fession of Walker, that "the accent and
quantity of the ancients" are, to modern readers, "obscure and mysterious,"
that it will be taken as a sign of arrogance and superficiality, to pretend
to a very certain knowledge of them. Nor is the difficulty confined to
Latin and Greek verse: the poetry of our own ancestors, from any remote
period, is not easy of scansion. Dr. Johnson, in his History of the English
Language, gave examples, with this remark: "Of the _Saxon_ poetry some
specimen is necessary, though our ignorance of the laws of their metre and
the quantities of their syllables, _which it would be very difficult,
perhaps impossible, to recover_, excludes us from that pleasure which the
old bards undoubtedly gave to their contemporaries."

OBS. 12.--The imperfect measures of "the father of English poetry," are
said by Dryden to have been _adapted to the ears_ of the rude age which
produced them. "The verse of Chaucer," says he, "I confess, is not
harmonious to us; but it is like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus
commends, it was _auribus istius temporis accommodata_:' they who lived
with him, and sometime after him, thought it musical; and it continues so
even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of Lidgate and Gower,
his contemporaries: there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it,
which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect. It is true, I cannot go
so far as he who published the last edition of him; for he would make us
believe that the fault is in _our ears_, and that there were really ten
syllables in a verse where we find but nine: but this opinion is not worth
confuting; it is so gross and obvious an error, that common sense (which is
a rule in every thing but matters of faith and revelation) must convince
the reader that equality of numbers in every verse, which we call Heroic,
was either not known, or not always practised in Chaucer's age. It were an
easy matter to produce some thousands of his verses, which are lame for
want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no pronunciation
can make otherwise. We can only say, that he lived in the infancy of our
poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at the first."--_British
Poets_, Vol. iii, p. 171.

OBS. 13.--Dryden appears to have had more faith in the ears of his own age
than in those of an earlier one; but Poe, of our time, himself an ingenious
versifier, in his Notes upon English Verse, conveys the idea that all ears