The greater part of your Treatise is employed in very ably and pleasantly supplying the deficiencies of my Preface, in points wherein it was necessarily deficient because I was out of reach of materials.

The remarks which are directed against my own hexameters appear to me altogether ill founded. You try the measure by Greek and Latin prosody: you might as well try me by the Laws of Solon, or the Twelve Tables.

I have distinctly stated that the English hexameter is not constructed upon those canons,

but bears the same relation to the ancient, that our heroic line does to the iambic verse.

I have explained the principle of adaptation which I had chosen, and by that principle the measure ought to be judged.

You bring forward arguments which are derived from music. But it by no means follows that a principle which holds good in music, should therefore be applicable to metre. The arts of music and poetry are essentially distinct, and I have had opportunities of observing that very skilful musicians may be as utterly without ear for metre, as I am myself without ear for music. If these arguments were valid, they would apply to the German hexameter as well as to the English; but the measure is as firmly established among the Germans as blank verse is with us, and having been sanctioned by the practice of their best poets, can never become obsolete so long as the works of Voss, and Göethe, and Schiller

are remembered, that is, as long as the language lasts.

Twice you have remarked upon the length of the verse as occasioning a difficulty in reading it aloud. Surely you have taken up this argument with little consideration, because it lay upon the surface. It is doubly fallacious: first, upon your own principle; for if the English verse is not isochronous

with the Latin, it must be shorter; and secondly, because the breath is regulated in reading by the length of the sentence, not by that of the verse.

Why did you bring against my trochee in the fifth place,

an argument just as applicable to the spondaic verse,

and which, indeed, is only saying that a versifier who writes without any regard to effect, may produce very bad verses? You might as well object to the Alexandrine

that it admits of twelve monosyllables. And how is it that you, who know Glaramara

so well, should have made me answerable for a vowel dropt at the press?

But I have done. It is a question de gustibus,

and therefore interminable. The proof of the pudding must be in the eating; and not all the reasoning in the world will ever persuade any one that the pudding which he dislikes is a good pudding, or that the pudding which pleases his palate and agrees with his stomach can be a bad one. I am glad that I have made the experiment, and quite satisfied with the result. The critics who write and who talk are with you; so I dare say are the whole posse of schoolmasters. The women, the young poets, and the docile bairns

are with me.