“V=it~al | sp=ark of | he=av’nly | fl=me,
    Q=uit oh | q=uit this | m=ort~al | fr=ame.” [509][—­POPE.]
        Hiley’s English Grammar, p. 126.

There is, in the works here cited, not only the inconsistency of teaching two very different modes of scanning the same species of verse, but in each instance the scansion is wrong; for all the lines in question are trochaic of four feet,—­single-rhymed, and, of course, catalectic, and ending with a caesura, or elision.  In no metre that lacks but one syllable, can this sort of foot occur at the beginning of a line; yet, as we see, it is sometimes imagined to be there, by those who have never been able to find it at the end, where it oftenest exists!

OBS. 5.—­I have hinted, in the main paragraph above, that it is a common error of our prosodists, to underrate, by one foot, the measure of all trochaic lines, when they terminate with single rhyme; an error into which they are led by an other as gross, that of taking for hypermeter, or mere surplus, the whole rhyme itself, the sound or syllable most indispensable to the verse.

   “(For rhyme the rudder is of verses,
    With which, like ships, they steer their courses.)”—­Hudibras.

Iambics and trochaics, of corresponding metres, and exact in them, agree of course in both the number of feet and the number of syllables; but as the former are slightly redundant with double rhyme, so the latter are deficient as much, with single rhyme; yet, the number of feet may, and should, in these cases, be reckoned the same.  An estimable author now living says, “Trochaic verse, with an additional long syllable, is the same as iambic verse, without the initial short syllable.”—­N.  Butler’s Practical Gram., p. 193.  This instruction is not quite accurate.  Nor would it be right, even if there could be “iambic verse without the initial short syllable,” and if it were universally true, that, “Trochaic verse may take an additional long syllable.”—­Ibid. For the addition and subtraction here suggested, will inevitably make the difference of a foot, between the measures or verses said to be the same!

OBS. 6.—­“I doubt,” says T. O. Churchill, “whether the trochaic can be considered as a legitimate English measure.  All the examples of it given by Johnson have an additional long syllable at the end:  but these are iambics, if we look upon the additional syllable to be at the beginning, which is much more agreeable to the analogy of music.”—­Churchill’s New Gram., p. 390.  This doubt, ridiculous as must be all reasoning in support of it, the author seriously endeavours to raise into a general conviction that we have no trochaic order of verse! It can hardly be worth while to notice here all his remarks. "An additional long syllable" Johnson never dreamed of—­“at the end”—­“at