But the iambics of the common poets are, on account of their likeness to ordinary conversation, very often in such a very low style, that sometimes it is hardly possible to discover any metre, or even rhythm in them.

I put an octave of iambics in his mouth, and he hath drunk it down.

A young scholar who should now glance his eye over the first chapter, containing speeches from Shakspeare and Addison's Cato translated into Greek iambics on the model of the Three Tragedians, would put aside the remainder with a smile of complacency at the improvement which has since been made in this species of task under the auspices of Porson.

In the first paragraph of the thirty-third chapter of Adam Bede is a sentence which makes a successful stanza in iambics by the addition of a single word.

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

But still this critic, in the very passage in which he finds this fault with him, (as I noticed when I was examining his work very closely,) himself makes an iambic without knowing it.