is a
mistake. It was avowedly a controversial diatribe against the celibacy
and priestcraft of Romanism, and was originally designed to be in prose.
That is not a safe basis for a dramatic poem, and the poem suffers from
the fact that it is in great part a theological pamphlet. It would have
made a most interesting historical novel as a mediaeval pendant to
_Hypatia_; but it is not a great lyrical drama. As we have had no great
lyrical drama at all since _Manfred_ and _The Cenci_, that is not much in
its dispraise. There are powerful passages, much poetic grace in the
piece; but the four thousand lines of this elaborate polemical poem
rather weary us, and a perfervid appeal to the Protestantism and
uxoriousness of Britons should have been cast into other moulds.

The long poem of _Andromeda_ almost succeeds in that impossible feat--the
revival of the hexameter in English. It may be a hard saying to the
countrymen of Longfellow, but the truth is that the hexameter is a
metrical monster in our English speech. The paucity of easy dactyls and
the absence of all true spondees in English words, the preponderance of
consonants over vowels, the want of inflected forms, and other
peculiarities in our language--make the hexameter incapable of
transplantation; and this magnificent metre loses with us all its
majesty, its ease, its beauty. The very line can hardly be printed on an
ordinary page, for the immense number of letters in each English verse
causes an unsightly doubling of the lines, chokes the voice, and wearies
the ear. In the hexameter line of Homer there are usually about thirty
letters, of which only twelve are consonants; in the English hexameter
there are often sixty letters, of which nearly forty are consonants. And
the Homeric hexameter will have six words where the English hexameter has
twelve or fourteen.[1] Yet having set himself this utterly hopeless and
thankless task, to write English hexameter, Kingsley produced some five
hundred lines of _Andromeda_, which in rhythm, ease, rapidity, and
metrical correctness are quite amongst the best in the language. It is
very rare to meet with any English hexameter which in rhythm, stress, and
prosody is perfectly accurate. _Andromeda_ contains many such lines, as
for example:

Violet, asphodel, ivy, and vine-leaves, roses and lilies--
Nereid, siren, and triton, and dolphin, and arrowy fishes.

These lines are true hexameters, chiefly because they cons