224 notes to chapter 3
ventured to clarify these under the heads as Feminine Rhythm, Enjambment,
Position of Pauses, Interchange of Feet, Special Quality of Vowels and Conso-
nants, Alliteration, Onomatopoea, etc., Believe me. Yours very truly, J. B. Mayor.- A 1902 review of both Chapters on English Metre by Joseph Mayor and Milton’s
Prosody by Robert Bridges was titled “The Battle of the Scansionists.” “Simple as the
matter might seem,” the reviewer summarizes, “the eternal crux of a metrical systemist
is to find some scheme by which he can label words as being in such and such a metre”
(465). - Bridges, Milton’s Prosody, 1921, 114.
- Saintsbury, Last Vintage, 116; Last Scrap Book, 88–91. Both quoted in Dorothy
Richardson Jones, King of Critics: George Saintsbury, 8. - Saintsbury, History of Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, 3,
- Patmore published “English Metrical Critics” in the North British Review in
1857, expanding it and revising it as part of his volume of poems, Amelia, & Tamerton
Church Tower in 1878. - Saintsbury, Atheneaum 2642 ( June 1878), 757. The last line refers to translating
Horace’s Odes into English. - Saintsbury, A History of Elizabethan Literature, 14. He continues, emphatically,
“[e]very 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 En-
glish metre so well as that application.” Saintsbury’s A History of Elizabethan Literature
was part of a four-part series that proved extremely popular in the 1890s, with twenty-
two reprints in all, and two editions. - Guest, A History of English Rhythms, 108.
- An archeologist and philologist, Guest established the Philological Society in
1842 that eventually began working on the New English Dictionary. An anonymous
reviewer notes that “compilers of histories of English language and literature have
quarried in Dr. Guest and appropriated his results,” and that Guest refused to reprint
the edition in his lifetime (323). - Despite Skeat’s efforts, Guest’s A History of English Rhythms was not that influ-
ential; it served more as a foil than anything else. The revival in the study of Anglo-
Saxon literature, as a whole, was more directly responsible for a revived interest in
Anglo-Saxon meter, as well as the influence of philological and metrical accounts of
the evolution of English poetry and meter from Germany. A small note in Notes and
Queries vol. 101 ( January 20, 1900) responds to “Egeria”’s query regarding “Instruc-
tion on the Rules of Poetry”: “There is, as far as we know, no such work as you seek. Dr.
Guest on ‘English Rhythm’ is erudite, but scarcely popular,” 60. - Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature, 44.
- Ibid., 39–47.
- Loring, The Rhymer’s Lexicon, iv.
- Ibid., viii.
- Eric Eaglesham writes that the authors of the Act—Robert Laurie Morant,
James Wycliffe Headlam, and John William Mackail (classicists all)—believed that
true mental discipline could only be learned through mastery of Latin grammar; En-
glish education had grown too quickly and without standards and, after the failures of