See Mitford, _Harmony of Language_, p. 105, who thinks the licence just the other way, and indeed roundly pronounces the pronunciation in one syllable “impossible.” A little later, again, Guest thinks the _dis_-syllable “uncouth and vulgar.” A most documentary disagreement! ----- As for the pause or Cæsura, Gascoigne is not injudicious. “The pause,” he says, “will stand best in the middle” of an octosyllable, at the fourth syllable in a “verse of ten,” at the sixth (or middle again) of an Alexandrine, and at the eighth in a fourteener. But it is at the discretion of the writer in Rhythm royal: “it forceth not where the pause be till the end of the line”—and this liberty will assuredly draw to more. Next he enumerates stanzas:—Rhyme royal itself, ballades, sonnets, Dizains, and Sixains, Virelays, and the “Poulter’s measure,” of twelve and fourteen alternately, to which his own contemporaries were so unfortunately addicted. You must “finish the sentence and meaning at the end of every staff”: and (by the way) he has “forgotten a notable kind of rhyme called riding rhyme, which is what our father Chaucer used in his Canterbury tales, and in divers other delectable and light enterprises.” It is good for “a merry tale,” Rhyme royal for a “grave discourse,” Ballads and Sonnets for love-poems, &c., and it would be best, in his judgment, to keep Poulter’s measure for Psalms and hymns. And so he makes an end, “doubting his own ignorance.” The chief points about this really capital booklet are as follows:—Gascoigne’s recognition of the importance of overhauling English Prosody; his good sense on the matter of the cæsura, and of Chaucer’s adoption of the principles of equivalenced scansion; his acknowledgment with regret of the impoverishment which, in the sterility of the mid-sixteenth century before Spenser, was a fact, as resulting from the tyranny of the iamb; the shrewdness of his general remarks; and, last but not least, his entire silence about the new versifying, the “Dranting of Verses.” [Sidenote: _Their capital value._] It is possible (for though he was at Cambridge he seems to admit that he did not acquire any great scholarship there) that he had not come into contact with any one who took interest in this: but it is improbable that it would have appealed to his robust sense of poetry, unsicklied by Harvey’s pedantry, and not misled by Spenser’s classical enthusiasm.