This kind of cadence is repeatedly used in the _Old Woman_ and in the 'Parody.'"[145]
The quantification, it should be observed, is original.
[145] _Letters of Robert Southey_, ed. Warter (London, 1856), i. 69.
[146] The evidence of this obsession is concentrated in Book I. chap. iv. pp. 74-101; but diffused over the entire treatise.
[147] This seems to have presented itself to him throughout as a matter of course, not requiring demonstration and hardly likely to be contested; it is perhaps most categorically affirmed at Book II. chap. iii. p. 184.
[148] This also is pervading. It "gathers itself up" most in the context just cited, and at pp. 301 and 400-402, the two last among the most surprising instances of complete misunderstanding of history by a real historical scholar.
[149] Perhaps it should be said that a "section" is a bundle of "accented" and "unaccented" syllables extending in possible bulk from _three_ syllables with _two_ accents (Guest's minimum) to _eleven_ syllables with _three_ accents. Of a pair of these, similar or dissimilar, a verse consists.
[Sidenote: Discussions on the _Evangeline_ hexameter.]
The amount of prosodic writing during the last seventy years has been very large. In the earliest and latest parts of the period it was principally devoted to the subject of English hexameters--in the first, in regard to the accentual attempts of Longfellow, to which _Evangeline_ gave immense popularity; in the last, to the counter-attempts at "quantitative" versification, in which the feet are constructed, not with reference to accent or to the way in which the words are ordinarily pronounced, but to independent and even opposed temporal value derived from the special sound attached to the vowel ("īdol," long; "fĭddle," short, etc.), or, on semi-classical principles, to what is called "position." To analyse the individual views of critics on these two bodies of questions would be here impossible, and reference must be made to the larger _History_, to Mr. Omond's treatises, or to the original works, the most important of which will be found duly entered in the Bibliography. But we may summarise results under three heads.
I. The "accentual" or _Evangeline_ hexameter has, as has been said, been at times far from unpopular; but it has always dissatisfied nicer ears by a certain _inappropriateness_ which has been differently appraised, but which is evidently pointed at by the apology of its first extensive practitioner, Southey, that he could not get spondees enough, and had to be content with trochees. This inappropriateness has since been characterised by an unsurpassed expert in theory and practice--Mr. Swinburne--in the blunt assertion that to English "all dactylic and spondaic forms of verse are unnatural and abhorrent."