particularly from the pains he takes to wipe off a stain from the Cheshire-men, who it
seems ran away in that battle, and from his encomiums on the Stanleys, Earls of
Derby, who usually headed that county. He laments the death of James Stanley,
Bishop of Ely, as what had recently happened when this poem was written; which
serves to ascertain its date, for that prelate died March 22, 1514-5.
Thus we have traced the alliterative measure so low as the sixteenth century. It
is remarkable that all such poets as used this kind of metre, retained along with it
many peculiar Saxon idioms, particularly such as were appropriated to poetry: this
deserves the attention of those who are desirous to recover the laws of the ancient
Saxon poesy, usually given up as inexplicable: I am of opinion that they will find
what they seek in the metre of Pierce Plowman.[13]
About the beginning of the sixteenth century, this kind of versification began
to change its form: the author ofScottish Field, we see, concludes his poem with a
couplet in rhyme: this was an innovation that did but prepare the way for the general
admission of that more modish ornament: till at length the old uncouth verse of the
ancient writers would no longer go down without it. Yet when rhyme began to be
superadded, all the niceties of alliteration were at first retained along with it, and the
song ofLittle John Nobodyexhibits this union very clearly. By degrees, the
correspondence of final sounds engrossing the whole attention of the poet, and fully
satisfying the reader; the internal embellishment of alliteration was no longer studied,
and thus was this kind of metre at length swallowed up and lost in our common
Burlesque Alexandrine, or Anapestic verse,[14] now never used but in ballads and
pieces of light humour, as in the following song of Conscience, and in that well-
known doggrel,
"A cobler there was, and he lived in a stall."
But although this kind of measure hath with us been thus degraded, it still
retains among the French its ancient dignity; their grand heroic verse of twelve
syllables[15] is the same genuine offspring of the old alliterative metre of the ancient
Gothic and Francic poets, stript like our Anapestic of its alliteration, and ornamented
with rhyme; but with this difference, that whereas this kind of verse hath been applied
by us only to light and trivial subjects, to which, by its quick and lively measure, it
seemed best adapted, our poets have let it remain in a more lax unconfined state,[16]
as a greater degree of severity and strictness would have been inconsistent with the
light and airy subjects to which they have applied it. On the other hand, the French
having retained this verse as the vehicle of their epic and tragic flights, in order to
give it a stateliness and dignity were obliged to confine it to more exact laws of
scansion; they have therefore limited it to the number of twelve syllables, and by
making the cæsura or pause as full and distinct as possible, and by other severe
restrictions, have given it all the solemnity of which it was capable. The harmony of
both, however, depends so much on the same flow of cadence and disposal of the
pause, that they appear plainly to be of the same original ; and every French heroic
verse evidently consists of the ancient distich of their Francic ancestors : which, by
the way, will account to us why this verse of the French so naturally resolves itself
into two complete hemistichs; And, indeed, by making the cæsura or pause always to
rest on the last syllable of a word, and by making a kind of pause in the sense, the
French poets do in effect reduce their hemistichs to two distinct and independent
verses, and some of their old poets have gone so far as to make the two hemistichs
rhyme to each other.[17]