O you chorus of indolent reviewers, Irresponsible, indolent reviewers, Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem All composed in a metre of Catullus, All in quantity, careful of my motion, Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him, Lest I fall unawares before the people, Waking laughter in indolent reviewers. Should I flounder awhile without a tumble Thro' this metrification of Catullus, They should speak to me not without a welcome, All that chorus of indolent reviewers. Hard, hard, hard is it, only not to tumble, So fantastical is the dainty metre. Wherefore slight me not wholly, nor believe me Too presumptuous, indolent reviewers. (TENNYSON: _Hendecasyllabics._) On the first of these stanzas of Tennyson, compare his stanzas to Maurice, and note, p. 77, above. With the hendecasyllabics, compare the "Phaleuciakes" of Sidney, p. 331, above, and "Hendecasyllabics" in Swinburne's _Poems and Ballads_. Tennyson took no little interest in the relations of classical and English metres, and seems to have believed in the possibility of genuine English quantitative verse. He did not, however, regard it as of practical value, and treated his own experiments as trifles. In his Memoirs, written by his son, Tennyson is said to have observed that he knew the quantity of every English word except _scissors_, a mysterious saying which may be set beside Southey's declaration that _Egypt_ is the only spondee in the English language. His son also preserves an extemporaneous line composed by Tennyson to illustrate the observance of quantity "regardless of accent": "All men alike hate slops, particularly gruel;" and a sapphic stanza, also extemporized, quantitative but conforming to common accent: "Faded ev'ry violet, all the roses; Gone the glorious promise; and the victim, Broken in this anger of Aphrodite, Yields to the victor." (_Memoir_, vol. ii. p. 231.) God, on verdurous Helicon Dweller, child of Urania, Thou that draw'st to the man the fair Maiden, O Hymenæus, O Hymen, O Hymenæus! (ROBINSON ELLIS: _Poems of Catullus_, LXI. 1871.) Mr. Ellis's translations from Catullus are all "in the metres of the original," and are among the most interesting specimens of modern classical versifying. "Tennyson's Alcaics and Hendecasyllabics," he said in his Preface, "suggested to me the new principle on which I was to go to work. It was not sufficient to reproduce the ancient metres, unless the ancient quantity was reproduced also." Of special interest is the imitation of the "almost unapproachable" galliambic verse of the _Attis_ (pp. 49-53):