a first attempt it naturally has defects, yet in many places it exhibits the true form of blank verse. We take the following examples at random : I waked. Therewith to the house-top I clamb, From the high rock while he doth hear the sound.. As wrestling winds out of dispersed whirl From bottom's depth doth welter up the seas. Surrey's verse is in general decasyllabic; he does not often admit an anapæst or employ a hypermetric line; and he very rarely has a hypermetric syllable after the cæsura. Some short pieces by Grimoald, Gascoigne, and Vallens were written in blank verse in the sixteenth century; but this measure found no favour, as the vehicle of narrative, till it was employed by Milton. On the other hand, its ease and freedom recommended it to the drama, and so early as the first years of Elizabeth it appeared in the Gordebuc of Norton and Sackville.* It was not however till the later years of her reign that it was brought into general use by Marlow, Green, Peele, and others. But it had not yet been able to emancipate itself completely from the couplet-form, and hence we constantly find rimes intermingled with it. We give the following lines from Peele's David and Bethsabé as an example of the dramatic verse of that period: See, Cusay, see the flower of Israel, The fairest daughter that obeys the king, * The lines in this play are strictly decasyllabic. Brighter than inside bark of new-hewn cedar, Here the lines, taken separately, are beautiful, but they do not run into each other and form a system; there is a stop at the end of each, and they resemble couplets deprived of their rimes. This kind of blank verse may also be seen in the earlier plays of Shakespeare himself; but he and his fellowdramatists gradually arrived at the sweep of blank verse,— which however is to be found in Marlow,-and in the beginning of the seventeenth century, dramatic verse had attained to perfection. In this state we may see it employed by Milton in his Comus, and even in his Samson Agonistes, and, with such modifications as we shall notice, in his epic poems. This dramatic verse is five-footed, not decasyllabic, for it admits anapæsts, and also hypermetric syllables, both after the cæsura and at the end of the line.* The first foot of the line, and also the first of its second part, may be a trochee. All these characteristics may be discerned in Milton's Comus, as well as in Shakespeare and the other dramatists. The varieties which Milton introduced into the structure * The anapæst occurs so frequently in our old poets, that editors might give up using the unsightly syncopes and elisions of the old printers. The Greek iambic verse also admitted this foot and the tribrach, and, like our own drama, more frequently in comedy than in tragedy; it occurs ten times in Aristophanes for one in the tragedians. So it abounds in our Beaumont and Fletcher, in whom there are lines that contain but one iamb. With the aid of it, all the verse in these poets that is printed as prose, might easily be brought back to its true form. Perhaps it would be better, instead of using the term 'hypermetric syllable,' to regard it and the preceding iamb as forming the foot named Bacchius (~—'—), used so often by Plautus, though hardly ever by the Greeks. We will here note some curious coincidences. Plautus has tetrameter Bacchiacs, as Tergéri, aut | ornári, | políri, ex | políri. Now this is the very measure of the Spanish Versos de Arte Mayor :— Darán en los siglos | etérna | memória.-Juan de Mena; To of his epic verse are, 1. A peculiar kind of anapast; 2. The making the two first feet of the line trochees, and in one case even anapæsts; 3. Doing the same after the cæsura. these we may add that, 4, he retained the use of the hypermetric syllable after the cæsura. Of all these varieties we will now give examples. If it be asked, where did Milton find these peculiarities, or were they devices of his own? we reply, that he derived them from the poets of modern Italy. Thus, as to the anapæsts, nothing is more erroneous than to term the Italian heroic verse hendecasyllabic ;* for it frequently is in reality of fourteen or more syllables. Italian diphthongs are such only nominally; for each vowel is pronounced distinctly, and the two do not form one sound, as in Greek and some other languages.† In like manner, when two vowels meet, it is only in some cases that there is an elision. Thus, in the following verse of Petrarca— L'óro, e le pérle, e i fiór vermígli, e i biánchi.—Rime i. son. 31; there are-as even the punctuation shows-actually eighteen syllables; for the vowels in fior and in bianchi are pronounced distinctly. But the verse is of five feet, as we may observe and we might say that this was adopted from Plautus. But the measure of the Sháh-námeh and the narrative poetry of Persia is : which is the Arabic measure Mútakaríb, to be found in the Korán, so that probably both Persians and Spaniards got it from the Arabs. But this is also one of the measures of the modern Welsh poetry :- Y tíroedd ardderchog | fu 'n rhoddi | magw'raeth.-Blodau Glyn Dyfi. Our theory is that the Welsh poets thought to imitate the English anapæsts ; but the genius of their language, which places the accent on the penult., forced the Bacchius on them. * If any one doubts the existence of anapasts in Italian heroic verse, let him read the following lines of Ariosto: Pedóni e cávaliéri, e venía in cámpo Là dove Cárlo Marsílio áttendéa.-Orl. Fur. ii. 37; for the accents cannot be altered in venia and Marsilio. + In Latin regione is counted as of four, in Italian as of three, syllables; yet an Italian will pronounce them exactly alike. In their poetry however, diphthongs, as io in regione, glorioso, etc., frequently count as two syllables. just that number of ictus, or strong accents, in it. In another verse of the same poet : Lassándo ógni sua imprésa; e piágne, e tréma.—Rime i. son. 90, 10, we may observe that there are seventeen syllables, and besides a peculiarity of Italian verse, which Milton did not venture to imitate, namely, that the first foot is an iamb, and the second a trochee. As almost every line of the five-foot poetry of Italy thus contains more than eleven syllables, it is needless for us to give any further examples. The following will serve to show how Milton followed the Italian poets: That were an ignominy and shame beneath.-i. 115. Many of these, no doubt, can come under the head of the hypermetric syllable after the cæsura; but we may observe that they are all followed by vowels. 2. Commencing the line, after the manner of the Provençal poets, with two trochees, has been a favourite practice of the Italian poets from the earliest times to the present day. We may see it in the very first lines of the Gerusalemme Liberata :*— Cánto l'ármi pietóse, e 'l capitano. S' ármò d'A'sia e di Líbia il popol misto. Nón circóndi la frónte in Elicona. *The first three feet of these lines, it will be seen, correspond with the two first feet of the classic choriambic. See above, page 317, note. Hai di stélle immortáli aurea corona. Súcchi amári ingannáto intanto ei beve, E dall' inganno suo vita riceve. In this last passage, every line but the last we may see commences with two trochees, and the fourth of them contains only two iambs, in which last practice Milton also imitates his Italian prototypes.* Héll born not to conténd with spirits of heaven.—ii. 687. Spírits ódorous bréathes, flowers and their fruits.—ib. 482. -x. 205. I'n the visions of Gód. It was a hill.-ib. 377. A'mong daughters of mén the fairest found.-Par. Reg. ii. 154. From that plácid aspéct and meek regard.-iii. 217. O' Jehovah our Lórd, how wondrous great.—Ps. viii. 1. It will be observed that here, as in the Italian poetry, the cæsura falls at the end of the third foot, and that four of these verses (v. 482, 750; x. 205; xi. 377) contain only two iambic feet. * The only instances we have met with out of Milton, areNímphès, Faúnès and A'madriades.-Chauc. C. T. 2930. I'n these flattering streams, and makes our faces.-Macbeth, iii. 2. The following line in Comus (v. 336) must, we think, be read in this manner,— O'r, if your influence be quite dammed up ; for the context shows that the emphasis must be laid on your. |