that is not sing-song.  Not that we would have Shakspeare’s metre tinkered where it seems defective, but that we would not have palpable gaps defended as intentional by the utterly unsatisfactory assumption of pauses and retardations.  Mr. White has in many cases wisely and properly made halting verses perfect in their limbs by easy transpositions, and we think he is perfectly right in refusing to interpolate a syllable, but wrong in assuming that we have Shakspeare’s metre where we have no metre at all.  We are not speaking of seeming irregularities, of lines broken up by rapid dialogue or cut short by the gulp of voiceless passion, nor do we forget that Shakspeare wrote for the tongue and not the eye, but we do not believe he ever left an unmusical period.  Especially is this true of passages where the lyrical sentiment predominates, and we beg Mr. White to reconsider whether we owe the reading

  “All overcanopied with luscious woodbine”
  (instead of lush)

to the printers of the Folio or to Shakspeare.  Even if we accept Steevens’s “whereon” instead of “where” in the first verse of this exquisite piece of melody, and read (as Mr. White does not)

  “I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows,”

it leaves the peculiar lilt of the metre unchanged.  The varied accentuation of the verses is striking; and would any one convince himself of the variety of which this measure is capable, let him try to read this passage, and the speech of Prospero, beginning “Ye elves of hills,” to the same tune.  In the verses,

  “And ye that on the sands with printless foot
  Do chase the ebbing Neptune, | and do fly him
  When he comes back,”

observe how the pauses are contrived to echo the sense and give the effect of flux and reflux.  Versification was understood in that day as never since, and no treatise on English verse so good, in all respects, as that of Campion (1602) has ever been written.  Coleridge learned from him how to write his “Catullian hendeca-syllables,” and did not better his instruction.[G]

[Footnote G:  For the comprehension of the laws of some of the lighter measures, no book is so instructive as Mother Goose’s Melodies.  That excellent lady was one of the best metrists the language has produced.]

In “Measure for Measure,” (Act i.  Sc. 1,) in this passage,—­

    “what’s open made
  To justice, that justice seizes:  what knows the law
  That thieves do pass on thieves?”

does Mr. White believe the “that” and “what” are Shakspeare’s?  Does he consider

  “To justice, that justice seizes:  what knows the law”

an alexandrine,—­and an alexandrine worthy of a student and admirer of Spenser?  Should we read it thus, we should dread Martial’s sarcasm of, Sed male cum recitas.  We believe that Shakspeare wrote

    “What’s open made
  To Justice, Justice seizes; knows the Law
  That thieve do pass on thieves?”