exhibits[222] as “right quantitie” of syllables and true order of versifying as either Greek or Latin—yet saw[223] that “our English tongue doth not well receive the nature of _Carmen Heroicum_, because _dactylus_, the aptest foot for that verse, is seldom found in English.” Truly it is not; your dactyl is apt to play the “Waler”—to buck under an English rider, and either throw him altogether, or force the alteration of the pace to anapæsts. The best apparent dactylics in English—the verses of Kingsley’s _Andromeda_—are not really dactylic-hexameters at all, they are five-foot anapæstics, with a very strong _anacrusis_ at the beginning, and a weak hypercatalectic syllable at the end. And with this fatal confession of Ascham (who had not a very poetical head), that of Campion, an exquisite poet and a keen though warped critic, coincides, as we shall see, a generation later. But the thing had to be done; and it was done, or at least attempted. ----- Footnote 221: It is curious that, in this very _début_ of English criticism, the incivility with which critics are constantly and too justly charged makes its appearance. Ascham would seem to have been a good-natured soul enough. Yet he abuses rhyme and its partisans in the true “Père Duchêne” style which some critics still affect. “To follow the Goths in rhyming instead of the Greeks in versifying” is “to eat acorns with swine, when we may eat wheat bread among men.” Rhymers are “a rude multitude,” “rash, ignorant heads,” “wandering blindly in their foul wrong way,” &c. Footnote 222: _Schoolmaster_, _ed. cit._, p. 73. Ascham actually _quotes_ the Greek and the Latin of Homer and Horace, and declares Watson’s stuff to be made as “naturally” as the one and as “aptly” as the other! Footnote 223: Ibid., p. 145. -----