon ouvrage rentrera dans l'obscurité d'où il étoit sorti. Mail s'il est un jour de quelque considération, mon erreur en physique sera plus utile à la morale, qu'une vérité d'ailleurs indifférente au bonheur des hommes. On en conclura avec raison qu'il faut être en garde contre les écrivains méme accrédités."- Harmonies de la Nature, t. 1. 129.

"I am inclined to attribute to the green colour of the vegetables with which, during the summer, a great part of our hemisphere is covered, that beautiful emerald tint which we sometimes perceive at that season in the firmament, towards the setting of the sun. It is rare in our climates, but is frequent between the tropics, where summer continues throughout the year. I know that this phenomenon may be explained by the simple refraction of the rays of the sun in the atmosphere, that spherical prism of our globe. But to this it may be objected, that the green colour is not seen during the winter in our sky; and moreover, I can support my opinion by other facts, which appear to prove that even the azure colour of the atmosphere is only a reflection of that of the ocean. In fact, the floating ice which descends every year from the North Pole, is announced before it appears upon the horizon, by a white blink, which enlightens the heaven day and night, and which is only a reflection of the crystallized snows, of which those masses are composed. This blink resembles the light of the aurora borealis, the centre of which is in the middle of the ice of our pole, but the white colour of which is mixed with yellow, with red, and with green, because it partakes of the colour of a ferruginous soil, and of the verdure of the pine forests which cover our icy zone. This explanation of these variations of colour in our aurora borealis, is so much the more probable, because that of the aurora australis, as Captain Cook has observed, differs in that its white colour is mixed with blue tints alone, which can only be, according to my opinion, because the ice of the austral pole (where there is no continent and no vegetation) is surrounded on all parts with the ocean, which is blue. Do we not see that the moon, which we suppose to be covered in great part with very elevated glaciers, sends back to us, in a light of a bluish white, the rays of the sun, which are golden in our ferruginous atmosphere? Is it not by the reverberation of a soil composed of iron, that the planet Mars reflects upon us at all times a red light? Is it not more natural to attribute these constant colours to the reverberation of the soil, of the seas, and of the vegetables of these planets, rather than to the variable refractions of the rays of the sun in their atmospheres, the colours of which ought to change every hour, according to their different aspects with regard to that star. As Mars appears constantly red to the

earth, it is possible that the earth might appear to Mars like a brilliant jewel, of the colour of the opal towards the North Pole, of the agoa marina at the South Pole, and alternately of the sapphire in the rest of its circumference. But without going out of our atmosphere, I believe that the earth reflects there the blue colour of its ocean with the green of its vegetation, at all times in the torrid zone, and in summer only in our climate, for the same reason that its two poles reflect their different auroras, which participate of the colours of the earth or the seas that are near them.

"Perhaps our atmosphere sometimes reflects landscapes, which announce islands to the sailors long before they reach them. It is remarkable that they show themselves, like the reflections of verdure, only in the horizon and on the side of the setting sun. I shall cite, on this subject, a man of the Isle of France, who used to perceive in the sky the images of vessels, which were out in full sea; the celebrated Vernet, who related to me that he had once seen in the clouds the ramparts of a town, situated seven leagues distant from him, and the phenomenon of the straits of Sicily, known under the name of the Fata Morgana. The clouds and the vapours of the atmosphere may very well reflect the forms and the colours of earthly objects, since they reflect in parhelions the image of the sun, so as to render it burning as the sun itself. In fine, if the waters of the earth repeat the colours and the forms of the clouds of the atmosphere, why then should not the vapours of the atmosphere, in their turn, reflect the blue of the sea, the verdure and the yellow of the earth, as well as the glancing colours of the polar ices?

"I advance my opinion, however, only as my opinion. The history of nature is an edifice which, as yet, is scarcely commenced; let us not fear to carry some stones towards the building; our grandchildren will use them, or lay them aside if they be useless. If my authority is of no weight hereafter, it will import little that I have deceived myself upon this point; my work will enter into obscurity, from whence it came; but if it should be, in future, of some consideration, my error, in physics, will be more useful to morals than a truth, otherwise indifferent to the happiness of mankind. For it will be inferred with reason, that it is necessary to regard even writers of credit with caution."

In one point of fact, St. Pierre is certainly mistaken. The green evening light is seen as often in winter as in summer. Having been led to look for it in consequence of suspecting the accuracy of his remarks, I noticed it on the very day when this extract was transcribed for the press, (late in December,) and twice in the course of the ensuing week; and I observed it, not in the evening alone, and in the west, (in which quarter, however, and at which time, it is most frequently seen,) but in different parts of the sky, and at different times of the day.