but it must not be verse. A single heroic line may very well pass
and not disturb the somewhat larger stride of the prose style; but
one following another will produce an instant impression of
poverty, flatness, and disenchantment. The same lines delivered
with the measured utterance of verse would perhaps seem rich in
variety. By the more summary enunciation proper to prose, as to a
more distant vision, these niceties of difference are lost. A
whole verse is uttered as one phrase; and the ear is soon wearied
by a succession of groups identical in length. The prose writer,
in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less harmonious, is
condemned to a perpetually fresh variety of movement on a larger
scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the trot of an accepted
metre. And this obligation is the third orange with which he has
to juggle, the third quality which the prose writer must work into
his pattern of words. It may be thought perhaps that this is a
quality of ease rather than a fresh difficulty; but such is the
inherently rhythmical strain of the English language, that the bad
writer--and must I take for example that admired friend of my
boyhood, Captain Reid?--the inexperienced writer, as Dickens in his
earlier attempts to be impressive, and the jaded writer, as any one
may see for himself, all tend to fall at once into the production
of bad blank verse. And here it may be pertinently asked, Why bad?
And I suppose it might be enough to answer that no man ever made
good verse by accident, and that no verse can ever sound otherwise
than trivial when uttered with the delivery of prose. But we can
go beyond such answers. The weak side of verse is the regularity
of the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive than the
movement of the nobler prose; and it is just into this weak side,
and this alone, that our careless writer falls. A peculiar density
and mass, consequent on the nearness of the pauses, is one of the