the history of meter 23
astonishing success,^11 these were histories first, and poems second, if at all. The
very fact of historical fact absolved the verses of any poetic responsibility.
Though the exact choice of meter in the metrical histories may not have car-
ried a specific message, they were nonetheless influenced by the way that each
author wanted his or her “English history” to be received. The fact that the
often unnamed meters were simple, emphatic, and recognizable—ballad me-
ters, double dactyls (common in nursery rhymes), and pentameters—none-
theless expressed a sense of community and connection. English meter in its
various unnamed forms was familiar enough to make English history easier,
and English history, in turn, joined English meter (or at least the adjective
“metrical”) to a progressive national narrative.
The late nineteenth century saw the growth of “History” and “English” as
disciplines that would eventually rival the classical curriculum, and both ama-
teur and specialized metrical histories of England circulated widely in the pe-
riod.^ The phenomenon of the metrical history, however, was not unique to the
nineteenth century; many of the earliest histories of England were metrical,
and many of the earliest poems in English were about the history of England.
Layamon’s Brut, (or “A Chronicle of Britain, a poetical Semi-Saxon para-
phrase”) written in the first part of the thirteenth century, tells the history of
the Britons from the fall of Troy to the fall of King Arthur, and was published
by the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1847. In the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, the six editions of the progressive, cumulative, and
multi author collection of poems The Mirror for Magistrates^12 told verse stories
of the lives of ancient Romans, ancient Britons, and even Queen Elizabeth and
her immediate predecessors.^13 Part ghost story, part national history, the Mir-
ror for Magistrates participated in a pattern that continued in Spenser and
throughout the eighteenth century of tacking ancient and contemporary En-
glish history onto the history of ancient Rome. The Mirror for Magistrates was
a poem that told a story, or many stories, but seemed less concerned with
whether or not the story was going to be repeated verbatim. In the eighteenth
century, the metrical history begins to concern specifically English history and
eschews the common myth of Roman origins, no longer recruiting these in the
service of legitimizing a succession. Rather, the “metrical histories” become
explicitly concerned with the successful transmission of English history and
English values into the minds of its readers in a time of nation building and
imperial expansion.
Scholars who wanted to teach a more “native” ancient English history in
the eighteenth century turned to “artificial memory” methods, of which Rich-
ard Grey’s 1737 Memoria Technica is the predecessor. His “new method of ar-
tificial memory” was, as stated on the title page, “applied to and exemplified in
chronolog y, history, geography, astronomy, and also Jewish, Grecian and
Roman Coins, Weights, and Measures” and its methodolog y consisted of as-
signing sections of made-up words to events in history, so that syllables, or