general from the Troubadours, and the hendecasyllabic, or fivefoot line, became the sole measure of their sonnets and the staple of their Canzoni, and also their heroic measure in the Terza Rima of Dante and the Ottava Rima of Boccaccio. But it is a fact not generally observed, that Dante's contemporary, Barberini, employed the five-foot line, both rimed and unrimed, in his poems named Documenti d' Amore and Reggimento delle Donne:* ex. gr.— Questa Giustizia, da tal Sir mandata, S'el con rigor va giudicando i rei. Or incomincia dir ciò ch' ella face; Fa-poi non giova-ben ciascun che tace, etc. Da sicurtà a tutta gente Amore, E fa portar li fériti e li morti Davanti a lui, e dice sovra loro Queste parole che qui sono scritte, etc. In these poems of Barberini, the cæsura almost always occurs at the end of the second foot, though not with the strict regularity of the Provençal and French measures, while in the sonnets and other forms this is not the case. The riming couplet never found favour in the eyes of the Italian poets; but early in the sixteenth century the blank verse, under the name of Versi Sciolti, was adopted for the nascent tragic drama, and was used by Rucellai in his didactic poem L'Api, and by Trissino in his epic L'Italia liberata da' Goti, but with the varied cæsura then general in Italian poetry. At the same time, in Spain, Boscan, in imitation of the Italian poets, translated Hero and Leander from the Greek in this measure.† With the exception of the drama, * See the passages quoted by Rossetti in his Spirito Antipapale, p. 289. + Milton, in his notice of The Verse prefixed to his Paradise Lost, says, "Not without cause, therefore, some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rime both in longer and shorter works; as have also long since our best English tragedies." He of course alludes to (beside those mentioned in the text) La Coltivazione of Alamanni, Le Sette Giornate of T. Tasso, and the Aminta, Pastor Fido, etc. As we know not what his Spanish reading was, and of some pieces by Chiabrera, the Versi Sciolti ceased, we believe, to form a part of Italian poetry till the end of the last century, when they were employed by Parini and others. About the same time they were adopted and became a favourite form in the revived poetry of Portugal and Brazil. Perhaps in both cases it arose from the admiration of the poetry of Milton, Young, and Thomson. The English language borrowed its poetic measures from the French and Provençal. It first adopted the four-foot and six-foot measures; but as the Anglo-Saxon verse, like that of the whole Teutonic family, had been regulated by alliteration and accent, not by quantity or number of syllables, the English poets would not submit to the restraint of having the same exact number of syllables in a line, but regulating their verse by accent alone, admitted feet of one or of three syllables into their lines.* The five-foot measure was introduced by Chaucer; and as he used the same freedom of cæsura as the Italian poets, we think it more likely that he adopted it from them, with whose poetry he was so familiar, than from the poets of France or of Provence. The earliest specimen of blank verse in English is the translation of the second and fourth books of the Æneis by the accomplished Earl of Surrey, who fell a victim to the ruthless tyranny of Henry VIII. in 1547. As he was so well versed in Italian literature, it seems more probable that he adopted it from Rucellai and others, than that he formed it from the five-foot riming measures of his own language. As we cannot be certain whether he was acquainted with Boscan's poem or not, or with the short pieces of Garcilaso de la Vega, Figueroa, and others; but it is highly probable that he may have read Jauregui's beautiful translation of the Aminta, which was printed at Rome in 1607, and which he may have purchased when he was in Italy. He would seem not to have known, or rather not to have recollected, Lord Surrey's verses, of which we are about to speak. * It was the same with the old poetry of Germany. In the Nibelungen Lied, feet of one and of three syllables are of frequent occurrence. It may be here observed, that the measure of this poem occurs in English in the Coke's Tale of Gamelyn, and other poems of the same kind, and in Spanish in the old poem of the Cid. 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 anapasts, 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 trochec. 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; of his epic verse are, 1. A peculiar kind of anapæst; 2. The making the two first feet of the line trochees, and in one case even anapæsts; 3. Doing the same after the cæsura. To 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 | arddérchog | fu 'n rhóddi | 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 anapæsts in Italian heroic verse, let him read the following lines of Ariosto:— Pedóni e cávaliéri, e venía in cámpo Là dove Carlo 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. |
