st foes of the Muses. The new
equipments may not have been indispensable to the poet's soaring--they
may not be the greater wings of his song, the mighty pinions that take
him beyond Space and Time into Eternity and the Infinite. But they
are most admirable _talaria_, ankle-winglets enabling him to skim and
scud, to direct his flight this way and that, to hover as well as to
tower, even to run at need as well as to fly.

That a danger was at hand, the danger of too great restriction in the
syllabic direction, has been admitted. The greatest poet of the
fourteenth century in England--the greatest, for the matter of that,
from the beginning till the sixteenth--went some way in this path, and
if Chaucer's English followers had been men of genius we might have
been sorely trammelled. Fortunately Lydgate and Occleve and Hawes
showed the dangers rather than the attractions of strictness, and the
contemporary practice of alliterative irregulars kept alive the
appetite for liberty. But at this time--at our time--it was
restriction, regulation, quantification, metrical arrangement, that
English needed; and it received them.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _The "accent" theory._]

These remarks are of course not presented as a complete account, even
in summary, of English, much less of European prosody. They are barely
more than the heads of such a summary, or than indications of the line
which the inquiry might, and in the author's view should, take.
Perhaps they may be worked out--or rather the working out of them may
be published--more fully hereafter. But for the present they may
possibly be useful as a protest against the "accent" and "stress"
theories which have been so common of late years in regard to English
poetry, and which, though not capable of being applied in quite the
same fashion to the Romance languages, have had their counterparts in
attempts to decry the application of classical prosody (which has
never been very well understood on the Continent) to modern tongues.
No one can speak otherwise than respectfully of Dr Guest, whose book
is certainly one of the most patient and ingenious studies of the kind
to be found in any literature, and whose erudition, at a time when
such erudition needed far greater efforts than now, cannot be too
highly praised. But it is a besetting sin or disease of Englishmen in
all matters, after pooh-poohing innovation, to go blindly in for it;
and I cannot b