of those under four syllables is larger, and the paeons are fewer, though often splendid in their effect. And the difference is made up chiefly in trochees, dactyls, and above all in monosyllabic feet, of which the percentage is much greater in De Quincey. These emphatic notes come often upon lofty, coloured, and poetic words, and the number is raised partly by deliberate repetition: 'thére', Gód', 'slówly'; others, not repeated, are 'súddenly', túmult', 'dýing | children', 'pángs', 'fiérce'. In De Quincey we begin to feel how the monosyllables win their foot-value, as in verse, either from being prolonged in the utterance, or from being helped out by rests and silences. But the true harmonies of such a passage can only be felt when we return to it in Sec. II, and consider the sequences and combined cadences.

"There were the apostles that had trampled upon earth, and the glories of earth, out of celestial love to man. | Thére were the martyrs that had borne witness to the truth through flames, through torments, and through armies of fierce, insulting faces. | Thére | were the saínts, whó | under intólerable pángs, I had glórified | Gód | by meek submission to his will. And all the time, while this tumult of sublime memorials | héld ón | as the deép chórds | from some accómpaniment in the bass |, I saw, through the wide | céntral | field of the window, where the glass was úncóloured, white fleécy | clouds | sáiling | over the azure depth of the sky; were it but a fragment or a hint of such a cloud, immediately, under the flash | of my sórrow-haúnted | éye, | it grew and shaped itself into visions of beds with white, lawny curtains; and in the beds | láy | sick children, dying children, that were tossing in anguish, and weeping clámorously for death. Gód, for some mysterious reason, could not suddenly release them from their pain; but he suffered the beds, as it seemed, to rise | slówly, through the clouds; slowly | the beds ascended into the chambers of the air; slówly álso | his arms descended from the heavens, that he and his young children, whom | in Pálestine | once and for ever he had blessed, though they must páss | slówly | through the dreadful | chásm | of separátion, might yet meet the sooner. These visions were self-sustained .

These visions needed not that any sound should speak to me, or music mould my feelings. The hint | from the litany the fragment from the clouds,--those and the storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare of the tumúltuous | órgan | wrought its own separate creations. And oftentimes in anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound, | fierce | yet melódious, over the voices of the choir,-high in arches, when it seemed to rise, surmounting and overriding the strife of the vocal parts, and gathering by strong coercion | the total stórm | into únity-sometimes I seemed to rise and walk triumphantly | upon those | cloúds, | whích |, but a moment before, I had looked up to as mementos of prostrate sorrow: yes, sometimes, under | the_tránsfigurátions | of music, felt of grief itself as of a fiery chariot for mounting | victóriously above the causes of grief.'

Lastly may be quoted the passage from the living master, a passage of slow, seemingly gentle description, punctuated with many monosyllabic groups, level movements, and trochaic arrests, which mark the changes of pace in the stroll that is narrated. The incident is nothing in itself; but the pace alters in obedience to a suppressed tragic feeling, which is present to the readers of The Golden Bowl. Some of the effects are broken and conversational—(‘at ány | cóst | as it wère'); but the spots of intenser colour, the bursts of louder emphasis, are marked in the rhythm; and the smoother, swifter steps of the couple are indicated in little runs of wavy feet. All this reflects the impression, it is not fanciful to think, of surface quiet and real tension. There are 157 feet in all. As I read the passage, these contain seventeen isolated monosyllables,-'old', 'oak', 'sun', &c., all pictorial or imaginative. The one clause that lets us into the underlying gravity of the affair is very marked in cadence: if they hádn't | beén | réally | toó | sérious' |; a rare sequence, third paeon, monosyllable, trochee, monosyllable, dactyl. There are antibacchics like and shaped yéw', ' of brick wáll', which easily run off into smooth and lovely combinations, like: 'and had túrned | at ónce | to

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púrple and to pink .' Another might have written 'to púrple | and pínk |'; not so Mr. Henry James.

