36 chapter 1
The standardizing projects of the eighteenth century and the conservatism
and classicism that we associate with the century in general do not apply neatly
in the case of prosody. Jeff Strabone has recently outlined the way that Samuel
Johnson’s standardizing project in The Dictionary (1755) was ambivalent
about its own cultural-imperialist aims,^42 and Paul Fussell has noted that John-
son’s own revisions to the fourth edition of The Dictionary (1773) added to
the generalization, “every line considered by itself is more harmonious, as this
rule is more strictly observed,” the warning, “[t]he variations necessary to plea-
sure belong to the art of poetry, not the rules of grammar.”^43 As Strabone ar-
gues elsewhere, the national myths of England’s classical origins were being
revised long before the study of language in England was crucially influenced
by Danish and German philological study. Dialect poems, a renewed interest
in ballads, and the collection of folk forms from rural Scotland competed with
the standardization and Latinization of English language and grammar. Stra-
bone suggests that Reliques of Ancient Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads,
Songs, and other Pieces of our earlier Poets^44 contained a kind of metrical dis-
course that rivaled the standardizing impulses of the prescriptive grammars,
especially in Percy’s long headnote, “On the Metre of Pierce Plowman’s Vi-
sions.”^45 Part of a general interest in pre-Chaucerian meters as unifying, folk-
meters of the people, Percy notes the division of Langland’s meter into lines of
two parts, or “distichs” each, measured by alliteration. Percy writes, “the au-
thor of this poem will not be found to have invented any new mode of versifi-
cation, as some have supposed, but only to have retained that of the old Saxon
and Gothic poets.”^46 A resurgent interest in “folk” forms, more purely “En-
glish” in some ways than the Latin forms imposed on English verse, both an-
ticipated and was concurrent with the renewed interest in Anglo-Saxon at the
turn of the nineteenth century.
In an 1835 review in The Gentleman’s Magazine of Rev. Samuel Fox’s King
Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon Version of the Metres of Boethius, with an English transla-
tion and notes (translator of the poetical calendar of the Anglo-Saxons), the
reviewer notes that “A taste for Anglo-Saxon literature is still increasing. The
most unequivocal proof of this is, the constant demand for standard Anglo-
Saxon books.”^47 The reviewer notes “Mr. Fox properly states that ‘[i]t is now
ascertained beyond all doubt that alliteration is the chief characteristic of
Anglo-Saxon verse; and this is also accompanied with a rhythm which clearly
distinguishes it from prose.’” The histories of England and the history of En-
glish meter are intertwined into one volume. England’s history is given a dif-
ferent kind of authority because it is not only about King Alfred but is actually
written by him; the Reverend Samuel Fox has also translated the “poetical cal-
endar” of the Anglo-Saxons and has clearly distinguished alliteration as the
principle by which Anglo-Saxon meters are distinguished from prose. By
1807, Sharon Turner’s History of England: The History of Anglo-Saxons from
the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest, alludes to the already extant con-