tches whirled down,
Ev'n with one frown, that stayed but with a smile;
And now behold the thing that thou, erewhile,
Saw only in thought: and what thou now shalt hear,
Recount the same to kesar, king, and peer."[8]

[8] The precedent descriptions of Sorrow herself, of Misery, and of Old
Age, are even finer than the above, which, however, I have preferred for
three reasons. First, it has been less often quoted; secondly, its subject
is a kind of commonplace, and, therefore, shows the poet's strength of
handling; thirdly, because of the singular and characteristic majesty of
the opening lines.

It is perhaps well, in an early passage of a book which will have much to
do with the criticism of poetry, to dwell a little on what seems to the
critic to be the root of that matter. In the first place, I must entirely
differ with those persons who have sought to create an independent prosody
for English verse under the head of "beats" or "accents" or something of
that sort. _Every English metre since Chaucer at least can be scanned,
within the proper limits, according to the strictest rules of classical
prosody: and while all good English metre comes out scatheless from the
application of those rules, nothing exhibits the badness of bad English
metre so well as that application._ It is, alongside of their great merits,
the distinguishing fault of Wyatt eminently, of Surrey to a less degree,
and of all the new school up to Spenser more or less, that they neglect the
quantity test too freely; it is the merit of Sackville that, holding on in
this respect to the good school of Chaucer, he observes it. You will find
no "jawbreakers" in Sackville, no attempts to adjust English words on a
Procrustean bed of independent quantification. He has not indeed the
manifold music of Spenser--it would be unreasonable to expect that he
should have it. But his stanzas, as the foregoing examples will show, are
of remarkable melody, and they have about them a command, a completeness of
accomplishment within the writer's intentions, which is very noteworthy in
so young a man. The extraordinary richness and stateliness of the measure
has escaped no critic. There is indeed a certain one-sidedness about it,
and a devil's advocate might urge that a long poem couched in verse (let
alone the subject) of such unbroken gloom would be intolerable. But
Sackville did not write a long poem, and his complete command within his
limits of the ef