the institution of meter 95
“stress” versus “time,” the very definitions of “accent,” “quantity,” “stress,” and
“time” in English verse were dynamic, malleable, and shifted in specificity and
abstraction depending on the intended audience, which I hope I have by now
shown. Opposite of Bridges’s willingness to explore multiple foundations and
definitions of meter, Saintsbury devoted an enormous amount of energ y to
fixing the terms for poetic form. He felt strongly that the history of English
poetry would clearly prove his opinions about English prosody, but he was
also invested in a reading practice that he seemed to take for granted as that
shared by all Englishmen. A teacher of Greek and Latin and even Hebrew at
a young age, Saintsbury, like most young men of his generation, learned in just
three or four years of school, “the first three books of the Aeneid, the Odes of
Horace, some Homer, and most of the iambic part, with some of the choruses,
of two or three Greek plays,” which he described as “large patterns and exam-
ples of the most perfect literary form that the world has produced.”^41 This is a
typical assessment from a student educated at King’s College School in Lon-
don and Merton College in Oxford, where there was not yet regular instruc-
tion in English literature when Saintsbury finished his studies in 1868. Yet
Saintsbury asserts that he formed his ideas about English prosody solely by
reading English poetry.^42 And as this proclaimed prosodic autodidact’s 1878
review of Coventry Patmore’s English Metrical Law^43 reveals, even at the young
age of thirty-three, Saintsbury (like Patmore, Bridges, and Hopkins) was not
only fully aware of the complicated nineteenth-century prosodic debates, but
he had already formed strong opinions about them. In this 1878 review,
Saintsbury displays what would become his characteristic style of dismissing
prosodic systems that did not satisfy his own nascent ideas of what an English
foot should be and do:
Mr. Patmore does not seem to have made quite as valuable a contribu-
tion to the literature of the subject as he might have made; the fatal old
quarrel between accent and quantity has drawn him to take part in it
with the usual result. The truth seems to be that English verse is to be
scanned both by quantity and accent, and that no verse is really good
which does not answer to this double test. Those who rely only upon ac-
cent give us slipshod doggerel; those who rely only upon quantity give
us variations on the original “Tityus happily thou,” and so on.^44He provides no information to back up his claim that the “truth seems to be”
that English meter is scanned by both accent and quantity. His devotion to
this singular understanding of meter is reinforced when, less than ten years
later, he asserts his belief in an English foot measurable by both accent and
quantity and based explicitly on classical meters, in his History of Elizabethan
Literature (1887): “I must entirely differ with those persons who have sought
to create an independent prosody for English verse under the head of ‘beats’ or