[265] With the
single exception of Thomas Campion, his experiments in adapting classical
metres to English verse are more successful than those of his
contemporaries. Some of his elegiacs are not ungrateful to the ear, and
it can hardly be doubted that Coleridge borrowed from his eclogue of
Strephon and Klaius the pleasing movement of his own _Catullian
Hendecasyllabics_. Spenser, perhaps out of deference to Sidney, also
tried his hand at English hexameters, the introduction of which was
claimed by his friend Gabriel Harvey, who thereby assured to himself an
immortality of grateful remembrance. But the result was a series of jolts
and jars, proving that the language had run off the track. He seems to
have been half conscious of it himself, and there is a gleam of mischief
in what he writes to Harvey: "I like your late English hexameter so
exceedingly well that I also enure my pen sometime in that kind, which I
find indeed, as I have often heard you defend in word, neither so hard
nor so harsh but that it will easily yield itself to our mother-tongue.
For the only or chiefest hardness, which seemeth, is in the accent, which
sometime gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ill-favoredly, coming short of
that it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the number, as in
_Carpenter_; the middle syllable being used short in speech, when it
shall be read long in verse, seemeth like a lame gosling that draweth one
leg after her; and _Heaven_ being used short as one syllable, when it is
in verse stretched out with a diastole, is like a lame dog that holds up
one leg.
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