heroes of Virgil's Eclogues sing alternately four lines each, Gray's
quatrain seems to suggest itself: and where a similar case occurs in
these Idylls (as for instance in the ninth) I thought it might be met by
taking whatever received English stanza was nearest the required length.
Pope's couplet again may possibly best convey the pomposity of some
Idylls and the point of others. And there may be divers considerations
of this kind. But, speaking generally, where the translator has not to
intimate stanzas--where he has on the contrary to intimate that there
are none--rhyme seems at first sight an intrusion and a _suggestio
falsi_.

No doubt (as has been observed) what 'Pastorals' we have are mostly
written in what is called the heroic measure. But the reason is, I
suppose, not far to seek. Dryden and Pope wrote 'heroics,' not from any
sense of their fitness for bucolic poetry, but from a sense of their
universal fitness: and their followers copied them. But probably no
scholar would affirm that any poem, original or translated, by Pope or
Dryden or any of their school, really resembles in any degree the
bucolic poetry of the Greeks. Mr. Morris, whose poems appear to me to
resemble it more almost than anything I have ever seen, of course writes
what is technically Pope's metre, and equally of course is not of Pope's
school. Whether or no Pope and Dryden _intended_ to resemble the old
bucolic poets in style is, to say the least, immaterial. If they did
not, there is no reason whatever why any of us who do should adopt
their metre: if they did and failed, there is every reason why we should
select a different one.

Professor Conington has adduced one cogent argument against blank verse:
that is, that hardly any of us can write it.[D] But if this is so--if
the 'blank verse' which we write is virtually prose in disguise--the