free liberty left of diversifying it, in any foot except the last, by Dr Maginn's 'detestable dance'. What more severe condemnation of the metre is imaginable than this mere description gives? 'Six trochees' seems to me the worst possible foundation for an English metre. I cannot imagine that Mr Arnold will give the slightest weight to this, as a judgment from me; but I do advise him to search in Samson Agonistes, Thalaba, Kehama, and Shelley's works, for the phenomenon.
I have elsewhere insisted, but I here repeat, that for a long poem a trochaic beginning of the verse is most unnatural and vexatious in English, because so large a number of our sentences begin with unaccented syllables, and the vigour of a trochaic line eminently depends on the purity of its initial trochee. Mr Arnold's feeble trochees already quoted (from Bétween to Tó a) are all the fatal result of defying the tendencies of our language.
If by a happy combination any scholar could compose fifty such English hexameters, as would convey a living likeness of the Virgilian metre, I should applaud it as valuable for initiating schoolboys into that metre: but there its utility would end. The method could not be profitably used for translating Homer or Virgil, plainly because it is impossible to say for whose service such a translation would be executed. Those
