d by Rowe was "fasting," a
manifest slip of the pen, and worth notice only as showing how easily
errors may be committed.]

In Dumain's ode, (_Love's Labor's Lost_, Act iv. Sc. 3,) beginning,

"On a day, (alack the day!)
Love, whose month is ever May,"

Mr. White chooses to read

"Thou, for whom Jove would swear
Juno but an Ethiop were,"

rather than accept Pope's suggestion of "ev'n Jove," or the far better
"great Jove" of Mr. Collier's Corrected Folio,--affirming that "the
quantity and accent proper to 'thou' make any addition to the line
superfluous." We should like to hear Mr. White read the verse as he
prints it. The result would be something of this kind:--

Thou-ou for whom Jove would swear,--

which would be like the 'bow-wow-wow before the Lord' of the old
country-choirs. To our ear it is quite out of the question; and,
moreover, we affirm that in dissyllabic (which we, for want of a better
name, call iambic and trochaic) measures the omission of a half-foot
is an impossibility, and all the more so when, as in this case, the
preceding syllable is strongly accented. Even had the poem been meant
for singing, which it was not, for Dumain reads it, the quantity would
be false, though the ear might more easily excuse it. Such an omission
would be not only possible, but sometimes very effective, in trisyllabic
measures,--as, for instance, in anapests like these,--

"'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock,"--

where iambs or spondees may take the place of the first or second foot
with no shock to the ear, though the change of rhythm be sensible
enough,--as

'Tis th[)e] d[=e][=e]p midnight by the castle clock,
And [)o]wls have awakened the crowing cock.

We quite agree with Mr. White and Mr. Knight in their hearty dislike of
the Steevens-system of versification, but we think that Coleridge (who,
although the best English metrist since Milton, often thought lazily and
talked loosely) has misled both of them in what he has said about the
pauses and retardations of verse. In that noblest of our verses, the
unrhymed iambic pentameter, two short or lightly-accented syllables
may often gracefully and effectively take the place of a long or
heavily-accented one; but great metrists contrive their pauses by the
artistic choice and position of their syllables, and not by leaving
them out. Metre is the solvent in which alone thought and emotion can