the original mould, one of the terms of | Reid? - the inexperienced writer, as this variety is lost, and we fall back on Dickens in his earlier attempts to be imsameness. Thus, both as to the arith-pressive, and the jaded writer, as any one metical measure of the verse, and the degree of regularity in scansion, we see the laws of prosody to have one common purpose: to keep alive the opposition of two schemes simultaneously followed; to keep them notably apart, though still coincident; and to balance them with such judicial nicety before the reader, that neither shall be unperceived and neither signally prevail.

may see for himself, all tend to fall at once into the production of bad blank verse. And here it may be pertinently asked, Why bad? And I suppose it might be enough to answer that no man ever made good verse by accident, and that no verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial, when uttered with the delivery of prose. But we can go beyond such answers. The weak side of verse is the regularity of the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive than the movement of the nobler prose; and it is just into this weak side, and this alone, that our careless writer falls. A peculiar density and mass, consequent on the nearness of the pauses, is one of the chief good qualities of verse; but this our accidental versifier, still fol lowing after the swift gait and. large gestures of prose, does not so much as aspire to imitate. Lastly, since he remains unconscious that he is making verse at all, it can never occur to him to extract those effects of counterpoint and opposition which I have referred to as the final grace and justification of verse, and, I may add, of blank verse in particular.

Here is a

The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. Here, too, we write in groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for the prose phrase is greatly longer and is much more nonchalantly uttered than the group in verse; so that not only is there a greater interval of continuous sound between the pauses, but, for that very reason, word is linked more readily to word by a more summary enunciation. Still, the phrase is the strict analogue of the group, and successive phrases, like successive groups, must differ openly in length and rhythm. The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose, to suggest no measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will; but it must not 4. Contents of the Phrase. be metrical. It may be anything, but it great deal of talk about rhythm, and must not be verse. A single heroic line naturally; for in our canorous language may very well pass and not disturb the rhythm is always at the door. But it somewhat larger stride of the prose style; must not be forgotten that in some lan. but one following another will produce guages this element is almost, if not quite, an instant impression of poverty, flatness, extinct, and that in our own it is probably and disenchantment. The same lines de- decaying. The even speech of many edlivered with the measured utterance of ucated Americans sounds the note of verse, would perhaps seem rich in variety. danger. I should see it go with someBy the more summary enunciation proper thing as bitter as despair, but I should to prose, as to a more distant vision, these not be desperate. As in verse no eleniceties of difference are lost. A whole ment, not even rhythm, is necessary; so, verse is uttered as one phrase; and the in prose also, other sorts of beauty will ear is soon wearied by a succession of arise and take the place and play the part groups identical in length. The prose of those that we outlive. The beauty of writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be the expected beat in verse, the beauty in so much less harmonious, is condemned prose of its larger and more lawless melto a perpetually fresh variety of movement ody, patent as they are to English hearing, on a larger scale, and must never disap. are already silent in the ears of our next point the ear by the trot of an accepted neighbors; for in France the oratorical metre. And this obligation is the third accent and the pattern of the web have orange with which he has to juggle, the almost or altogether succeeded to their third quality which the prose writer must places; and the French prose writer work into his pattern of words. It may would be astounded at the labors of his be thought perhaps that this is a quality brother across the Channel, and how a of ease rather than a fresh difficulty; but good quarter of his toil, above all invita such is the inherently rhythmical strain of Minerva, is to avoid writing verse. the English language, that the bad writer wonderfully far apart have races wandered -and must I take for example that in spirit, and so hard it is to understand admired friend of my boyhood, Captain | the literature next door!

So

66

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat."* Down to "virtue," the current s and R are both announced and repeated unobtrusively, and by way of a grace-note that almost inseparable group PVF is given entire.† The next phrase is a period of repose almost ugly in itself, both S and R still audible, and B given as the last fulfillment of PVF. In the next four phrases, from "that never down to "run for," the mask is thrown off, and but for a slight repetition of the F and V, the whole matter turns, almost too obtrusively, on S and R; first s coming to the front, and then R. In the concluding phrase all these favorite letters, and even the flat A, a timid preference for which is just perceptible, are discarded at a blow and in a bundle; and to make the break more obvious, every word ends with a dental, and all but one with T, for which we have been cautiously prepared since the beginning. The singular dignity of the first clause, and this hammer-stroke of the last, go far to make the charm of this exquisite sentence. But it is fair to own that S and R are used a little coarsely.

