them from the pages of the same writer, one who was ambidexter;
let us take, for instance, Rumour's Prologue to the Second Part of
_Henry IV._, a fine flourish of eloquence in Shakespeare's second
manner, and set it side by side with Falstaff's praise of sherris, act
iv., scene 1; or let us compare the beautiful prose spoken throughout by
Rosalind and Orlando, compare, for example, the first speech of all,
Orlando's speech to Adam, with what passage it shall please you to
select--the Seven Ages from the same play, or even such a stave of
nobility as Othello's farewell to war; and still you will be able to
perceive, if you have any ear for that class of music, a certain
superior degree of organisation in the prose; a compacter fitting of the
parts; a balance in the swing and the return as of a throbbing pendulum.
We must not, in things temporal, take from those who have little, the
little that they have; the merits of prose are inferior, but they are
not the same; it is a little kingdom, but an independent.

3. _Rhythm of the Phrase._--Some way back, I used a word which still
awaits an application. Each phrase, I said, was to be comely; but what
is a comely phrase? In all ideal and material points, literature, being
a representative art, must look for analogies to painting and the like;
but in what is technical and executive, being a temporal art, it must
seek for them in music. Each phrase of each sentence, like an air or a
recitative in music, should be so artfully compounded out of long and
short, out of accented and unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear.
And of this the ear is the sole judge. It is impossible to lay down
laws. Even in our accentual and rhythmic language no analysis can find
the secret of the beauty of a verse; how much less, then, of those
phrases, such as prose is built of, which obey no law but to be lawless
and yet to please? The little that we know of verse (and for my part I
owe it all to my friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin) is, however,
particularly interesting in the present connection. We have been
accustomed to describe the heroic line as five iambic feet, and to be
filled with pain and confusion whenever, as by the conscientious
schoolboy, we have heard our own description put in practice.

"All night | the dread | less an | gel un | pursued,"[18]

goes the schoolboy; but though we close our ears, we cling to our
definition, in spite of its proved and naked insufficiency. Mr. Jenkin