they are at a loss in the absence
of the habitual accompaniment and guide to their judgment. Their style
halts, totters, is loose, disjointed, and without expressive pauses or
rapid movements. The measured cadence and regular _sing-song_ of rhyme or
blank verse have destroyed, as it were, their natural ear for the mere
characteristic harmony which ought to subsist between the sound and the
sense. I should almost guess the Author of Waverley to be a writer of
ambling verses from the desultory vacillation and want of firmness in the
march of his style. There is neither _momentum_ nor elasticity in it; I
mean as to the _score_, or effect upon the ear. He has improved since in
his other works: to be sure, he has had practice enough. Poets either get
into this incoherent, undetermined, shuffling style, made up of
'unpleasing flats and sharps,' of unaccountable starts and pauses, of
doubtful odds and ends, flirted about like straws in a gust of wind; or,
to avoid it and steady themselves, mount into a sustained and measured
prose (like the translation of Ossian's Poems, or some parts of
Shaftesbury's Characteristics) which is more odious still, and as bad as
being at sea in a calm." Hazlitt's views on this question are peculiar,
though his examples are well chosen. The more common opinion is that
voiced by Coleridge in his remarks "On Style": "It is, indeed, worthy of
remark that all our great poets have been good prose writers, as Chaucer,
Spenser, Milton; and this probably arose from their just sense of metre.
For a true poet will never confound verse and prose; whereas it is almost
characteristic of indifferent prose writers that they should be constantly
slipping into scraps of metre." Works, IV, 342.

P. 268. _Addison's Campaign_ (1705), written in honor of Marlborough's
victory at Blenheim, was described as "that gazette in rhyme" by Joseph
Warton (1722-1800) in his "Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope," I,
29.

_Chaucer_. Cf. A. W. Pollard's "Chaucer," p. 35: "To Boccaccio's 'Teseide'
and 'Filostrato,' he was indebted for something more than the groundwork
of two of his most important poems; and he was also acquainted with three
of his works in Latin prose. If, as is somewhat hardily maintained, he
also knew the _Decamerone_, and took from it, in however improved a
fashion, the idea of his Canterbury Pilgrimage and the plots of any or all
of the four tales (besides that of Grisilde) to which resemblances have
bee