OBS. 11.—The nature, chief sources, and true distinction of quantity, at least as it pertains to our language, I have set forth with clearness, first in the short chapter on Utterance, and again, more fully in this, which treats of Versification; but that the syllables, long and short, of the old Greek and Latin poets, or the feet they made of them, are to be expounded on precisely the same principles that apply to ours. I have not deemed it necessary to affirm or to deny. So far as the same laws are applicable, let them be applied. This important property of syllables,—their quantity, or relative time,—which is the basis of all rhythm, is, as my readers have seen, very variously treated, and in general but ill appreciated, by our English prosodists, who ought, at least in this their own province, to understand it all alike, and as it is; and so common among the erudite is the confession of Walker, that “the accent and quantity of the ancients” are, to modern readers, “obscure and mysterious,” that it will be taken as a sign of arrogance and superficiality, to pretend to a very certain knowledge of them. Nor is the difficulty confined to Latin and Greek verse: the poetry of our own ancestors, from any remote period, is not easy of scansion. Dr. Johnson, in his History of the English Language, gave examples, with this remark: “Of the Saxon poetry some specimen is necessary, though our ignorance of the laws of their metre and the quantities of their syllables, which it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to recover, excludes us from that pleasure which the old bards undoubtedly gave to their contemporaries.”
OBS. 12.—The imperfect measures of “the father of English poetry,” are said by Dryden to have been adapted to the ears of the rude age which produced them. “The verse of Chaucer,” says he, “I confess, is not harmonious to us; but it is like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends, it was auribus istius temporis accommodata:’ they who lived with him, and sometime after him, thought it musical; and it continues so even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of Lidgate and Gower, his contemporaries: there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect. It is true, I cannot go so far as he who published the last edition of him; for he would make us believe that the fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten syllables in a verse where we find but nine: but this opinion is not worth confuting; it is so gross and obvious an error, that common sense (which is a rule in every thing but matters of faith and revelation) must convince the reader that equality of numbers in every verse, which we call Heroic, was either not known, or not always practised in Chaucer’s age. It were an easy matter to produce some thousands of his verses, which are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise. We can only say, that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at the first.”—British Poets, Vol. iii, p. 171.