I had read in the morning Wasse's Greek Trochaics to Bentley.

A trochaic octosyllabic line, for example, substituting stress for quantity, would be scanned / | /

In his use of caesuras Vergil in the Ciris resembles Catullus: both to a certain extent distrust the trochaic pause.

Trochaic Verse; its Nature Observations on Trochaic Metre Trochaics shown in their 8 Measures Order III.

On a wide page, iambics and trochaics may possibly be written in octom'eter; but lines of this measure, being very long, are mostly abandoned for alternate tetrameters.

Iambics and trochaics often occur in the same poem; but, in either order, written with exactness, the number of feet is always the number of the long syllables.

1.Trochaic verse without the final short syllable, is the same as iambic would be without the initial short syllable;it being quite plain, that iambic, so changed, becomes trochaic, and is iambic no longer.

But trochaic, retrenched of its last short syllable, is trochaic still; and can no otherwise be made iambic, than by the prefixing of a short syllable to the line.

2.To suppose that iambic verse may drop its initial short syllable, and still be iambic, still be measured as before, is not only to take a single long syllable for a foot, not only to recognize a pedal cæsura at the beginning of each line, but utterly to destroy the only principles on which iambics and trochaics can be discriminated.

A prosodist might just as well scan all iambics into trochaics, by pronouncing each initial short syllable to be hypermeter.

"(For rhyme the rudder is of verses, With which, like ships, they steer their courses.)"Hudibras. Iambics and trochaics, of corresponding metres, and exact in them, agree of course in both the number of feet and the number of syllables; but as the former are slightly redundant with double rhyme, so the latter are deficient as much, with single rhyme; yet, the number of feet may, and should, in these cases, be reckoned the same.

This doubt, ridiculous as must be all reasoning in support of it, the author seriously endeavours to raise into a general conviction that we have no trochaic order of verse!

After these observations and criticisms concerning the trochaic order of verse, I proceed to say, trochaics consist of the following measures, or metres: MEASURE I.TROCHAIC OF EIGHT FEET, OR OCTOMETER.

Trochaic of eight feet, as these sundry examples will suggest, is much oftener met with than iambic of the same number; and yet it is not a form very frequently adopted.

Full trochaics have some inconvenience, because all their rhymes must be double; and, as this inconvenience becomes twice as much when any long line of this sort is reduced to two short ones, there may be a reason why a stanza precisely corresponding to the foregoing couplets is seldom seen.

Such are the prosodial characteristics of the following lines; which, if two were written as one, would make exactly our full trochaic of seven feet, the metre exhibited above: "Whisp'ring, | heard by | wakeful | maids, To whom | the night

But since they commence with the shorter metre of six trochees only, and are already placed under that head, I too may take them in the like connexion, by now introducing my third species of trochaics, which is Everett's tenth.

But it is plain, that the third line of the first stanza, having seven long syllables, must have seven feet, and cannot be a trochaic hexameter; and, since the third below should be like it in metre, one can hardly forbear to think the words which I have inserted in brackets, were accidentally omitted.

This, in view of the examples above, of our longer trochaics, may serve as a comment on the author's boast, that, "having deduced his rules from the usage of the great poets, he has the best reason for being confident of their correctness.

Campbell repeats a suggestion of the older critics, that gayety belongs naturally to all trochaics, as such, and gravity or grandeur, as naturally, to iambics; and he attempts to find a reason for the fact; while, perhaps, even heremore plausible though the supposition isthe fact may be at least half imaginary.

1. WITH TROCHAICS.

Possibly lines of five anapests, or of four and an initial iambus, might be written; for these would scarcely equal in length some of the iambics and trochaics already exhibited.

But it happens, that the common error by which single-rhymed Trochaics have so often been counted a foot shorter than they are, is also extended by some writers to single-rhymed Dactylicsthe rhyming syllable, if long, being esteemed supernumerary!

verse shown in its eight measures Trochaics, Eng., the TETRAMETER the most common meas.

217; Scotchman, not a, ii. 363, n. 4; studied hard, i. 71; iv. 21; v. 316; verses, his, iv. 23; Wasse's Greek Trochaics, v. 445.