[Footnote F:  Mr. Dyce says the word supplied by Rowe was “fasting,” a manifest slip of the pen, and worth notice only as showing how easily errors may be committed.]

In Dumain’s ode, (Love’s Labor’s Lost, Act iv.  Sc. 3,) beginning,

  “On a day, (alack the day!)
  Love, whose month is ever May,”

Mr. White chooses to read

  “Thou, for whom Jove would swear
  Juno but an Ethiop were,”

rather than accept Pope’s suggestion of “ev’n Jove,” or the far better “great Jove” of Mr. Collier’s Corrected Folio,—­affirming that “the quantity and accent proper to ‘thou’ make any addition to the line superfluous.”  We should like to hear Mr. White read the verse as he prints it.  The result would be something of this kind:—­

Thou-ou for whom Jove would swear,—­

which would be like the ‘bow-wow-wow before the Lord’ of the old country-choirs.  To our ear it is quite out of the question; and, moreover, we affirm that in dissyllabic (which we, for want of a better name, call iambic and trochaic) measures the omission of a half-foot is an impossibility, and all the more so when, as in this case, the preceding syllable is strongly accented.  Even had the poem been meant for singing, which it was not, for Dumain reads it, the quantity would be false, though the ear might more easily excuse it.  Such an omission would be not only possible, but sometimes very effective, in trisyllabic measures,—­as, for instance, in anapests like these,—­

  “’Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
  And the owls have awakened the crowing cock,”—­

where iambs or spondees may take the place of the first or second foot with no shock to the ear, though the change of rhythm be sensible enough,—­as

  ’Tis th[)e] d[=e][=e]p midnight by the castle clock,
  And [)o]wls have awakened the crowing cock.

We quite agree with Mr. White and Mr. Knight in their hearty dislike of the Steevens-system of versification, but we think that Coleridge (who, although the best English metrist since Milton, often thought lazily and talked loosely) has misled both of them in what he has said about the pauses and retardations of verse.  In that noblest of our verses, the unrhymed iambic pentameter, two short or lightly-accented syllables may often gracefully and effectively take the place of a long or heavily-accented one; but great metrists contrive their pauses by the artistic choice and position of their syllables, and not by leaving them out.  Metre is the solvent in which alone thought and emotion can perfectly coalesce,—­the thought confining the emotion within decorous limitations of law, the emotion beguiling the thought into somewhat of its own fluent grace and rebellious animation.  That is ill metre which does not read itself in the mouth of a man thoroughly penetrated with the meaning of what he reads; and only a man as thoroughly possessed of the meaning of what he writes can produce any metre