III. OCTOSYLLABLE.--The historical origin of the octosyllabic (or, as the accentual people call it, the four-beat or four-stress line) is one of the most typical in the whole range of prosody, though the lesson of the type may be differently interpreted. Taking it altogether, there is perhaps no metre in which so large a body of modern, including mediæval, poetry has been composed. But, although it is simply dimeter iambic, acatalectic or catalectic as the case may be, it is quite vain to try to discover frequent and continuous patterns of origin for it in strictly classical prosody.[162] Odd lines, rarely exact, in choric odes prove nothing, and the really tempting
of Pindar is an uncompleted fragment which might have gone off into any varieties of Pindaric. There are a few fragments of Alcman--
in the metre, while the spurious verse of the "Anacreontea," a catalectic form with trisyllabic equivalence, seems to have been actually practised by the real poet. _Alternately_ used, it is, of course, frequent in the epodes of Horace, in Martial, etc. But the fact remains that, as has been said, it is not a classical metre to any but a very small extent, though those who attach no value to anything but the "beats" may find it in bulk in the _anapæstic_ dimeter of Greek and Latin choruses. It is in the Latin hymns--that is to say, in Latin after it had undergone a distinct foreign admixture--that the metre first appears firmly and distinctly established. In the fourth century, St. Ambrose without rhyme, and Hilary with it, employ the iambic dimeter, and it soon becomes almost the staple, though Prudentius, contemporary with both of them and more of a regular poet, while he does use it, seems to prefer other metres. By the time, however, when the modern prosodies began to take form, it was thoroughly well settled; and every Christian nation in Europe knew examples of it by heart.
It still, however, remains a problem exactly why this particular metre should, as a matter of direct literary imitation, have commended itself so widely to the northern nations. They had nearly or quite as many examples in the same class of the _trochaic_ dimeter
and they paid no attention to this, though their southern neighbours did. They had, from the time of Pope Damasus[163] downwards, and in almost all the hymn-writers, mixed dactylic metres to choose from; but for a staple they went to this. It seems impossible that there should not have been some additional and natural reasons for the adoption--reasons which, if they had not actually brought it about without any literary patterns at all, directed poets to those patterns irresistibly. Nor, as it seems to the present writer, is it at all difficult to discover, as far at least as English is concerned, what these reasons were.