without having the destestable dance of Dr Maginn's
And scarcely had she begun to wash
Ere she was aware of the grisly gash,
jigging in my ears, to spoil the effect of Homer, and to torture me. To apply that manner and that rhythm to Homer's incidents, is not to imitate Homer, but to travesty him.
Lastly I come to Mr Newman. His rhythm, like Chapman's and Dr Maginn's, is a ballad-rhythm, but with a modification of his own. 'Holding it', he tells us, 'as an axiom, that rhyme must be abandoned', he found, on abandoning it, 'an unpleasant void until he gave a double ending to the verse'. In short, instead of saying
Good people all with one accord
Give ear unto my tale,
Mr Newman would say
Good people all with one accord
Give ear unto my story.
A recent American writer[1] gravely observes that for his countrymen this rhythm has a disadvantage in being like the rhythm of the American national air Yankee Doodle, and thus provoking ludicrous associations. Yankee Doodle is not our national air: for us Mr Newman's rhythm has not this dis-*
- ↑ Mr Marsh, in his Lectures on the English Language, New York, 1860, p. 520.