Yet French prose is distinctly better | somewhat a matter of conscience to select than English; and French verse, above examples; and as I cannot very well ask all while Hugo lives, it will not do to place the reader to help me, I shall do the next upon one side. What is more to our pur- best by giving him the reason or the hispose, a phrase or a verse in French is tory of each selection. The two first, one easily distinguishable as comely or un- in prose, one in verse, I chose without comely. There is then another element previous analysis, simply as engaging pasof comeliness hitherto overlooked in this sages that had long re-echoed in my ear. analysis: the contents of the phrase. Each phrase in literature is built of sonnds, as each phrase in music consists of notes. One sound suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonizes with another; and the art of rightly using these concordances is the final art in literature. It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon as sonance. The vowel demands to be repeated; the consonant demands to be repeated; and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow the adventures of a letter through any passage that has particularly pleased you; find it, perhaps, denied a while, to tantalize the ear; find it fired again at you in a whole broadside; or find it pass into congenerous sounds, one liquid or labial melting away into another. And you will find another and much stranger circumstance. Literature is written by and for two senses a sort of internal ear, quick to perceive "unheard melodies; " and the eye, which directs the pen and deciphers the printed phrase. Well, even as there are rhymes for the eye, so you will find that there are assonances and alliteration; that where an author is running the open A, deceived by the eye and our strange English spelling, he will often show a tenderness for the flat A; and that where he is running a particular consonant, he will not improbably rejoice to write it down even when it is mute or bears a different value.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

(KANDL)

Where Alph the sacred river ran, (KANDLSR) Through caverns measureless to man, (KANLSR) (NDLS)

A stately pleasure dome decree, (KDLSR)

Down to a sunless sea.‡

Here I have put the analysis of the main group alongside the lines; and the more it is looked at, the more interesting it will seem. But there are further niceties. In lines two and four, the current s is most delicately varied with z. In line three, the current flat A is twice varied with the open A, already suggested in line two, and both times ("where" and "sacred") in

conjunction with the current R. In the I turned with some curiosity to a player same line F and v (a harmony in them- of the big drum. selves, even when shorn of their comrade P) are admirably contrasted. And in line four there is a marked subsidiary M, which again was announced in line two. I stop from weariness, for more might yet be said.

and only concerned about the meaning of his words and the rhythm of his phrases, was struck into amazement by the eager triumph with which he cancelled one expression to substitute another. Neither changed the sense; both being monosyl.

lables, neither could affect the scansion; and it was only by looking back on what he had already written that the mystery was solved: the second word contained an open A, and for nearly half a page he had been riding that vowel to the death.

From The Spectator.

ARAB COURAGE.

WHAT a flood of light these skirmishes on the Red Sea throw upon Mahommedan history, and especially upon those two most obscure series of events, the early conquests of the Arabian khalifs, and the successive failures of the Crusading armies to turn Palestine into a European province ! Writer after writer has attempted to account for the defeat of the Roman armies, still the best disciplined In practice, I should add, the ear is not in the world, by Arabs less numerous and always so exacting; and ordinary writers, less disciplined than themselves, and has in ordinary moments, content themselves with avoiding what is harsh, and here and soled himself either by depreciating the failed; and, conscious of failure, has conthere, upon a rare occasion, buttressing a Roman troops as effete and enfeebled by phrase, or linking two together, with a patch of assonance or a momentary jingle luxury, or by raising "fanaticism" into a of alliteration. To understand how con- force. Even Sir William Muir is forced military quality of almost supernatural stant is this preoccupation of good writers, even where its results are least obtru- to explain the marvellous battle of Yakusa - the battle which prostrated Heraclius sive, it is only necessary to turn to the bad. There, indeed, you will find cacoph-by hinting that, what with their new and deprived the Eastern Empire of Syria ony supreme, the rattle of incongruous creed and their hunger for booty, and their consonants only relieved by the jaw desire for the female captives, who were breaking hiatus, and whole phrases not to after each victory distributed among them, be articulated by the powers of man. Khâlid's soldiers had become, as it were, Conclusion. We may now briefly enu- transformed into the greatest warriors of merate the elements of style. We have, the age. It was, no doubt, a marvellous peculiar to the prose writer, the task of battle. Heraclius, at last alarmed for the keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and Roman dominion which, we must repleasing to the ear, without ever allowing member, seemed to him, and to all of his them to fall into the strictly metrical: generation, a part of the divinely imposed peculiar to the versifier, the task of comorder of mankind - had despatched a bining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, assisted by clouds of auxiliaries, chiefly great army of ninety thousand regulars, logic and metre-harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully thousand in number, to make a final end Bedouins, exceeding one hundred and fifty combining the prime elements of language of the new and threatening power. They into phrases that shall be musical in the encamped on the bank of the Yermuk, in mouth; the task of weaving their argu- Syria, under the command of the emper ment into a texture of committed phrases or's brother Theodoric, and his celebrated and of rounded periods - but this partic ularly binding in the case of prose; and general Bahan, the Armenian, and so again common to both, the task of choos- trolled only forty thousand men, that at ing apt, explicit, and communicative first they avoided battle. They counted words. We begin to see now what an their enemies, and would not attack. Khâintricate affair is any perfect passage; lid, however, made a forced march across how many faculties, whether of taste or the desert-his picked men living for five pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it days on water extracted from slaughtered should afford us so complete a pleasure. camels-induced the sheikhs to entrust From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised. We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

alarmed the Moslem sheikhs, who con

to him the supreme command, and in one tremendous day in September, A.D. 634, utterly destroyed the Roman hosts. After a skirmish, in which four hundred Arabs taken by surprise vowed to die, and died sword in hand, Khâlid ordered a general

advance:

