Corrections of metre are avoided even more carefully than those of grammar. For the rules of prosody have undergone perhaps greater change than those of grammar. There is no doubt that a system of versification has taken root among us very different from that which was in use in the earlier days of our poetry. The influence of classical prosody has worked in a manner that could hardly have been expected. Quantity in the sense in which the Greeks and Romans understood it, is altogether foreign to our speech; and our poets, willing to imitate the verse regulated by laws of quantity, have partially adopted those laws, substituting for long syllables those that bear a stress of accent or emphasis. In Greek and Latin accent was essentially distinct from quantity, and verse was regulated entirely by the latter. In the modern imitation of classical metres, for want of appreciation of quantity, we go entirely by accent or emphasis, and make precisely such verses as classical taste eschewed. Thus we have learned to scan lines by iambuses, or rather by their accentual imitations, and a perfect line would consist of ten syllables, of which the alternate ones bore a rhythmical stress. These iambuses may, under certain restrictions, be changed for 'trochees,' and out of these two 'feet,' or their representatives, a metre, certainly very beautiful, has grown up gradually, which attained perhaps its greatest perfection in the verse of Pope. But the poets of this metre, like renaissance architects, lost all perception of the laws of the original artists, and set themselves, whenever it was possible, to convert the original verses into such as their own system would have produced. We see the beginnings of this practice even in the first Folio, when there exist Quartos to exhibit it. In each successive Folio the process has been continued. Rowe's few changes of F4 are almost all in the same direction, and the work may be said to have been completed by Hanmer. It is to be feared that a result of two centuries of such a practice has been to bring about an idea of Shakespearian versification very different from Shakespeare's. But we feel a hope that the number of Shakespeare's students who can appreciate the true nature of the English versification in our elder poets is increasing, and will increase more as the opportunity is furnished them of studying Shakespeare himself. Of course we do not mean to give here an essay on Shakespearian versification. Those who would study it may best be referred to Capell, in spite of the erroneous taste of his day, to Sidney Walker, and especially, if they are earnest students, to Dr Guest's _History of English Rhythms_.