are repugnant ideas; and so are, after a “method,” and “by instinct.”  Again, what sense is there in making the “liberty” of publishing one’s “private observations” to depend on the presumed absence of rivals?  That the author did not lack confidence in the general applicability of his speculations, subversive though they are of the best and most popular teaching on this subject, is evident from the following sentence:  “We intend, also, that if these principles, with the others previously expressed, are true in the given instances, they are equally true for all languages and all varieties of metre, even to the denial that any poetic metres, founded on other principles, can properly exist.”—­Ib., p. 491

OBS. 21.—­J.  D. W. is not one of those who discard quantity and supply accent in expounding the nature of metre; and yet he does not coincide very nearly with any of those who have heretofore made quantity the basis of poetic numbers.  His views of the rhythmical elements being in several respects peculiar, I purpose briefly to notice them here, though some of the peculiarities of this new “Art of Measuring Verses,” should rather be quoted under the head of Scanning, to which they more properly belong.  “Of every species of beauty,” says this author, “and more especially of the beauty of sounds, continuousness is the first element; a succession of pulses of sound becomes agreeable, only when the breaks or intervals cease to be heard.”  Again:  “Quantity, or the division into measures of time, is a second element of verse; each line must be stuffed out with sounds, to a certain fullness and plumpness, that will sustain the voice, and force it to dwell upon the sounds.”—­Rev., p. 485.  The first of these positions is subsequently contradicted, or very largely qualified, by the following:  “So, the line of significant sounds, in a verse, is also marked by accents, or pulses, and divided into portions called feet.  These are necessary and natural for the very simple reason that continuity by itself is tedious; and the greatest pleasure arises from the union of continuity with variety. [That is, with “interruption,” as he elsewhere calls it!] In the line,

    ‘Full many a tale their music tells,’

there are at least four accents or stresses of the voice, with faint pauses after them, just enough to separate the continuous stream of sound into these four parts, to be read thus: 

    Fullman—­yataleth—­eirmus—­ictells,[503]