ut think that Dr Guest's accentual theory, after being
for years mainly neglected, has, for years again, been altogether too
greedily swallowed. It is not of course a case necessarily of want of
scholarship, or want of ear, for there are few better scholars or
poets than Mr Robert Bridges, who, though not a mere Guestite, holds
theories of prosody which seem to me even less defensible than
Guest's. But it is, I think, a case of rather misguided patriotism,
which thinks it necessary to invent an English prosody for English
poems.

[Sidenote: _Initial fallacies._]

This is surely a mistake. Allowances in degree, in shade, in local
colour, there must of course be in prosody as in other things. The
developments, typical and special, of English prosody in the
nineteenth century cannot be quite the same as those of Greek two
thousand years ago, or of French to-day. But if, as I see not the
slightest reason for doubting, prosody is not an artificially acquired
art but a natural result of the natural desires, the universal organs
of humanity, it is excessively improbable that the prosodic results of
nations so nearly allied to each other, and so constantly studying
each other's work, as Greeks, Romans, and modern Europeans, should be
in any great degree different. If quantity, if syllabic equivalence
and so forth, do not display themselves in Anglo-Saxon or in
Icelandic, it must be remembered that the poetry of these nations was
after all comparatively small, rather isolated, and in the conditions
of extremely early development--a childish thing to which there is not
the slightest rhyme or reason for straining ourselves to assimilate
the things of manhood. That accent modified English prosody nobody
need deny; there is no doubt that the very great freedom of
equivalence--which makes it, for instance, at least theoretically
possible to compose an English heroic line of five tribrachs--and the
immense predominance of common syllables in the language, are due in
some degree to a continuance of accentual influence.

[Sidenote: _And final perversities thereof._]

But to go on from this, as Dr Guest and some of his followers have
done, to the subjection of the whole invaluable vocabulary of
classical prosody to a sort of _praemunire_, to hold up the hands in
horror at the very name of a tribrach, and exhibit symptoms of
catalepsy at the word catalectic--to ransack the dictionary for
unnatural words or uses of words like "catch,"