settled accent, observed a system of harmony of his own that is to say, he did not confine the sense to the couplet, but carried on his sentences from one couplet to another, frequently ending them with the first of the two rhymes. His successors in the Elizabethan age followed his practice of the enjambement, as it is technically called, but neglected the limitations he imposed on himself, letting their fancies run on luxuriantly from verse to verse, in the manner rendered familiar to the readers of Keats' 'Endymion.' Waller, as has been said, was the first to make a step towards the later methods of versification by restricting the sentence to the couplet; but the more subtle developments of the measure, depending on the variation of the cæsura, and the balance of one couplet against another, were due to a less famous author, George Sandys, the translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses.'

1

Sandys is praised both by Dryden and Pope as one of the chief refiners of our language. The former indeed blames him for the too great literalness of his translation. "He leaves him (Ovid)," says he, "obscure; he leaves him prose where he found him verse. . . . This is at least the idea which I have remaining of his translation; for I never read him since I was a boy." But the very closeness at which Sandys aimed in his rendering, tended to import a new character into the treatment of the couplet. The limitations of rhyme forced him to compress as much of the sense of the original as he could into the bounds of his measure; he endeavoured to reproduce exactly the rhetorical turns of the Latin; and he was evidently impressed by the analogy between the cæsura of the hexameter and the various syllables of the heroic metre, on which it is possible to make the pause. The result of his experiment is seen in verses like the following, which appear at least as remarkable as Waller's lines on The Prince's Escape at Saint Andero,' considering

1 Preface to Translations from Ovid's Metamorphoses.'

that they follow Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander' at an interval of only forty years, and precede Pope's earliest published translations by more than seventy years.

"O sister, O my wife, the poore remaines

Of all thy sex, which all in one containes!
Whom human nature, one paternal line,

Then one chaste bed, and now like dangers joyne!

Of what the sun beholds from east to west

We two are all the sea entombs the rest.

Nor yet can we of life be confident;

The threatening clouds strange terrors still present.
O what a heart wouldst thou have had, if Fate
Had ta'en me from thee, and prolonged thy date!
So wilde a feare, such sorrows, so forlorne
And comfortlesse, how wouldest thou have borne !
If seas had sucked thee in, I would have followed
My wife in death, and sea should me have swallowed.
O would I could my Father's cunning use,
And soules into well-modelled clay infuse!
Now all our mortal race we two contayne;
And but a pattern of mankind remayne."

Dryden, an original poet like Waller, and a voluminous translator like Sandys, united in his style the smooth elegance of the one master and the measured cadence of the other. The ardour of his mind, however, prompted him to vary his use of the couplet, as much as possible, by the introduction of triplets and Alexandrine verses. Pope made him his chief model in composition. "I learned versification," he told Spence, "wholly from Dryden's works; who had improved it much beyond any of our former poets; and would probably have brought it to perfection had not he been unhappily obliged to write so often in haste." Stories are told on the authority of some of his friends of an interview he had with Dryden, when he was twelve years old, to which, say some, he had stolen away from the Forest, while others report that the old poet gave him, by way of encouragement, a shilling for a

1 Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' (Book I. 352) Englished. By George Sandys,

1634.

Spence, 'Anecdotes,' p. 281.

translation he made of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. Johnson, in his Life of Pope, moralises on the incident: "Dryden died May 1, 1700, some days before Pope was twelve, so early must he therefore have felt the power of harmony and the zeal of genius. Who does not wish that Dryden could have known the value of the homage that was paid him, and have foreseen the greatness of his young admirer ?" It is almost a pity to disturb such an agreeable legend, but as Pope's biographers say that he did not begin the study of Dryden till he was twelve years old, and after his removal to Binfield, and as Dryden had for some time before his death been a cripple confined to his own house, the tale about the coffee-house and the shilling can hardly be accepted as veracious history. All that Pope himself says is that he saw Dryden when he was about twelve years of age,' but that he was not so happy as to know him."