'What was now clear, at all events, | for the father | and the daughter, was their simply knowing they wanted, for the time, to be together at ány cost, as it wère ; and their necessity so worked in them as to bear them out of the house, in a quarter hidden from that in which their friends were gathered, and caúse them | to wander, unseén, unfollowed, along a covered walk in the "old garden, as it was called, old | with an antiquity of formal things, high box | and shaped yéw | and expanses of brick wall that had turned at once to purple and to pink. They went out of a door in the wall, a door that had a slab with a date set above it, 1713, but in the old multiplied lettering, and then | had before them | a smáll | white gáte, | inténsely white | and clean amid all the greenness, through which they gradually passed to where some of the grandest treés spáciously | clústered | and where they would find one of the quietest places. A bench had been placed, long ago, beneath a great oak that helped to crown a mild eminence, and the ground sank away below it, to rise again, opposite, at a distance sufficient to enclose the solitude | and figure a bósky | horizon. Summer, blissfully, was with them yét, and the lów | sún | máde | a splash of light where it pierced the looser shade; Maggie, coming down to go out, had brought a parasol, which, | as over her chárming | báre heád, she nów | handled it, gáve, with the big | stráw hát | that her father in these days always wore a good deal tipped back, definite intention to their walk. They knew the bench; it was "sequestered they had praised it for that together, before, and liked the word; and after they had begun to linger there they could have smiled (if they hadn't been |, reálly |, tóo | sérious |, and if the question hadn't so soon ceased to matter), over the probable wonder of the others as to what would have become of them.'

II. THE CURSUS.

The student, by finding his own examples, or by using those given in the History of English Prose Rhythm, can pursue such a line of inquiry without limit, and can check these suggestions as to the relative frequency and differing

significance of the feet. He will learn the rhythmical habits of many writers; one thing he will never learn, a recipe for the production of beautiful effects. But his ear may be made more sensitive by the discipline. It is time to turn to the cursus. This is a name for certain sequences of feet, which come in emphatic places and are used because they are thought to be more beautiful and effective than others. They are an effort to bring, not indeed any actual metre, but the metrical principle into prose; they are meant to recur, not at fixed intervals, but with fixed limits of internal variation, and to give the pleasure of law and order thereby. Professor Saintsbury, while holding to the principle of variety as the foundation of our prose rhythm, notes, especially in his Appendix III, some habits of rhythmical sequence which seem specially grateful or the reverse. These hints are offered as 'strictly provisional', but they merit a closer investigation than can be given here. One principle approved is that of 'gradation', 'either way, from longer to shorter, or from shorter to longer'. For example, there seems to be harmony in a sequence of 'dochmiac', paeon, trisyllable, or in one of anapaest, iamb, monosyllable. A parallel sequence, from our extract from Gibbon, is this: As the wonders | of ancient | dáys'; another is: either síx¦ or nine days'. So in Newman: but they are over, and the énd | is cóme'. So in De Quincey: 'yet melódious |, over the voices of the choir'; 'as meméntos | of próstrate | sórrow'. So in Henry James: "sánk | away | belów it | to ríse again; this is from shorter to longer'. Saintsbury also suggests that 'amphibrach, bacchic or antibacchic, and anapaest, seem in many cases to combine with special harmony'; thus in our last passage we have 'expánses | of brick wáll | that had túrned'. My own impression is that this is very true, but that the happy combinations are almost infinite, especially if we look at the body of the sentence, or at the beginning.

It is easier to define

the range of effects by first keeping to the cursus, which, inasmuch as it disregards the divisions of the words, and necessarily begins on an accent, works on a principle radically inconsistent with that of 'gradation'.

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The cursus is the sequence of two or three feet which precedes a pause. The most marked pauses come at the end of a completed grammatical sentence; those next in emphasis are heard before a minor point (comma, semicolon); and there are shorter groups still, which are marked off by the ear. The cursus, as Mr. Clark explains with great fullness of learning, go back to certain Greek and Latin writers of numerous' prose, and especially to some of the orators. He relates the astonishing history of their persistence through post-classical times, and in mediaeval and vulgar Latin; and then their transference from accentual Latin to early Modern English. He goes on to inquire, in his tract Prose Rhythm in English, into the extent of their sway over later English; and institutes a search for those cadences which are of native source and are not classically descended. Mr. Shelly had already entered on the same quest, especially in respect of liturgical and biblical English.

There are three or four types of classically descended cursus. The base of them all was a cretic--; this was the first of the two or three feet that made up the sequence. The cretic was followed either by a trochee, or by another cretic, or by two trochees; the last syllable of the whole being treated as 'doubtful'. In a fourth form the cretic was followed by a trochee and dactyl. These were minor variations, to be noted presently. In time accent took the place of quantity. I append the four types with their variations, as described by Mr. Clark, drawing examples freely from his pages and also from the passages from Gibbon, De Quincey, and Henry James; stating in each case (a) the classical cadence, (B) the cadence in accentual Latin, (y) the same in English.