"The cæsura, it is true, comes in at irregular intervals and serves as a breathing place, but its management requires care in reading, and entirely breaks up the natural rhythm of breathing. The reason why the 'common metre' of our hymn books and the fourteen syllable line of Chapman's Homer is such easy reading is because of the short alternate lines of six and eight syllables. One of the most irksome of all measures is the twelve-syllable line in which Drayton's Polyolbion is written. While the fourteen syllable line can be easily divided in half in reading, the twelve syllable one is too much for one expiration and not enough for two, and for this reason has been avoided by poets. "There is, however, the personal equation to be taken into account. A person of quiet temperament and ample chest may habitually breathe but fourteen times in a minute, and the heroic measure will therefore be very easy reading to him; a narrow-chested, nervous person, on the contrary, who breathes oftener than twenty times a minute, may prefer the seven-syllable verse, like that of Dyer's _Grongar Hill_, to the heroic measure, and quick-breathing children will recite Mother Goose melodies with delight, when long metres would weary and distract them. "Nothing in poetry or in vocal music is widely popular that is not calculated with strict reference to the respiratory function. All the early ballad poetry shows how instinctively the reciters accommodated their rhythm to their breathing: _Chevy Chace_, or _The Babes in the Wood_ may be taken as an example for verse. _God save the King_, which has a compass of some half a dozen notes, and takes one expiration, economically used, to each line, may be referred to as the musical illustration. "The unconscious adaptation of voluntary life to the organic rhythm is perhaps a more pervading fact than we have been in the habit of considering it. One can hardly doubt that Spenser breathed habitually more slowly than Prior, and that Anacreon had a quicker respiration than Homer. And this difference, which we conjecture from their rhythmical instincts, if our conjecture is true, probably, almost certainly, characterized all their vital movements."