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Or, combining these two modes of nomenclature, one may legitimately speak of iambic feet as "duple rising," "And never lifted up a single stone"; trochaic as "duple falling," "Here they are, my fifty perfect poems"; anapestic as "triple rising," "But he lived with a lot of wild mates, and they never would let him be good"; and dactylic as "triple falling";
This, besides being too much rhyme and too much vowel, is, in iambic lines, metrically a defect, the eleventh syllable being a superfluous syllable. In these two prominent features English verse is different from Italian: it has feminine rhymes, but the larger part of its rhymes are masculine; and it has fewer than Italian.
This verse, in variety and metrical signification, is greatly inferior to the English and German rhymeless iambic, from its uniform feminine termination, and from there being merely an accentuation in Italian, without any syllabic measure.
Unless "ipsi prodeant" was pronounced after a pause, the hearer must have discovered a complete iambic verse. It would have had a better cadence in prose if he had said "prodeant ipsi." But I am only to consider the species, and not the cadence of the sentence. He goes on, "Cur clandestinis consiliis nos oppugnant? cur de perfugis nostris copias comparant contra nos?"
Discarding short stories and a ludicrous diction, through its passing out of its satyric stage, it assumed, though only at a late point in its progress, a tone of dignity; and its metre changed then from trochaic to iambic. The reason for their original use of the trochaic tetrameter was that their poetry was satyric and more connected with dancing than it now is.
In both pieces the author fell back upon his earlier scheme of metre, the Christabel blend of iambic with anapæstic passages, instead of the nearly pure iambs of his middle poems.
The first book of Satires ten in number, his earliest publication, appeared 35 B.C. A second volume of eight satires, showing more maturity and finish than the first, was published 30 B.C.; and about the same time the small collection of lyrics in iambic and composite metres, imitated from the Greek of Archilochus, which is known as the Epodes.
Imitation is only a kind of play or sport, and the tragic poets, whether they write in iambic or in Heroic verse, are imitators in the highest degree? Very true. And now tell me, I conjure you, has not imitation been shown by us to be concerned with that which is thrice removed from the truth? Certainly. And what is the faculty in man to which imitation is addressed? What do you mean?
And so with "trochee," "dactyl," "anapest" and the rest; if we knew that accent and not quantity was what we really had in mind, it was proper enough to speak of Paradise Lost as written in "iambic pentameter," and Evangeline in "dactylic hexameter," etc.
The actors raised on high boots above their natural height, their faces hidden in masks and their tones mechanically magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, but upon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation of that majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by a rapid and conversational delivery.