There is one defect, it may be freely admitted, in these classical names of feet. They provide no place for the secondary accent. A foot made up of a fully accented plus a slightly accented syllable must be called either a spondee (the second syllable being thought of as approaching the stress of the first) or a trochee (the syllable being thought of as approaching no stress). The abundant use of secondary or compromised accents--and one might say, too, of secondary or compromised quantities--is a Germanic characteristic, for which no classical terminology can provide. There is, theoretically, room for some new names of feet recognizing these ambiguous syllables. Yet since degrees of accent are purely relative, and no two readers would be sure of agreeing as to which syllables are fully stressed, and which are half-stressed, it is not likely that such additional terms would make our terminology any more exact for practical purposes. The present system does, in fact, represent a characteristic feature of modern English as distinguished from early English verse; namely, that our metres strive after a regular alternation of stress and no-stress, and that the ear imagines this alternation even where (if it were a matter of prose utterance) it can scarcely be said to exist. It would be absurd to strive with any warmth for the classical system of terminology in English prosody. It is undoubtedly not an ideal system, nor such a one as we should adopt if we were naming everything anew; few existing terminologies are. The only object of the present defence of its carefully limited use is to show that it does stand for some fundamental facts in our verse, and to suggest that it is usually wiser to make the best of the vocabulary we have than to fly to one we know not of. The important thing, in any case, is not the question of terms, but the end that we should not lose hold of the musical rhythms of our verse, made up of delicately adjusted elements of accent and time. FOOTNOTES: [49] This discussion is in part a reproduction of an article with the same title originally published in _Modern Language Notes_, December, 1899. [50] _Science of English Verse_, p. 65. [51] On the nature of our sense of rhythm, see Mr. T. L. Bolton's account of his experiments relating to the subject, given in the _American Journal of Psychology_, vol. vi, p. 145. He reaches the conclusion that, in order to awaken the sense of rhythm, it is necessary that "the accents in a line shall recur at regular intervals." [52] Similarly, so distinguished a scholar as Professor Skeat has lately opposed the scansion of English verse by feet, in the _Transactions of the Philological Society_ for 1897-1898. For an ample examination of his views the reader must be referred to the new edition of Mr. Mayor's _Chapters on English Metre_, chap. vii.