ably disregarded position, perhaps the
most important element of quantity. In the first line of _Evangeline_--

_This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,_

there are no less than five violations of position, to say nothing of
the shortening of a syllable so distinctly long as the _i_ in
_primeval_. Mr. Swinburne, in his Sapphics and Hendecasyllables, while
writing on a manifestly artistic conception of those metres, and, in my
judgment, proving their possibility for modern purposes by the superior
rhythmical effect which a classically trained ear enabled him to make in
handling them, neglects position as a rule, though his nice sense of
metre leads him at times to observe it, and uniformly rejects any
approach to the harsh combinations indulged in by other writers. The
nearest approach to quantitative hexameters with which I am acquainted
in modern English writers is the _Andromeda_ of Mr. Kingsley, a poem
which has produced little effect, but is interesting as a step to what
may fairly be called a new development of the metre. For the experiments
of the Elizabethan writers, Sir Philip Sidney and others, by that
strange perversity which so often dominates literature, were as
decidedly unsuccessful from an accentual, as the modern experiments from
a quantitative point of view. Sir Philip Sidney has given in his
_Arcadia_ specimens of hexameters, elegiacs, sapphics, asclepiads,
anacreontics, hendecasyllables. The following elegiacs will serve as a
sample.

_Unto a caitif wretch, whom long affliction holdeth,
And now fully believ's help to bee quite perished;
Grant yet, grant yet a look, to the last moment of his anguish,
O you (alas so I finde) caus of his onely ruine:
Dread not awhit (O goodly cruel) that pitie may enter
Into thy heart by the sight of this Epistle I send:
And so refuse to behold of these strange wounds the recitall,
Lest it might m' allure home to thyself to return._

In these the classical laws of position are most carefully observed;
every dactyl ending in a consonant is followed by a word beginning with
a vowel or _h_--_affl[i]ct(i)(o)n holdeth_, _mom[e]nt (o)f h(i)s
anguish_, _ca[u]se (o)f h(i)s onely_; _affliction wasteth_, _moment of
his dolour_, _cause of his dreary_, would have been as impossible to Sir
Philip Sidney as _mo[e]r(o)r t(e)nebat_, _mom[e]nt(a) p(e)r curae_,
_ca[u]s(a) v(e)l sola_ in a Latin writer of hexameters