Butler indulges also in the arbitrary and inventive riming that we find later in Lowell:

When pulpit, drum ecclesiastick,

Is beat with fist instead of a stick.

(Strictly speaking, this is not a true rime, since the second line merely repeats without the proper variation the terminal sound of the first line.)

The iambic tetrameter has served other purposes than satire. Chaucer employed it in "The House of Fame," Milton in "Il Penseroso," Burns in "Tam o' Shanter," Byron in "The Prisoner of Chillon," Wordsworth in "The White Doe," Scott in "Marmion" and "The Lady of the Lake," Whittier in "Maud Muller" and " Barbara Frietchie." Scott, indeed, was frank in declaring his preference for the iambic tetrameter over the pentameter for purposes of narrative, although perhaps not for descriptive poetry. He held that the tetrameter "is capable of certain varieties denied to the heroic couplet. Double rimes, for instance, are congenial to it. . . . You may also render it more or less rapid by retaining or dropping an occasional syllable. Lastly, it runs better into sentences than any length of line I know, as it corresponds, upon an average view of our punctuation, very commonly with the proper and usual space between comma and comma." And then Scott added, as a final reason for his liking, that he had "somehow a better knack at this" meter than at the longer pentameter. In other words, Scott found iambic tetrameters easy to write; and so they are; and this facility is often fatal to them, since they may flow too fast and without sufficient thought and emotion be

hind them. As Holmes pointed out, the iambic tetrameter does not conform to our normal breathing; it forces us to hurry and to take short breaths. It may be rapid, as indeed it is in the movement of Scott's narrative passages; but it tends in time to be fatiguing. It lacks the broader scope of the pentameter, which is better adjusted to our natural inspiration and expiration. Yet Scott was right in thinking that it was a satisfactory meter for the bold and lusty deeds he desired to set forth in verse; and he modified its rigidity under two influences. One of these was the old English ballad which he had absorbed so absolutely, and from which he borrowed the privilege of dropping the strict couplet, now and then, and employing a quatrain with its interlaced rimes, and with its occasional trimeter lines to relieve the monotony of the tetrameter. And the other influence was that of Coleridge's "Christabel," which he had seen or heard before its publication. Coleridge had deliberately departed from the strict eight syllables of the rigid iambic tetrameter as that had been written by his immediate predecessors. He claimed the right to vary iambics with anapests and to drop out syllables at will, if the sense explained the resulting pause; he professed to reserve the privilege of varying the number of syllables in any line from seven to twelve as long as he retained the four long syllables which were the backbone of the meter. As a matter of fact, he went so far as to put only four syllables into one of his lines:

'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,

And the owls have awakened the crowing cock,
Tu-whit! Tu-whoo!

Here Coleridge is rather anapestic than iambic, whereas Scott following him is more regularly iambic, although not without an occasional anapest, which gives enhanced rapidity to his lines: —

"Now, in good sooth," Lord Marmion cried,
"Were I in warlike wise to ride,

A better guard I would not lack
Than your stout forayers at my back;
But as in form of peace I go,

A friendly messenger, to know
Why, through all Scotland, near and far,
Their king is mustering troops for war,
The sight of plundering Border spears
Might justify suspicious fears,
And deadly feud or thirst of spoil

Break out in some unseemly broil."

It is curious that Scott, brought up on the iambic pentameter, which still retained its vogue in his youth, should have abandoned it in his narrative poems, when his great predecessors in the art of story-telling in verse, Chaucer and Dryden, long familiar with the tetrameter, seem to have introduced the pentameter as an ampler instrument for the same purpose. Chaucer and Dryden are not only greater poets than Scott; they are also far more consummate metrists, far more careful and conscientious artists in verse. The explanation of Scott's reversion to the meter Chaucer had abandoned is probably to be found in the fact that he found the pentameter after it had received the impress of Pope, whereby it had lost not a little of the easy spontaneity with which Chaucer had endowed it. In Pope's hands the iambic pentameter had stiffened; it had become antithetic and artificial. There is more than a little truth in Cowper's

assertion that Pope had "made poetry a mere mechanic art"; at least Pope had made the mechanism of verse more obvious, and never more obvious than in his handling of the heroic couplet. Perhaps the difference between this meter as Pope used it and as Chaucer had used it can be indicated by declaring that in Pope's hands it is strictly the heroic couplet, with the thought firmly clamped within two riming lines, whereas in Chaucer it is rather to be called iambic pentameter flowing ever freely from line to line with no rigid limitation of the sense within the successive pairs of rimes.

in

Although the main purpose of the present book is not to give the history of English versification but to dwell on its principles and on its practice, the importance of the rimed iambic pentameter is such that a brief chronological survey is here justifiable, deed, the rich variety of which this meter is capable can best be shown by considering its development. The easy amplitude of the iambic pentameter as Chaucer handled it will be found also in Spenser's treatment. It retained its fluidity and openness in Marlowe and Shakspere; but it tightened and stiffened in Ben Jonson's hands. Waller refined on Jonson and Pope on Waller, until the heroic couplet became antithetical, exactly balanced, with the meaning rigidly compacted into a single line or at most within the pair of rimes. At its worst the heroic couplet as Pope had sharpened and polished it justifies Lowell's assertion that " Mr. Pope's versification was like the regular ticking of one of Willard's clocks, in which we could fancy, after long listening, a certain kind of rhythm or tune, but which yet was only a

poverty-stricken tick, tick, after all." And in "A Fable for Critics" Lowell declared that the heroic couplet was

what I call a sham meter,

But many admire it, the English pentameter.

Here Lowell is in disaccord with Holmes, who liked to write the iambic pentameter and who loved to praise it :

The proud heroic, with its pulse-like beat,

Rings like the cymbals, clashing as they meet.

This couplet is from one of his earlier poems; and in one of his later lyrics Holmes with even more emphasis again declared the faith that was in him :

And so the hand that takes the lyre for you

Plays the old tune on strings that once were new.
Nor let the rimester of the hour deride

The straight-backed measure with its stately stride,
It gave the mighty voice of Dryden scope;
It sheathed the steel-bright epigrams of Pope;
In Goldsmith's verse it learned a sweeter strain;
Byron and Campbell wore its clanking chain;
I smile to listen while the critic's scorn

Flouts the proud purple kings have nobly worn.

Holmes himself relished the heroic couplet as it had been edged and pointed by Pope; and though he cited Goldsmith and Campbell, he failed to mention the later poets who have used the iambic pentameter with the same large liberty that Chaucer enjoyed. Leigh Hunt led the way in emancipating this meter, and he was followed immediately by Keats and Shelley. And later it was employed by Swinburne and Morris, with a freedom from mere antithesis, which made this measure in their hands a very different instrument