notes to chapter 3 225
the Boer War, Latin could help the country get back on track. Eric Eaglesham, “Imple-
menting the Education Act of 1902,” 153–75. Christopher Stray makes a similar asser-
tion: “Underlying the attachment to Latin grammar was a powerful emotional convic-
tion that it was the exemplar of ‘real’ knowledge. . . . The stress on the power of
discipline needs to be seen in this context, as a reassertion of permanence and stabil-
ity” (Stray, Classics Transformed, 258).
- Cf. Matthew Hendley, “‘Help us to Secure a Strong, Healthy, Prosperous and
Peaceful Britain,’” 261–88. See also J. O. Springhall, “Lord Meath, Youth, and Em-
pire,” 97–111, and R.J.Q. Adams, “The National Service League and Mandatory Ser-
vice in Edwardian Britain,” 53–74. - “Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little. Among them towers the
Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe his Miltonic sympathies, though
here again I must disclaim all portraiture.” George Bernard Shaw, “Preface: A Profes-
sor of Phonetics,” 102. - Andrews, The Reading and Writing of Verse, ix.
- Loring, The Rhymer’s Lexicon, x.
- Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody, vol. 1, 182.
- Ibid., vol. 3, 188. Cf. Prins, “Victorian Meters,” The Cambridge Companion to
Victorian Poetry, 89–113. - Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody, vol. 3, 247.
- Ibid., vol. 1, 529.
- Ibid., vol. 3, 522. See Jason Rudy’s excellent discussion of Carlyle’s rhythms in
Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics, 76–77. - Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody, vol. 3, 521.
- Omond, A Study of Metre, xii.
- Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody, vol. 3.
- “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is
charity” (1 Cor 13:13). I am grateful to Liam Corley and Carolyn Williams for this
reference. - Christopher Stray notes how, well into the twentieth century, “when ciphers
were being used in wartime, the classical knowledge which excluded the lower ranks
from such communications on one side simultaneously linked the officers and gentle-
men on opposing sides” (Stray, Classics Transformed, 127). - George Saintsbury studied at Merton College until 1868; Bridges was at Cor-
pus Christi; and Hopkins was at Balliol until 1867. - From “Verses Written for Mrs. Daniel,” an unpublished poem written in 1919
publicly printed in facsimile at Oxford in 1932 and printed again in Collected Poems.
Notice Bridges’s subtle play on the word “rootlets,” wherein “roots” is the root of the
word. Botanical metaphors for metrical and grammatical education abounded in this
period, with many calls to rely on proper educational “roots” so that the language stu-
dent could “blossom” into the right kind of English citizen, quite unlike the earlier
insidious grass of metrical form in the metrical histories I discussed in chapter 1. - Green, Robert Bridges, 37.
- Phillips describes Bridges’s education:
Once the basics of Latin and Greek were sufficiently grasped, the boys moved
gradually through Horace, Ovid, Livy, Cicero, Catullus, Propertius, Caesar,
Greek lyric and elegiac writers, Virgil, Homer, some Thucydides, Herodotus,