_Lear._ "Thou know'st the first time that we smell the air,
We wawl, and cry:--I will preach to thee; mark me.

[_Gloster._ "Alack! alack the day!]

_Lear._ "When we are born, we cry, that we are come
To this great stage of fools,--This a good block?"
--_King Lear_, Act IV. Sc. 6.

In this passage [I bracket Gloster] we find no fewer than
_forty-two monosyllables_ following each other consecutively.
Again,


"------but through his lips do throng
Weak words, so thick come, in his poor heart's aid,
That no man could _distinguish_ what he said."
_Rape of Lucreece_, Stanza 255.

After I had kept this among other flim-flams for more than a year in
my note-book, I submitted it in a letter to the examination of a
friend; his answer was as follows:--"Your canon is ingenious,
especially in the line taken from the sonnet. I doubt it however,
much, and rather believe that sound is often sympathetically, and as
it were unconsciously, adapted to sense. Moreover, monosyllables are
redundant in our tongue, as you will see in the scene you quote. In
_King John_, Act III. Sc. 3., where the King is _pausing_
in his wish to incense Hubert to Arthur's murder, he says:--