me that the career of Marlowe was closing, and he carried it to
the greatest perfection in variety, suppleness and fulness. He released
it from the excessive bondage that it had hitherto endured; as Robert
Bridges has said, "Shakespeare, whose early verse may be described as
syllabic, gradually came to write a verse dependent on stress." In
comparison with that of his predecessors and successors, the blank verse
of Shakespeare is essentially regular, and his prosody marks the
admirable mean between the stiffness of his dramatic forerunners and the
laxity of those who followed him. Most of Shakespeare's lines conform to
the normal type of the decasyllable, and the rest are accounted for by
familiar and rational rules of variation. The ease and fluidity of his
prosody were abused by his successors, particularly by Beaumont and
Fletcher, who employed the soft feminine ending to excess; in Massinger
dramatic blank verse came too near to prose, and in Heywood and Shirley
it was relaxed to the point of losing all nervous vigour.

The later dramatists gradually abandoned that rigorous difference which
should always be preserved between the cadence of verse and prose, and
the example of Ford, who endeavoured to revive the old severity of blank
verse, was not followed. But just as the form was sinking into dramatic
desuetude, it took new life in the direction of epic, and found its
noblest proficient in the person of John Milton. The most intricate and
therefore the most interesting blank verse which has been written is
that of Milton in the great poems of his later life. He reduced the
elisions, which had been frequent in the Elizabethan poets, to law; he
admitted an extraordinary variety in the number of stresses; he
deliberately inverted the rhythm in order to produce particular effects;
and he multiplied at will the caesurae or breaks in a line. Such verses
as

"Arraying with reflected purple and gold--
Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep--
Universal reproach, far worse to bear--
Me, me only, just object of his ire"--

are not mistaken in rhythm, nor to be scanned by forcing them to obey
the conventional stress. They are instances, and _Paradise Lost_ is
full of such, of Milton's exquisite art in ringing changes upon the
metrical type of ten syllables, five stresses and a rising rhythm, so as
to make the whole texture of the verse respond to his poetical thought.
Writing many years later in _Paradise Regai