Thus syllabism was “an apostasy to the ‘rhythm of the foreigner’.” Wherever Bridges found an elision in Milton, Saintsbury found a trisyllabic foot. These “laws” he felt were operative in one degree or another in all historical periods. His History, which an unkind critic might dub The History of the Trisyllabic Foot in English Verse, emphasized foot-scansion and the equivalence of two “shorts” for a “long”-on the analogy of classical verse-as the “Main Laws” of English verse (see I, 82-84). It was he, surely, who first approached that system without a strong bias in favor of a stress prosody, or of a prosody insisting on extra-metrical liberties, and who consequently saw in it not only a rigid side-the syllable-count-but a flexible side, wherein genuine musical variation was possible-the manifold devices of “elision.”Ĩ Saintsbury was certainly one of the key objectors. Historically more important, I think, is the debt we owe Bridges for restoring to its original dignity the broadly European metrical system, characteristic of the Renaissance and of Milton, which Bridges called the “syllabic” system. For example, it is from Bridges as much as from anybody that we have derived the notion of “scansion divorced from rhythm,” of speech-accents counter-pointing metrical accents. What the poet's modesty concealed, however, was that underneath the linguistic surface, which was almost Teutonic in its precision and thoroughness, there lay, scattered but brilliant, an ore of metrical theory. iv), he referred to it as his “poor little grammar.” And in one very important sense, that is what it actually was: a grammar, or grammatical prosody, of the verse of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. It was a study both highly promising and a little repulsive. Robert bridges published his second edition of Milton's Prosody in 1921.
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