What he learned from Dryden in versification was the art of expressing the social and conversational idiom of the language in a metrical form. His conception of metrical harmony was, however, altogether different from his professed master's, and rather resembled that of Sandys, whose translation of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' he told Spence he had read when very young, and with the greatest delight.' He explains the system in a letter to Cromwell dated November 25, 1710.

"(1.) As to the hiatus, it is certainly to be avoided as often as possible; but on the other hand, since the reason of it is only for the sake of the numbers, so if, to avoid it, we incur another fault against their smoothness, methinks the very end of that nicety is destroyed; as when we say, for instance,

Does not the ear in this place tell us that the hiatus is smoother, less constrained, and so preferable to the cæsura?1

(2.) I would except against the use of all expletives in verse, as do before verbs plural, or even too frequent use of did or does to change the termination of the rhyme; all these being against the usual manner of speech, and mere fillers-up of unnecessary syllables.

(3.) Monosyllable lines, unless very artfully managed, are stiff, languishing, and hard.

(4.) The repeating the same rhymes within four or six lines of each other, which tire the ear with too much of the like sound.

(5.) The too frequent use of Alexandrines, which are never graceful, but where there is some majesty added to the verse by them, or when there cannot be found a word in them but what is absolutely needful.

(6.) Every nice ear must, I believe, have observed that in any smooth English verse of ten syllables, there is naturally a pause either at the fourth, fifth, or sixth syllables; as for example, Waller :— At the fifth

'Whene'er thy navy spreads her canvas wings,'

At the fourth

'Honour to thee, and peace to all she brings.'

At the sixth

'Like tracks of leverets in morning snow.'

Now I fancy that, to preserve an exact harmony and variety, none of these pauses should be continued above three lines together, without the interposition of another; else it will be apt to weary the ear with one continued tone—at least, it does mine."

When he published his correspondence he re-addressed this letter to Walsh, and dated it October 22, 1706. Though it is not probable that it was really written so early, the 'Translation of Statius,' and the Pastorals,' both show a strict attention to the rules here specifically laid down. Now there are very few of these rules which Dryden does not violate. He apologises, indeed, for the liberties he takes with regard to the hiatus, or, what he calls the rule of "synalepha," which he discusses at length in his Preface to the translations from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses;' and there are probably fewer lines made up of monosyllables in his poems than in Pope's. Expletives are not frequent with him, but he does not systematically avoid them, and he was much too rapid a writer to be careful about repe

1 He seems here to use 'cæsura' in the sense of 'elision.'

titions of sound. As to the nice variation of the pauses in the line, on which Pope lays so much stress, Dryden can scarcely be said to have regarded the couplet itself as the basis of metrical harmony. His verses have often no cæsura, in the places prescribed by Pope, lines like the following being common in his poems :

or,

"No sooner had the goddess ceased to speak,"

"Which myriads of our martial men surround."

His sentences often overflow from one couplet to another, and his triplets and Alexandrines were much more frequent than his successor approved. On the other hand, the reader will find in the typical passage from Sandys cited above all those varieties of pause which constitute the harmony of the metre, as it was understood by Pope, and which are studiously observed in his Translation of Statius. Pope did not, indeed, strictly conform to his own rule. Owing to the great number of monosyllables in English there is a natural tendency to make a pause on the fourth syllable of the rhyming heroic line; the majority of Pope's verses break at this place; and he not seldom repeats the effect through considerably more than the three continuous lines he allows as a limit; the first five lines of his Translation from Statius, for instance, all make the pause on the fourth syllable.

There is another point in which the style of Pope, in his earliest translation, differs fundamentally from Dryden's. The latter sought above all things to reproduce the spirit of his original in an English dress. Popc, on the contrary, as he himself confesses, was at this period of his life essentially an imitator, who aimed as much as possible at rendering the style of the Latin. By a curious coincidence he had pitched upon an author who stood in almost the same relation to one of his poctical predecessors, as he himself for the moment stood to Dryden. There is scarcely a striking episode, an ingenious