, for
the same." This is always misleading. The shift of the accent in what Mr.
Masson calls "dissyllabic variations" is common to all pentameter verse,
and, in the other case, most of the words cited as trisyllables either
were not so in Milton's day,[375] or were so or not at choice of the
poet, according to their place in the verse. There is not an elision of
Milton's without precedent in the dramatists from whom he learned to
write blank-verse. Milton was a greater metrist than any of them, except
Marlowe and Shakespeare, and he employed the elision (or the slur)
oftener than they to give a faint undulation or retardation to his verse,
only because his epic form demanded it more for variety's sake. How
Milton would have _read_ them, is another question. He certainly often
marked them by an apostrophe in his manuscripts. He doubtless composed
according to quantity, so far as that is possible in English, and as
Cowper somewhat extravagantly says, "gives almost as many proofs of it in
his 'Paradise Lost' as there are lines in the poem."[376] But when Mr.
Masson tells us that
"Self-fed and self-consumed: if this fail,"
and
"Dwells in all Heaven charity so rare,"
are "only nine syllables," and that in
"Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream,"
"either the third foot must be read as an _anapaest_ or the word _hugest_
must be pronounced as one syllable, _hug'st_," I think Milton would have
invoked the soul of Sir John Cheek.
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