Seven have two dactyls, as laudabilis numerus, laudat exercitus; one ends with spondees, apostolorum chorus.

The reason why these were adopted only in the dramas, while the Odyssey of Livius was written in the national Saturnian measure, evidently was that the iambuses and trochees of tragedy and comedy far more easily admitted of imitation in Latin than the epic dactyls.

Poetical language is the key to the ideal world of poetry, poetic measure the key to poetical feeling; for the man, to whom the eloquent epithet is dumb and the living image is dead, and in whom the times of dactyls and iambuses awaken no inward echo, Homer and Sophocles have composed in vain.

This double Motion of the Stone is admirably described in the Numbers of these Verses; As in the four first it is heaved up by several Spondees intermixed with proper Breathing places, and at last trundles down in a continual Line of Dactyls.

* PTERO-DACTYLS.

The learned languages have certainly a great advantage of us, in not being tied to the slavery of any rhyme; and were less constrained in the quantity of every syllable, which they might vary with spondees or dactyls, besides so many other helps of grammatical figures, for the lengthening or abbreviation of them, than the modern are in the close of that one syllable, which often confines, and more often corrupts, the sense of all the rest.

In Priestley, of 1772: "Iambics, dactyls, dactylic, anapæstic, monosyllabic, electric, public, critic; author, emperor's, superior; favour, labours, neighbours, laboured, vigour, endeavour; meagre, hillock, bailiwick, bishoprick, control, travelling."

"A Dactyl has the first syllable accented, and the two latter unaccented.

Iambic spondees and dactyls are to be distinguished by the metrical accent falling on the last syllable.

By a synæresis of the two short syllables, an anapest may sometimes be employed for an iambus; or a dactyl, for a trochee.

"Dactylic measure may consist of one, two, or three Dactyls, introduced by a feeble syllable, and terminated by a strong one; as, M~

According to the Prosodies, the first four of these may be either dactyls or spondees; the fifth is always, or nearly always, a dactyl; and the sixth, or last, is always a spondee: as, "L=ud~er~e |

The Sapphic verse, according to Fabricius, Smetius, and all good authorities, has eleven syllables, making "five feetthe first a trochee, the second a spondee, the third a dactyl, and the fourth and fifth trochees."

The Sapphic stanza, or what is sometimes so called, consists of three Sapphic lines and an Adonian, or Adonic,this last being a short line composed of "a dactyl and a spondee.

" To arrange eleven syllables in a line, and have half or more of them to form trochees, is no difficult matter; but, to find rhythm in the succession of "a trochee, a spondee, and a dactyl," as we read words, seems hardly practicable.

Those which I have seen, are generally, if not in every instance, susceptible of a more natural scansion as being composed of trochees, with a dactyl, or some other foot of three syllables, at the beginning of each line.

But these verses I divide, as I have divided the others, into trochees with initial dactyls.

What is a Dactyl?

HEXAMETER, n. A verse or line of poetry, having six feet, either dactyls or spondees; the heroic, and most important, verse among the Greeks and Romans;a rhythmical series of six metres.

It did not seem fit to us that such a one as he should trouble his head about spondees and dactyls, or care to know who signed the Magna Charta.

L. H. Tragedy of the Super-Patriot 257 IRWIN, FELIX Mélisande's Point of View 438 JAGGER, ARTHUR Ptero-dactyls 202 JAY, THOMAS Charivaria weekly Midget (The) 166 JENKINS, ERNEST Daily and Maily 97 New School (A) 85 KERR, S. P. Counter-Revolutionary Collar 270 KIDD, ARTHUR Drink of the Gods (The) 90 KILPATRICK, MRS.

This double Motion of the Stone is admirably described in the Numbers of these Verses; As in the four first it is heaved up by several Spondees intermixed with proper Breathing places, and at last trundles down in a continual Line of Dactyls.

The following from Evangeline illustrates the substitution of trochees for dactyls: U U | U | U U | U U | U U | U | Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed.

It is a rough, irregular metre, in which the trochees preponderate over the dactyls: many of the lines, in fact, would not bear a critical scansion.

He disliked the texture of those stiff verses, in their official garb, their abject reverence for grammar, their mechanical division by imperturbable caesuras, always plugged at the end in the same way by the impact of a dactyl against a spondee.