But the adoption of some new metre, different from the perpetual series of hexameters, was required when the poet desired to do something more than recount a long story or fragment of heroic legend,—when he sought to bring himself, his friends, his enemies, his city, his hopes and fears with regard to matters recent or impending, all before the notice of the hearer, and that, too, at once with brevity and animation. The Greek hexameter, like our blank verse, has all its limiting conditions bearing upon each separate line, and presents to the hearer no predetermined resting-place or natural pause beyond.[149] In reference to any long composition, either epic or dramatic, such unrestrained license is found convenient, and the case was similar for Greek epos and drama,—the single-lined iambic trimeter being generally used for the dialogue of tragedy and comedy, just as the daktylic hexameter had been used for the epic. The metrical changes introduced by Archilochus and his contemporaries may be compared to a change from our blank verse to the rhymed couplet and quatrain: the verse was thrown into little systems of two, three, or four lines, with a pause at the end of each; and the halt thus assured to, as well as expected and relished by, the ear, was generally coincident with a close, entire or partial, in the sense, which thus came to be distributed with greater point and effect. The elegiac verse, or common hexameter and pentameter (this second line being an hexameter with the third and sixth thesis,[150] or the last half of the third and sixth foot, suppressed, and a pause left in place of it), as well as the epode (or iambic trimeter followed by an iambic dimeter) and some other binary combinations of verse which we trace among the fragments of Archilochus, are conceived with a view to such increase of effect both on the ear and the mind, not less than to the direct pleasures of novelty and variety. [149] See the observations in Aristotle (Rhetor. iii, 9) on the λέξις εἰρομένη as compared with λέξις κατεστραμμένη·—λέξις εἰρομένη, ἣ οὐδὲν ἔχει τέλος αὐτὴ καθ᾽ αὑτὴν, ἂν μὴ τὸ πρᾶγμα τὸ λεγόμενον τελειώθη·—κατεστραμμένη δὲ, ἡ ἐν περιόδοις· λέγω δὲ περίοδον, λέξιν ἔχουσαν ἀρχὴν καὶ τελευτὴν αὐτὴν καθ᾽ αὑτὴν καὶ μέγεθος εὐσύνοπτον. [150] I employ, however unwillingly, the word _thesis_ here (arsis and thesis) in the sense in which it is used by G. Hermann (“Illud tempus, in quo ictus est, _arsin_; ea tempora, quæ carent ictu, _thesin_ vocamus,” Element. Doctr. Metr. sect. 15), and followed by Boeckh, in his Dissertation on the Metres of Pindar (i, 4), though I agree with Dr. Barham (in the valuable Preface to his edition of Hephæstion, Cambridge, 1843, pp. 5-8) that the opposite sense of the words would be the preferable one, just as it was the original sense in which they were used by the best Greek musical writers: Dr. Barham’s Preface is very instructive on the difficult subject of ancient rhythm generally.