model of Sir Thomas Brown. The great number of excellent
translations which were constantly appearing through all its progressive
stages of improvement, must naturally have given the language a
classical turn. It is scarcely possible that a work so extensive, and so
universally read, as Pope's admirable translation of Homer, should not
leave some gloss of grecism upon the idiom into which so many of its
greatest beauties had been transfused. At the same time the early and
proud independence of the middle orders of people in England, prevented
them from conforming their language, their manners, or their sentiments
to the model of a court. Whereby if their expression did not acquire
politeness from that quarter, it did not loose any of its strength.
While the energy which their language is allowed to possess is the old
inheritance of their Anglo Saxon ancestors, whatever elegance it may
have acquired, is derived rather from Athens and Rome than from St.
James's.--The varied and extended occupations of a maritime and
commercial people have increased the fund from which imagery in
discourse is drawn, and as all occupations in such a nation are deemed
honorable, no metaphor is rejected as ignoble that is apt and
expressive.

A number of ideas conveyed by monosyllables gives great force and
conciseness, but leaves the poet frequently to struggle with the
harshness of sound; nevertheless those who are conversant with English
poetry will have perceived that this difficulty is not always
insuperable. The different accentuation of the old Anglo Saxon words,
with those adopted from other tongues, affords uncommon variety and
emphasis to the numbers of English verse. The measure commonly used in
poetry of a higher style is of ten syllables, as that in French is of
twelve. Three English verses of ten syllables generally contain nearly
the same number of syllables as two Latin or Greek hexameters, but are
in most instances capable of conveying more ideas, especially in
translating from Greek which abounds so much in what seem to us
expletive particles. The _caesura_, or pause is not invariably fixed on
the same syllable of the verse, as in French; in the choice and variety
of its position, consists the chief art of appropriate harmony.
Accentuation of syllables, which seems, to answer the idea of long and
short syllables in the dead languages, is the foundation of English,
metre.--Tripple rhymes used with judgment have been admitted