ables, was his old familiar medium; nor is it used here with greater skill than he had used it in "The Earthly Paradise," though even here we may find subtle adaptations to the dramatic method. But the rhymed dactylics to which reference has been made—a metre at once one of the rarest, one of the most difficult, and if successfully used, one of the most hauntingly beautiful, which the English language uses—are a noble development of that single exquisite fragment, "Pray but One Prayer for Me," which had been one of his very earliest achievements in poetry. And the alliterative metre which he invented, or reinvented, for the body of the play deserves a more serious notice.
The fact that the whole of English poetry, from the sixteenth century downwards, is written in metres of foreign origin, only naturalized in English through the long and difficult practice of centuries, is one which, however familiar to students of mediæval literature, is little realized beyond the circle of historians and scholars. As was the case in Latin literature for a period of about the same length, the foreign metres, after a time of struggle during which the native metre produced its finest achievements, conquered it and drove it completely below the surface. But, as was the case in Latin literature, the native metre not only had a deep influence on the special development of the imported metres, but retained an affinity to the structure of the language which made it tend to reappear when the dominant metrical forms were exhausted from over-use. Here, at the present day, the parallel ceases. But if 'the argument from the Latin analogy were seriously pressed, it might be conjectured that the future forms of English poetry would be, not, indeed, the form of the mediæval English alliterative
