controversy about the English hexameter. Whatever may be the ultimate
fate of that struggling alien--and I confess myself to be one of those
who doubt whether he can ever be naturalized--most judges will, I
believe, agree that for the present at any rate his case is sufficient
to occupy the literary tribunals, and that to raise any discussion on
the rights of others of his class would be premature. Practice, after
all, is more powerful in such matters than theory; and hardly at any
time in the three hundred years during which we have had a formed
literature has the introduction of classical lyric measures into
English been a practical question. Stanihurst has had many successors
in the hexameter; probably he has not had more than one or two in the
Asclepiad. The Sapphic, indeed, has been tried repeatedly; but it is an
exception which is no exception, the metre thus intruded into our
language not being really the Latin Sapphic, but a metre of a different
kind, founded on a mistake in the manner of reading the Latin, into
which Englishmen naturally fall, and in which, for convenience'
sake, they as naturally persist. The late Mr. Clough, whose efforts in
literature were essentially tentative, in form as well as in spirit,
and whose loss for that very reason is perhaps of more serious import
to English poetry than if, with equal genius, he had possessed a more
conservative habit of mind, once attempted reproductions of nearly all
the different varieties of Horatian metres. They may he found in a
paper which he contributed to the fourth volume of the "Classical
Museum;" and a perusal of them will, I think, be likely to convince the
reader that the task is one in which even great rhythmical power and
mastery of language would be far from certain of succeeding. Even the
Alcaic fragment which he has inserted in his "Amours de Voyage"--

"Eager for battle here
Stood Vulcan, here matronal Juno,