[41] The easy abuse of these irregular measures is amusingly parodied by Mr. Owen Seaman, in a burlesque of an ode of Mr. Le Gallienne's: "Is this the Seine? And am I altogether wrong About the brain, Dreaming I hear the British tongue? Dear Heaven! what a rhyme! And yet 'tis all as good As some that I have fashioned in my time, Like _bud_ and _wood_; And on the other hand you couldn't have a more precise or neater Metre." (_The Battle of the Bays_, p. 37.) VI. IMITATIONS OF CLASSICAL METRES While English verse is generally admitted to be based on a different system from that of Greek and Latin poetry (the element of accent obscuring that of quantity in English prosody, as the element of quantity obscures that of accent in classical prosody), there have been repeated attempts to introduce the more familiar classical measures into English. Most of these attempts have been academic and have attracted the attention only of critics and scholars; a few have interested the reading public. Imitations of classical verse in English may conveniently be divided into two classes: imitations of lyrical measures, and imitations of the dactylic hexameter. The latter group is of course much the larger, especially in modern poetry. It will appear that the classical measures might also be divided into two groups according to another distinction: those attempting to observe the quantitative prosody of the original language, and those in which the original measure is transmuted into frankly accentual verse.