The
other, called octo-syllabic, or the measure of eight syllables,
offered such facilities for _namby-pamby_, that it had become a jest
as early as the time of Shakespeare, who makes Touchstone call it the
'butterwoman's rate to market', and the 'very false gallop of verses'.
It has been advocated, in opposition to the heroic measure, upon the
ground that ten syllables lead a man into epithets and other
superfluities, while eight syllables compress him into a sensible and
pithy gentleman. But the heroic measure laughs at it. So far from
compressing, it converts one line into two, and sacrifices everything
to the quick and importunate return of the rhyme. With Dryden, compare
Gay, even in the strength of Gay,--

The wind was high, the window shakes;
With sudden start the miser wakes;
Along the silent room he stalks,

(A miser never 'stalks'; but a rhyme was desired for 'walks')

Looks back, and trembles as he walks:
Each lock and every bolt he tries,
In every creek and corner pries;
Then opes the chest with treasure stor'd,
And stands in rapture o'er his hoard;

('Hoard' and 'treasure stor'd' are just made for one another)

But now, with sudden qualms possess'd,
He wrings his hands, he beats his breast;
By conscience stung, he wildly stares,
And thus his guilty soul declares.

And so he denounces his gold, as miser never denounced it; and sighs,
because

Virtue resides on earth no more!

Coleridge saw the mistake which had been made with regard to this
measure, and restored it to the beautiful freedom of which it was
capable, by calling to mind the liberties allowed its old musical
professors the minstrels, and dividing it by _time_ instead of
_syllables_;--by the _beat of four_ into which you might get as many
syllables as you could, instead of allotting eight syllables to the
poor time, whatever it might have to say. He varied it further with
alternate rhymes and stanzas, with rests and omissions precisely
analogous to those in music, and rendered it altogether worthy to
utter the manifold thoughts and feelings of himself and his lady
Christabel. He even ventures, with an exquisite sense of solemn
strangeness and licence (for there is witchcraft going forward), to
introduce a couplet of blank verse, itself as mystically and
beautifully modulated as anything in the music of Gluck or Weber.

'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the