the history of meter 43
century comparative philolog y on the continent had a profound impact on
the study of the English language and the perception that the English lan-
guage, with a genealog y that was perhaps different from that of the ancient
languages, should and could reflect the greatness of the nation. Formed in re-
sponse to this new comparative philolog y, a group of scholars under the name
of the “Philological Society” met in London in 1830 with the aim of combin-
ing the old classical philolog y with the new comparative philolog y. By 1842,
Edwin Guest founded the English Philological Society, whose published in-
tentions were to “investigate the Philological Illustration of the Classical Writ-
ers of Greece and Rome” and to investigate the “Structure, Affinities, and the
History of Languages” both in England and in other countries. This is, of
course, the society that eventually created the New English Dictionary (NED)
and its members included, at one time or another, NED editors James Henry
Murray and Richard Chevenix Trench, as well as Alexander Ellis and Henry
Sweet, both late-century pioneers in the study of English phonolog y. In addi-
tion to establishing the English Philological Society, Guest—archeologist and
self-taught Anglo-Saxonist—was the author of Origines Celticae: A History of
Britain in two volumes, in 1883 (published posthumously), and the monu-
mental History of English Rhythms, in 1838, which reflected his interest in
philolog y and Old English by asserting, quite controversially, that the accent
was “the sole principle”^67 that regulated English rhythm. This assertion, though
it did not gain as much traction in 1838 as it did when it was reprinted in
1882, is important not only because it shows how differently—even abstractly
—the problem of pronunciation is taken up by prosodic theorists, but also
because it shows the deep-seated influence of the revived interest in Anglo-
Saxon literatures on the study of English meter in the twentieth century.
Along with the new philolog y,^68 new histories of English literature,^69 and
the rise of English education, historical interpretations of prosody flourished
in the nineteenth century. Yopie Prins writes, “English Prosody becomes a na-
tional heritage, with a political as well as poetical purpose.”^70 As Prins asserts
in her ground-breaking essay “Victorian Meters,” following John Hollander’s
claim that “prosodical analysis is a form of literature in itself,”^71 Victorian pros-
ody as “a literary genre . . . raises important historical and theoretical questions
about the interpretation of poetry, beyond a merely technical, seemingly ahis-
torical approach to the scansion of a particular text.”^72 The main prosodic
theorists in this book—Hopkins, Bridges, Patmore, Saintsbury, Guest, New-
bolt, Meynell, Pound—did not emerge in a vacuum. Even by midcentury, pro-
sodic discourse was already known as a complicated and unresolved subject. In
1858, Goold Brown wrote on page 827 of the over 1,000 page Grammar of
English Grammars^73 a two-page definition of “versification” (but then ap-
pended to this definition two additional pages of smaller text “observations,”
including the following : “If to settle the theory of English verse on true and
consistent principles, is as difficult a matter, as the manifold controversies of