22 chapter 1
vessels for transmission. With pedagogic simplicity at the forefront, Burt ad-
vertises that in a mere hour, his metrical epitome can provide the amount of
information that a week’s reading “in the ordinary [prose] manner” (iv) would
require. Burt’s use of the term “metrical” here means “narrative” or “vehicle
for transmission and retention of a narrative pertaining to England” particu-
larly. We can also read, in his reluctance to claim responsibility for his meter,
that “meter” was also associated with a kind of potentially measurable accu-
racy, which his “epitome” would like to sidestep, or perhaps replace with the
measurable accuracy of its historical account. What Burt takes for granted
is that the regularity and familiarity of a dactylic tetrameter will only help
the foreign-sounding Saxon names to become part of the En glish historical
record.
Why would Burt need to fix these Anglo-Saxon names into the more fa-
miliar dactylic meter rather than into an Anglo-Saxon meter? The “metrical”
of Burt’s Metrical Epitome is distinct from the varieties of English meters with
which Victorian poets were experimenting and to which he himself alludes; it
is also distinct from the rigorous classical meters of the public school and Ox-
bridge,^9 not participating in any of the discord about translations into English
from classical meters that took place at midcentury (translating the quantita-
tive dactylic hexameter into a six-beat line.)^10 Burt avoids explicit discussion
of versification and begins his history with only these names, which call atten-
tion to their own, seemingly inherent strong-stresses—through the very Anglo
-Saxon alliteration and mid-line caesura—while at the same time making them
conform to a familiar dactylic pattern. Burt begins English history here, in a
subtly hybrid past in which alliterative, stressed Englishness seems to overtake
the familiar conventional dactylic tetrameter. As we will see, linguistic and
metrical forms are often conceived as part of a series of narratives of conquest
and submission, and even in this proclaimed non-poetic English history, we
may read subtle tensions between national and metrical pasts.
In addition to these relatively inconspicuous details, however, Burt’s “met-
ricality” was meant to counterbalance the supposed dryness of historical facts,
to dress them up, organize, and stabilize them so that they could be more easily
retained by the memory. “Versified” history organized the facts of England’s
past so that the younger generation could remember it; just as the regents
themselves provide an “order” to the epochs of history, so too did nineteenth-
century meter, broadly conceived as part of English history, provide an “order”
for the overwhelmed mind of the young student. This “metricality,” therefore,
did not allude to the more complicated dactyls of the public schoolboy’s exer-
cise in translating from Greek and Latin hexameters, though that exercise was
intended to provide a similar kind of mental discipline. The intended audience
for metrical histories needed historical knowledge first, with the verse forms,
never named or discussed, securing that knowledge in a student’s memory.
Like Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, published ten years earlier in 1842 to