the institution of meter 93
verse but the final place you quoted against me [a line]: ‘The infernal serpent
on me exercise most.’ I am writing to ask if you have any objection to telling me
how you accented or shaped the word exercise in that line.”^37 Mayor’s reply
does not acknowledge Bridges’s question. His form letter response shows that
he is entirely unwilling to engage Bridges on the level of pronunciation, which
is what Bridges is getting at when he asks him to explain how he would have
“accented or shaped” the word.^38 What is remarkable about this scholarly dis-
agreement is less that they disagree than the choice of lines over which they
argue. Both men are admirers of Milton, and both, as if to suit their own pro-
sodic purposes, quote line 927 from book ten of Paradise Lost as: “That cruel
serpent. On me exercise most,” as if Milton’s line is asking for the metrical
scholar to exercise his prosodic methodologies on the text of the poem. How-
ever, Milton’s line does not read “exercise most.” The line, as if in defiance of all
metrical attempts to standardize, reads: “That cruel serpent: on me exercise
not” (emphasis mine). Bridges is rebelling against what he feels is an unfairly
prescriptive approach to English language teaching ; by standardizing pho-
netic spelling, the rules of English meter would emerge as harmonious with
the past and would be truly English in character; the “exercises” of schoolmas-
ters and grammarians, in Bridges’s mind, are to blame for the inefficient state
of English literary education. Mayor, on the other hand, represents the pre-
scriptive ends of meter as a grammar—the cruel serpent of grammar exercises
“most” in Mayor’s concept of English literary education, whereas Bridges
wants to reform it altogether.^39
Perhaps fueled by the opposition of scholars like Mayor, in the 1921 edi-
tion Bridges does not hesitate to use Milton’s Prosody as a platform for educa-
tion reform: “I wish that the book may do something to conquer the prejudice
which still opposes reform of this fundamental defect in our early education.”
He attacks the community to which he appealed repeatedly for validation,
implicitly including, among others, his dear friend Henry Bradley, editor of
the New English Dictionary (later the OED) and frequent correspondent:
[T]here are very few of my contemporaries who will listen to common
sense in this matter, or allow the clear light of scientific method to dis-
pel the mystifications which prevent our children from understanding
the elements of speech. And the further they proceed in the higher edu-
cation the more hopelessly are they involved and confirmed in their ig-
norance: the barbarous distortion of Latin in our great schools is stren-
uously upheld as a reasonable propriety which it is almost a national
offence to discredit.^40Bridges recognizes British society’s attachment to the classical languages and
all that they signify, but like other reformers eager to demystify the abstrac-
tions of linguistic signs, Bridges is attempting to be more nationalistic than the