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The History of Meter

When this, this little group their country calls

From academic shades and learned halls,

To fix her laws, her spirit to sustain,

And light up glory through her wide domain;

Their various tastes in different arts display’d

Like temper’d harmony of light and shade,

With friendly union in one mass shall blend,

And thus adorn the state, and that defend.

— Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “The Invitation: To Miss B*****”

Upon few other subjects has so much been written with so little tangible result.

—Coventry Patmore, “Prefatory Study on English Metrical Law”

When you are at school and learn grammar grammar is very exciting.

— Gertrude Stein, Poetry and Grammar

A Metrical History of England

With the above lines from “The Invitation” by “Our Poetess” (Anna Laetitia
Barbauld), William Enfield begins his 1774 The Speaker, an elocutionary
handbook that was intended for use in classrooms at the moment when ver-
nacular literature was beginning to displace classical literature in private gram-
mar schools.^1 Enfield was a schoolmaster at the dissenting Warrington Acad-
emy, and both he and Anna Laetitia Barbauld (daughter of schoolmaster John
Aiken, also of Warrington Academy, and author of The Female Speaker [1811])
were invested in the cultural capital of English literature. As John Guillory
describes it, “by the time Thomas Sheridan published British Education: Or
the Source of the Disorders of Great Britain (1756), the connection between
vernacular linguistic refinement and a progressive political agenda was firmly
entrenched.”^2 Urging English literature as “models of style,” Sheridan expressed
“anxiety . . . that in the absence of an institutional form of dissemination, liter-
ary culture [could] not be entrusted to preserve English works of the past.^3 It
is in this climate that Barbauld imagines a collective classroom community in