modern readers have often been deterred from the study of our early writers by their unsettled orthography. Our later literary antiquaries have, therefore, with equal taste and sagacity, modernised their text, by printing the words as the writers, were they now living, would have transcribed them.

Such have been the impracticable efforts to paint the voice to the eye, or to chain by syllables airy sounds. The imperfections for which such reforms were designed in a great part still perplex us. Our written language still remains to the utter confusion of the eye and ear of the baffled foreigner, who often discovers that what is written is not spoken, and what is spoken is not written. The orthography of some words leads to their false pronunciation. Hence originated that peculiar invention of our own, that odd-looking monster in philology, "a pronouncing dictionary,' which offends our eyes by this unhappy attempt to write down sounds. They whose eyes have run over Sheridan, Walker, and other orthoepists, must often have smiled at their arbitrary disfigurements of the English language. These ludicrous attempts are after all inefficient, while they compel us to recollect, if the thing indeed be possible, a polysyllabic combination as barbarous as the language of the Cherokees.

We may sympathise with the disconcerted foreigner who is a learner of the English language. All words ending in ugh must confound him: for instance, though, through, and enough, alike written, are each differently pronounced; and should he give us bough rightly, he may be forgiven should he blunder at cough; if he escape "Dic gave Jac a kic when Jac gave Dic a knoc on the bac with a thic stic." If even such familiar words and simple monosyllables can distract our attention, though they have only lost a single and mute letter, how greatly more in words compounded, disguised by the mutilation of several letters.

in safety from though, the same wind will blow him out of thought. What can the foreigner hope when he discovers that good judges of their language pronounce words differently? A mere English scholar, who holds little intercourse with society, however familiar in his closet be his acquaintance with the words, and even their derivations, might fail in a material point, when using them in conversation or in a public speech. A list of names of places and of persons might be given, in which not a single syllable is pronounced of those that stand written.

That a language should be written as it is spoken we see has been considered desirable by the most intelligent scholars. Some have laudably persevered in writing the past tense red, as a distinction from the present read, and anciently I have found it printed redde. Lord Byron has even retained the ancient mode in his Diary. By not distinguishing the tenses, an audible reader has often unwarily confused the times. G before I ungrammatical orthoepists declare is sounded hard, but so numerous are the exceptions, that the exceptions might equally be adopted for the rule. It is true that the pedantry of scholarship has put its sovereign veto against the practice of writing words as they are spoken, even could the orthoepy ever have been settled by an unquestioned standard. When it was proposed to omit the mute b in doubt and debt, it was objected that by this castration of a superfluous letter in the pronunciation, we should lose sight of their Latin original. The same circumstance occurred in the reform of the French orthography: it was objected to the innovators, that when they wrote tems, rejecting the p in temps, they wholly lost sight of the Latin original, tempus. Milton seems to have laid down certain principles of orthography, anxiously observed in his own editions, printed when the poet was blind. An orthog

raphy which would be more natural to an unlearned reader is rejected by the etymologist, whose pride and pomp exult in tracing the legitimacy of words to their primitives, and delight to write them as near as may be according to the analogy of languages.

35

THE ANCIENT METRES IN MODERN VERSE.

A STRONG predilection to reproduce the ancient metres in their vernacular poetry was prevalent among the scholars of Europe; but, what is not less remarkable, the attempt everywhere terminated in the same utter rejection by the popular ear. What occasioned this general propensity of the learned, and this general antipathy in the unlearned?

These repeated attempts to restore the metrical system of the Greeks and the Romans would not only afford a classical ear, long exercised in the nice artifices of the ancient prosody, a gratification entirely denied to the uninitiated; but at bottom there was a deeper design-that of elevating an art which the scholar held to be degraded by the native but unlettered versifiers; and, as one of them honestly confessed, the true intent was to render the poetic art more difficult and less common. Had this metrical system been adopted, it would have established a privileged class. The thing was practicable; and, even in our own days, iambics and spondees, dactyls and tribrachs, charm a few classical ears by their torturous arrangement of words without rhythm and cadence.* Fortunately for all vernacular poetry, it was attempted too late among the people of modern Europe ever to be substituted for their

*For a remarkable effusion of this ancient idolatry and classical superstition, see Quarterly Review, August, 1834.

The ancient poetry of the Greeks was composed for recitation. The people never read, for they had no books; they listened to their rhapsodists; and their practised ear could decide on the artificial construction of verses regulated by quantity, and not by the latent delicacy and numerosity of which modern versification is susceptible.

native melody, their rhythm, the variety of their cadences, or the consonance of rhyme.

*

With us the design of appropriating the ancient metres to our native verse was unquestionably borrowed from Italy, so long the model of our fashions and our literature. There it had early begun, but was neither admired nor imitated. The nearly forgotten fantasy was again taken up by Claudio Tolommei, an eminent scholar, who composed an Italian poem with the Roman metres. More fortunate and profound than his neglected predecessors, Tolommei, in 1539, published his Versi e Regole della POESIA NUOVA-the very term afterward adopted by the English critics-and promised hereafter to establish their propriety on principles deduced from philosophy and music. But before this code of "new poetry" appeared, the practice had prevailed, for Tolommei illustrates "the rules" not only by his own verses, but by those of other writers, already seduced by this obsolete novelty. But what followed? Poets who hitherto had delighted by their euphony and their rhyme, were now ridiculed for the dissonance which they had so laboriously struck out. A literary war ensued! The champions for "the new poetry" were remarkable for their stoical indifference amid the loud outcries which they had raised; something of contempt entered into their bravery, and it was some time before these obdurate poets capitulated.

In France the same attempt encountered the same fate. A few scholars, Jodelle, Passerat, and others, had the intrepidity to versify in French with the ancient metres; and, what is perhaps not generally known, later, D'Urfé, Blaise de Vigneres, and others, adopted blank verse, for Balzac congratulates Chapelain in 1639 that "Les vers sans rime sont morts pour jamais." French poetry, which at that period could

* Quadrio, Storia e raggione d'ogni Poesia, i., 606.