upon him in consequence of his discoveries. Aubrey reports that he had heard Harvey say that "after his booke of the Circulation of the Blood came out, he fell mightily in his practice and . . . 'twas believed by the vulgar he was crack-brained." What a curious crisscross of things it is that the vulgar should believe Harvey crack-brained and accept as wise men the ignorant charlatans whom we saw them running after in Dr. John Hall's book!

Yet Harvey lived to see his doctrine established. And the metaphysician Hobbes, well enough acquainted with the vanity of such success, spoke of him as "the only man I know that conquering envy, hath established a new doctrine in his life-time." People knew in a vague sort of way, before Harvey, that the blood moved; but they were utterly ignorant of what made it move; and even in Shakspere's time we find a writer speaking of the liver as the fountain of the blood-evidently fancying that, from some cause or other, the blood spouted out of the liver as a fountain out of the ground. Servetus appears to have narrowly missed forestalling Harvey's Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis. Harvey's own position against his antagonists was dignified and noble. He says in one of his own works that scarce a day has passed that he has not heard both good and evil of his doctrine. Some with great disdain opposed him; others dispraised with childish slight his dissections and his frogs and serpents; but he thinks it unworthy of a philosopher and a searcher of the truth to return bad words for bad words, and thinks he will do better and more advised if with the light of true and evident observations he shall wipe away those symptoms of incivility. He died in 1657, after great gifts to the College of Physicians.

And I cannot better close this meagre lecture than by citing the words of another young physician of this period

named Harvey, who appears to have been altogether a beautiful soul, and to have died lamented at a very early age. This was Dr. John Harvey. In some letters of the learned Gabriel Harvey, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney and particularly of Edmund Spenser, I find a short but touching allusion to the death of Dr. John Harvey, who was his brother. "He that lived not to see nine and twenty years, . . . in Norfolk," says Gabriel,

I..

as

skilful a physician for his age as ever came there. can never forget that sweet voice of the dying cygnet." And then follow the dying words of his brother: "O frater, Christus est optimus medicus, et meus solus medicus. Vale Galene, valete humanæ artes: nihil divinum in terris, praeter animum aspirantem ad cælos. (O brother, Christ is the best physician, and my only physician. Farewell Galen, farewell human arts: there is nothing divine in the world, except the soul aspiring to the heavens.)"

CHAPTER XX

THE METRICAL TESTS-I

Rime Test and Run-on and End-stopped Line Test

ND now, having studied various conditions of the life and literature of Shakspere's day, let us again devote our attention for a while to some considerations of the forms of his poetry, and to tracing from the poems their development along certain artistic and spiritual lines. In the remaining lectures we shall begin to apply the theory of forms already developed1 to the understanding of that general formulation of the phenomena of life which we call Shakspere's character, just as we shall apply the special doctrines to the understanding of that special formulation of the phenomena of sound which we call Shakspere's verse.

Note in the first place that phenomena of tone-colour, as we saw in the case of phenomena of pitch, reduce themselves in the last analysis to phenomena of rhythm.2

1 See The Science of English Verse. 2 It is, by the way, a circumstance which I think has not been suffi

ciently attended to that a play cannot ever really be said to have metre. It is always prose measure,

We have found that a tone-colour was the joint product of

several known

partials,

sound

tones, as, for instance, the flute C was as such because it combined the upper while the same tone on the oboe would differently because the even tones here would be obscured and the odd ones relatively more prominent. But since this tone simply represents so many vibrations, we may call it a 250-rhythm; and this is a 500-rhythm, and so on; and thus we find that the tone-colour is simply a combination of a number of different-rated rhythms acting simultaneously upon the ear.

But we have found also that the principle of Opposition is at the bottom of all rhythm. Since, then, tonecolour analyses into rhythm, and rhythm into Opposition, we may strike out the intermediate term in our minds and regard tone-colour as we have found reason to regard tune, and rhythm proper - as another phase of the great organising principle of Opposition.

And here we may add the second of our two contributions, by considering the curious minuteness with which we find this principle flowering out into the most unexpected effects in verse.

and measured rhythmically, not metrically. For let us examine by the absolutely accurate method of musical notation what is meant by a "pause" as Mr. Furnivall, Mr. Ellis, Mr. Fleay, etc., use that word. It is a rest in music; the interposition of it as they wish wholly changes the metre; in fact, the interposition of it as demanded by the exigences of dramatic busi

ness (the long pause while one is

making eyes, or adjusting the coun

tenance in silence, or doing any of those hundred things that constitute the actor's part while the audience is looking at him, not listening) almost destroy the metrical character of dramatic blank verse. Our blank verse is not blank verse, that is, not 5's, at all—as may be easily seen by dividing up the verse properly in musical notation for rests, etc. (See The Science of English Verse.)

For example, collate, in this view, two singularly dif fering preferences of the ear as between the artistic manner of using vowel-colours and the artistic manner of using consonant-colours in English verse. Here, for example, is a line from Tom Hood's poem written in illustration of his comical "Plan for Writing Blank Verse in Rhyme." The plan was for making the three last words of each line rime with each other, though no two lines rimed together— which Hood, writing in the person of a needy poetaster, trumpeted as a discovery that placed him alongside of Newton, Harvey, and Columbus. The poem begins:

and ends:

Even is come, and from the dark park, hark,
The signal of the setting sun-one gun!

While ribbons flourish and a stout shout out

That upward goes shows Rose knows those bow's woes.

Now you remember that, in discussing the colours of verse, one of the first matters presented to you was the proper variation of vowel-colours in each line, so that not more than two like colours should be consecutive, and so ona variation which, although scarcely ever thought of by the lay reader, is absolutely vital to the success of any work in verse. Here in Hood's poem the principle is even more strongly illustrated, you see, by showing that an irresistibly comic effect is produced by what we may call-using Professor Sylvester's happy term in a somewhat different sense these vowel-syzygies. In short, we may formulate the principle that our ear does not like several identical vowelcolours in succession.

But how curious this seems when we come to collate