ome
sort justifies the honour. Meanwhile, this metrical theory, from his
time, has been generally received; and the renown of the founder of our
poetry settled on all the wider and firmer basis, when he appears as the
earliest skilled artificer of the verse itself--the ten-syllabled or now
national verse, of Shakspeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Pope.

One starts, therefore, to find a name of such distinction as the late
Laureate's formally opposed to Tyrwhitt, and committed to the opinion
which may seem to have been Dryden's, that the verse of Chaucer is
"rhythmical, not metrical." This hardly self-explicating distinction of
Dr Geo. Fred. Nott's, Southey in his Life of Cowper has explained in set
terms--a verse for which the number of beats or accents is ruled is
rhythmical--for example, the verse of Coleridge's _Christabel_. In that
beautiful poem, the verse is fixed at four beats or accents, but is free
syllabled, having six, seven, ten, twelve, or fourteen. Southey cannot
believe that the prudent and practical Chaucer would have placed his
verse, intended for general reception, in the jeopardy of a reader's
discretion for determining when the verse required the sounding, and
when the silence, of a vowel, by its nature free to be sounded or left
silent, as exigency might require. But he misapprehends the proposed
remedy; and the discretion which he supposes is not given. In the two
languages from which ours is immediately derived, the Anglo-Saxon and
the Norman-French, there are found many final syllables, entirely
dropped in our pronunciation, and many of them in our writing, but which
in the time of Chaucer were all still written, and all with the same
vowel E. The metrical hypothesis, to which Tyrwhitt's labours gave a
lustre, much heightened by the Anglo-Saxon studies abroad and at home of
the present century, bears--first, that in the language of Chaucer's day
these syllables were still audible; and secondly, that Chaucer
consequently employed them in his verse, like any other syllables, with
the due metrical value:--herein not, as the Laureate thought,
overruling, but conforming himself to the use of his mother tongue. To
this more than plausible view, which, if the late studies that have been
taken in the intelligence of Alfred's speech had been made in Tyrwhitt's
day, would not have waited till now for its full establishment, no
objection has yet been raised that seems to deserve the slightest
attention. T