The Romans too advanced, and the charge was met on both sides with the sword. All

man.

day the battle raged. Fortune varied; and actly as Osman Digna's men poured on the carnage amongst the Moslems, as well as the Berkshires and Marines the very the Romans, was great. Ikrima's gallant com- incident of the women charging being repany, holding their ground firm as a rock in peated and but for the rifles Osman's front of Khalid's tent, bore the brunt of the might have been as successful. Every day; they were slain or disabled almost to a So fierce were the Arabs, that even the correspondent, at all events, thinks and women joined their husbands and brothers in says so. Why? Sir W. Muir speaks of the field; and Huweiria, daughter of Abu fanaticism, and greed, and lust, all conSofiân, inheriting the spirit of her mother | spiring together to make heroes; but as Hind, was severely wounded in an encounter with the enemy. Towards evening the Romans began to falter. Khâlid, quickly perceiving that their horse were declining from the infantry, launched his centre as a wedge between the two. The cavalry, with nothing behind them but the precipice, made a fierce charge for their lives; the Moslem troops opened to let them pass, and so they gained the open country and never again appeared. The Moslems then turned right and left upon the remaining force cooped-up between the ravine and the chasm; and, as they drove all before them, the Romans on both hands "were toppled over the bank even as a wall is toppled over." The battle drew on into the night, but opposition was now in vain. Those that escaped the sword were hurled in a moving mass over the edge into

a matter of fact, these motive powers did
not operate until Khâlid joined the troops,
and, splendid strategist though he was,
trusted the battle to the magnificent dar-
ing of his desert soldiery. That this
courage was inflamed by "fanaticism"
that is, by a sure and certain hope of
reaching Heaven if they died in battle
is true enough; but even that faith would
not have so operated except upon men of
exceptional personal daring. It does not
so operate upon millions of convinced Ma-
hommedans. The simple truth is that the
Arab of the desert, whether of the pure
blood of Ishmael or of that blood crossed
with the negro, was then, and is now, by
nature one of the warrior races, the supe-

the yawning gulf. "One struggling would draw ten others with him, the free as well as rior of the Roman, even when Roman batchained." And so, in dire confusion and dis- talions were "stiffened" with barbarians, may, the whole multitude perished. The fatal and the equal, as he showed subsequently chasm Yacusa engulfed, we are told, 100,000 in the Crusades and in Spain, of any men. Ficâr, the Roman general, and his fel-northerner whatever-Saxon, or Frank, low-captains, unable to bear the sight, sat down, drew their togas around them, and, hiding their faces in despair and shame, awaited

thus their fate.

or Teuton, or Visigotha man who can fight on when beaten, and die hard even when left alone. When he first came out of the desert, he dared face the Roman; The "chained" men were picked soldiers, five hundred years later he faced the mailwho chained themselves together to make clad soldiers of Europe, and he is facing charges in mass. Sir Gerald Graham English soldiers to-day, and always in the would, we think, understand that story, same manner, with the most reckless perand account for the Moslem victory by sonal valor and a contempt for death military reasons, the simple explanation which scarcely any Europeans possess. being that the Arabs fought then, as they Our soldiers call him a brute because, fight now, with a fury, a perseverance, when wounded, he courts death by slashand a contempt of death which hardly anying at his captors; but if Tommy Atkins troops in the world have ever surpassed. knew he must die in agony there are no They were personally the Romans' supe- doctors or ambulances with Osman Digna riors in battle; and they killed them out, - and believed that if he could only get retreat being impossible, by sheer bravery killed he would go straight to Heaven, he and hard fighting. Without entering into would in all probability do precisely the the difficult question whether the Roman same thing. soldier had degenerated at all—a ques tion on which the evidence is most conflicting it may be taken as certain that the Englishman of to-day is a better man, and as nearly certain that, but for the Gardners and the rifles that is, but for the terrible armor that is forged for us by science- the Arab, with his superior numbers, would wipe him out on the shores of the Red Sea as completely as Khâlid's tribesmen did the Roman. Khâlid's men poured on Bahan's regulars ex

We press this point of the personal valor of Arabs over and over again, not because anybody is just now doubting it, but because the successes of Europe for the last century tend to make Englishmen mistaken in their views of history. So many large Asiatic armies have been overthrown by small European armies, that we have come to doubt whether any Asiatics are brave, whether the Turks, whose courage is undeniable, have not acquired it in European air, and whether Europe