with Mr Clough. Mr Arnold's English hexameter cannot be a higher inspiration to him, than the true hexameter was to a Greek: yet that metre inspired strains of totally different essential genius and merit.
But I claim Mr Arnold himself as confessing that our ballad metre is epical, when he says that Scott is 'bastard-epic'. I do not admit that his quotations from Scott are all Scott's best, nor anything like it; but if they were, it would only prove something against Scott's genius or talent, nothing about his metre. The Κύπρια ἔπη or Ἰλίου πέρσις were probably very inferior to the Iliad; but no one would on that account call them or the Frogs and Mice bastard-epic. No one would call a bad tale of Dryden or of Crabbe bastard-epic. The application of the word to Scott virtually concedes what I assert. Mr Arnold also calls Macaulay's ballads 'pinchbeck'; but a man needs to produce something very noble himself, before he can afford thus to sneer at Macaulay's 'Lars Porsena'.
Before I enter on my own 'metrical exploits', I must get rid of a disagreeable topic. Mr Arnold's repugnance to them has led him into forms of attack, which I do not know how to characterize. I shall state my complaints as concisely as I can, and so leave them.
1. I do not seek for any similarity of sound in an English accentual metre to that
