y almost be called a success. This is even more true of
metres, where these faults are less perceptible or more easily avoided,
for instance, Asclepiads. Take the verses on solitariness, Arcadia, B.
II. fin.

_O sweet woods, the delight [o]f s(o)l(i)t[a]riness!
O how much I do like your solitariness!
Where man's mind hath a freed consideration
Of goodness to receive lovely direction._

or the hendecasyllables immediately preceding,

_Reason tell me thy minde, if here be reason,
In this strange violence, to make resistance,
Where sweet graces erect the stately banner._

It is obvious that a very little more trouble would have converted these
into very perfect and very pleasing poems. Had Sir Philip Sidney written
every asclepiad on the model of _Where man's mind hath a freed
consideration_, every hendecasyllable like _Where sweet graces erect the
stately banner_, the adjustment of accent and quantity thus attained
might, I think, have induced greater poets than he to make the
experiment on a larger scale. But neither he nor his contemporaries
were permitted to grasp as a principle a regularity which they sometimes
secured by chance; nor, so far as I am aware, have the various revivals
of ancient metre in this country or Germany in any case consistently
carried out the _whole_ theory, without which the reproduction is
partial, and cannot look for a more than partial success. Even the four
specimens given in the posthumous edition of Clough's poems, two of them
elegiac, one alcaic, one in hexameters, though professedly constructed
on a quantitative basis, and, in one instance (_Trunks the forest
yielded, with gums ambrosial oozing, &c._) combining legitimate quantity
(in which accent and position are alike observed) with illegitimate (in
which position is observed, but accent disregarded) into a not
unpleasing rhythm, cannot be considered as more than imperfect
realizations of the true positional principle. Tennyson's three
specimens are, at least in English, still unique. It is to be hoped that
he will not suffer them to remain so. Systems of Glyconics and
Asclepiads are, if I mistake not, easily manageable, and are only
thought foreign to the genius of our language because they have never
been written on strict principles of art by a really great master.

What, then, are the rules on which such rhythms become possible? They
are, briefly, these:--(1) accented syllables, _as a general rule