Historical manual of English prosody Author:George Saintsbury Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III SYSTEMS OF ENGLISH PROSODY THE SYLLABIC History of A Strictly syllabic system of prosody has hardly at any theory1.lablc time been a sufficient... more » key, even in appearance, to English verse. But it has preserved a curious insistence of pretension, and the study of it is of great and informing prosodic interest. It is, of course, French in origin— French prosody, except in eccentric instances, has been from the first, and is to the present day, strictly syllabic. It is innocuous in so far as in the words "octosyllable," "decasyllable," "fourteener," and the like, the irreducible syllabic minimum (save by licence of certain metres) is conveniently indicated. In so early an example as Orm (v. inf.) we find it carried out exactly and literally. But the inherited spirit of Old English, surviving and resisting all changes and reinforcements of vocabulary, accent, and everything else, will have none of it. In the /f/teener1 itself; in its sequel and preserver, ballad measure; in octosyllabic couplet—not merely in the loose form of Genesis and Exodus, but to some extent even in the strict one of The Owl and the Nightingale; in almost all mixed modes, when once they have broken free from direct copying of French or Provencal, it is cast to the winds. It can only be introduced into Chaucer, as far as his heroic couplet is concerned, by perpetual violations of probability, document, and rhythm. Even in Gower, the principal representative of it, and one who probably did aim at it,-there are some certain, and many probable, lapses from strict observance. But in the linguistic and phonetic changes of the fifteenth century, with the consequent decadence of original literary poetry, the principle of syllabic liberty degenerates into intolerable licence, and the doggerel which result...« less