volume would become
even more inconsistent than that of F1 itself. Add to this; there are
places, though, as has been seen, not many, where we have had to leave
the reading of F1 altogether. How then shall we spell the correction
which we substitute?

D. _Metre._

Corrections of metre are avoided even more carefully than those of
grammar. For the rules of prosody have undergone perhaps greater change
than those of grammar. There is no doubt that a system of versification
has taken root among us very different from that which was in use in the
earlier days of our poetry. The influence of classical prosody has
worked in a manner that could hardly have been expected. Quantity in the
sense in which the Greeks and Romans understood it, is altogether
foreign to our speech; and our poets, willing to imitate the verse
regulated by laws of quantity, have partially adopted those laws,
substituting for long syllables those that bear a stress of accent or
emphasis.

In Greek and Latin accent was essentially distinct from quantity, and
verse was regulated entirely by the latter. In the modern imitation of
classical metres, for want of appreciation of quantity, we go entirely
by accent or emphasis, and make precisely such verses as classical taste
eschewed. Thus we have learned to scan lines by iambuses, or rather by
their accentual imitations, and a perfect line would consist of ten
syllables, of which the alternate ones bore a rhythmical stress. These
iambuses may, under certain restrictions, be changed for 'trochees,' and
out of these two 'feet,' or their representatives, a metre, certainly
very beautiful, has grown up gradually, which attained perhaps its
greatest perfection in the verse of Pope. But the poets of this metre,
like renaissance architects, lost all perception of the laws of the
original artists, and set themselves, whenever it was possible, to
convert the original verses into such as their own system would have
produced. We see the beginnings of this practice even in the first
Folio, when there exist Quartos to exhibit it. In each successive Folio
the process has been continued. Rowe's few changes of F4 are almost all
in the same direction, and the work may be said to have been completed
by Hanmer. It is to be feared that a result of two centuries of such a
practice has been to bring about an idea of Shakespearian versification
very different from Shakespeare's. But we feel a hope that the number of
Shakespear