of) its
combination with other elements of poetry. Thus the previous
difficulty is left unanswered, what the elements are with which it
must be combined, in order to produce its own effects to any
pleasureable purpose. Double and tri-syllable rhymes, indeed, form a
lower species of wit, and, attended to exclusively for their own sake,
may become a source of momentary amusement; as in poor Smart's distich
to the Welsh Squire who had promised him a hare:

Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader!
Hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallowed her?

But for any poetic purposes, metre resembles (if the aptness of the
simile may excuse its meanness) yeast, worthless or disagreeable by
itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is
proportionately combined.

The reference to _The Children in the Wood_ by no means satisfies my
judgement. We all willingly throw ourselves back for awhile into the
feelings of our childhood. This ballad, therefore, we read under such
recollections of our own childish feelings, as would equally endear to
us poems, which Mr. Wordsworth himself would regard as faulty in the
opposite extreme of gaudy and technical ornament. Before the invention
of printing, and in a still greater degree, before the introduction of
writing, metre, especially alliterative metre (whether alliterative at
the beginning of the words, as in _Piers Plowman_, or at the end, as
in rhymes), possessed an independent value as assisting the
recollection, and consequently the preservation, of _any_ series of
truths or incidents. But I am not convinced by the collation of facts,
that _The Children in the Wood_ owes either its preservation, or its
popularity, to its metrical form. Mr. Marshal's repository affords a
number of tales in prose inferior in pathos and general merit, some of
as old a date, and many as widely popular. _Tom Hickathrift_, _Jack
the Giant-killer_, _Goody Two-shoes_, and _Little Red Riding-hood_ are
formidable rivals. And that they have continued in prose, cannot be
fairly explained by the assumption, that the comparative meanness of
their thoughts and images precluded even the humblest forms of metre.
The scene of _Goody Two-shoes_ in the church is perfectly susceptible
of metrical narration; and, among the [Greek: Thaumata thaumastotata]
even of the present age, I do not recollect a more astonishing image
than that of the '_whole rookery, that flew out of the giant's
beard_', scared