For their scansion, it is less to be regretted, for if they take it into their heads to be poets, it is odds but they turn out, the greater part of them, vile plagiarists.

Parts of it were evidently written when the theme stirred and moved the writer: others, again, when he was merely bent on reproducing scenes that lived in his singularly retentive memory, with needless minuteness of detail, and in any kind of couplet that might pass muster in respect of scansion and rhyme.

" The rhymes are all right, but the scansion of the first line is susceptible of improvement.

And, in the scansion of the following stanza from Byron, the word "Let" twice used, is to be reckoned a long syllable, and not (as Wells would have it) a short one: "Cavalier! and man of worth!

This, though far from being right, is very different from the doctrine of Murray or Sheridan; because, in practice, or the scansion of verses, it comes to the same results as to suppose all our feet to be "formed by quantity."

Nor is the difficulty confined to Latin and Greek verse: the poetry of our own ancestors, from any remote period, is not easy of scansion.

Hence a correct mode of reading, as well as a just theory of measure, is essential to correct scansion, or a just discrimination of the poetic feet.

The dividing of verses into the feet which compose them, is called Scanning, or Scansion.

But the propriety of acknowledging an order of "Amphibrachic verse," as does Humphrey, is more than doubtful; because, by so doing, we not only recognize the amphibrach as one of the principal feet, but make a vast number of lines ambiguous in their scansion.

It is doubtless possible to read the six short lines above, into the measure of so many anapests; but, since the two monosyllables "In" and "All" are as easily made long as short, whoever considers the common pronunciation of the longer words, "Resonance" and "Tinkled," may well doubt whether the learned professors have, in this instance, hit upon the right mode of scansion.

Even what seems to be dactylic of two feet, if the last syllable be sufficiently lengthened to admit of single rhyme with the full metre, becomes somewhat doubtful in its scansion; because, in such case, the last foot maybe reckoned an amphimac, or amphimacer.

It is not probable, that the false scansion just criticised originated with Blair; for the Comprehensive Grammar, a British work, republished in its third edition, by Dobson, of Philadelphia, in 1789, teaches the same doctrine, thus:

By the present scansion, the first foot is an iamb in all of them but the two anapestics.

1.Composite verse, especially if the lines be short, is peculiarly liable to uncertainty, and diversity of scansion; and that which does not always abide by one chosen order of quantities, can scarcely be found agreeable; it must be more apt to puzzle than to please the reader.

| gr=ound W=ith h~is c=ane.' This," says he, "is the general scansion of the poem.

He imagines that, "By all who have earsnot over longthis will be acknowledged as the true and the sole true scansion.

It is not to be denied, that we have much difficulty in reading them rhythmically, according to their stated feet and scansion; and so we should have, in reading our own language rhythmically, in any similar succession of feet.

Noticing this in respect to the Latin Hexameter, or Heroic verse, Poe says, "Now the discrepancy in question is not observable in English metres; where the scansion coincides with the reading, so far as the rhythm is concernedthat is to say, if we pay no attention to the sense of the passage.

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.

What is meant by scanning or scansion?

In scansion, why are the principal feet to be preferred to the secondary?

[It may now be required of the pupil to determine, by reading and scansion, the metrical elements of any good English poetry which may be selected for the purposethe feet being marked by pauses, and the long syllables by stress of voice.

from synchysis Hyperbole, defined Hyperboles, by what commonly expressed Hypermeter, meaning of, in scansion Hyphen, its uses present use in compound names Rules for the insertion of, in compounds signif.

The language had undergone some changes since Chaucer's time, which made his scansion obsolete.

Nevertheless there was a controversy over Rowley hardly less obstinate than that over Ossian, a controversy made possible only by the then almost universal ignorance of the forms, scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry.