Shakspeare, to some extent, and still more Milton, Shelley, and many other poets, are very fond of using monosyllables without the metrical accent, however long their quantity may be: Our colors do return in those same hands That díd | display | them whén | we first | march'd fórth. O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, After this thy | trável | sore, MILTON. MILTON. Gentle, and brave, and generous, no lorn bard, In some cases, difficulties may present themselves in Elizabethan poetry which arise from the difference between the Elizabethan and modern accents. When two monosyllables are compounded into one word, the latter monosyllable, however long in quantity, loses its accent, and indeed sometimes much of its quantity; e.g., main-s'l (the nautical equivalent for mainsail). Some words-e.g., good-man — were recognized as compounds once, but are not now: others are recognized as compounds now, e.g., béd-time, but perhaps were not yet recognized generally then. This refers merely to monosyllables in compound dissyllables. There are other differences of accent in polysyllables between the Elizabethan and the modern usage; but these must be made the subjects of special study. The difference between Milton and Pope is very marked in the use of long syllables. Milton, with the evident intention of avoiding any thing like epigrammatic point at the end of his lines, frequently introduces at the end two monosyllables, of which the first, which is unaccented, is long in quantity. The effect is to take something from the sharpness of the final accent. Thus we find as verse-endings "soft lays," "fair truth," "frail man," "strange fire." For a similar reason Shakspeare rather avoids, at the end of a line, dissyllabic words accented on the last syllable; e.g., remáin. The accent is too marked for continuous dramatic verse. Shakspeare often uses trisyllables, which, owing to the weakness of the final accent, are avoided by Pope. 113. Exaggeration of the Effect of Quantity on English Metre. - If quantity were the exclusive consideration in English metre, it would be possible to divide each line into a certain number of parts of time called measures; and in each measure as many syllables might be compressed as could be pronounced in the time assigned to the measure. Thus, as music is divided into bars, and a bar may be filled with one, or two, or three, or four, or almost any number of distinct notes, subject to this condition, that, whether the notes be one or eight in number, the time occupied in producing the notes in each bar shall be always the same, -SO a similar system might (if quantity were the standard of metre) be adopted in poetry. As in music one minim takes as much time as two crotchets or four quavers, so a word like strives might be said to occupy the same time as coming or solitary; and (on this theory) such words might be interchanged without interference with the metrical effect. But this theory cannot be supported by the literature of English poetry. No instance whatever could be given where a measure o or twelve syllables in one instance corresponded to a n of two syllables in another. Moreover, in poetry t called measures are not pronounced in the same time. in Rocks, cáves, | lakes, féns, | bogs, déns, | and shades of d MIL (1), (2), and (3) take much more time than (4) or (5). It is therefore more in accordance with truth, in expla any English metre, to state definitely the law of accent whether the accent recurs as a rule with an interval of or two unaccented syllables. As a supplementary exp tion, it may be added that some syllables are so little no in pronunciation that they are (1) either totally suppres - as is the case always with superfluous syllables in the syllabic, and often in the dissyllabic metre, or (2) admi as a rare but pleasing variety, not sufficiently irregular to br the general effect of the metre, which sometimes takes pl in the dissyllabic metre, but not in the trisyllabic. 114. Slurred Syllables are syllables which are so lit noticed in pronunciation that they are either ignored in met or are not considered noticeable enough to be objectionab intrusive when they come irregularly and superfluously dissyllabic metre. There are degrees of slurring, differing slightly from one another that it is often impossible to sa whether a slurred syllable is heard a little, or not heard all. For instance, the e in "whispering" is slurred, but prob ably not wholly ignored (and, indeed, it is almost impossibl to avoid uttering a slight vowel sound) in But in the following line, written in the stricter trisyllabic measure, it is not slurred: And the whispering sound of the cool | colonnáde. COWPER. It would be useless to attempt to divide all slurred syllables into those which are not pronounced at all, and those which are but slightly pronounced, because different persons will differ in their pronunciation of many of these syllables. Some syllables are entirely ignored, even in prose, -e.g., -ed final, except after dentals. The double sound in -tion is also scarcely audible, and is by some declared to be always inaudible. But betwixt this complete suppression and the ordinary sound of an unaccented syllable, there are many degrees of suppression, as in "timorous," "popular," "heavenly," "glorious," "beneath," "travellers," "misery." If we attempt to classify these degrees, we are met with a difficulty. We might indeed say with truth that, at the present time, the e in heavenly is more nearly suppressed than the u in popular. But at different periods in English literature the pronunciation appears to have differed, and certainly there has been a difference in the poetic usage of slurring. Very often the suppression or slurring of a syllable was indicated by the spelling. In the early editions of Milton's Poems we find tim'rous, whisp'ring, and the like. But we cannot infer from the contracted spelling that the syllable omitted was totally suppressed. For though we still write o'er and e'er in poetry, yet the sound is not, and cannot be, totally suppressed in o'er, for example. It is therefore best to use some term such as slurred to apply to all such syllables, without attempting to decide what is the degree of slurring. The license of slurring syllables was more freely used by |