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poet seems to have tied himself up to begin the two first lines of each strophe with the same letters, and to confine his verse within six syllables. Others think they observe that the initial letters of the lines
and Romans formed their metre of certain artful distributions of their long and short syllables: so the northern Scalds placed the structure of theirs in the studied repetition and adaptation of the vowels and consonants. ——— The same mode of versification was admired by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and hath not wholly been laid aside much more than two centuries among our English poets; see “Reliques of ancient Engl. poetry,” Vol. II. p. 260. ——— It may not be amiss to add, that the metre of the Welsh bards is altogether of the alliterative kind, and full as artificial as that of the ancient Scandinavians: Yet those who thoroughly understand that language, assert that this kind of metre is extremely pleasing to the ear, and does not subject the poet to more restraint than the different sorts of feet did the Greek and Roman poets.
Perhaps it will not be difficult to find the difference between the metre of the ancient Classics, and that of the Gothic and Celtic bards, in the different genius of their respective languages. The Greek and Latin tongues chiefly consisted of polysyllables, of words ending with vowels, and not overburdened with consonants: their poets therefore (if they would produce harmony) could not but make their metre to consist in quantity, or the artful disposal of the long and short syllables; whereas the old Celtic and Teutonic languages being chiefly composed of monosyllables, could have had hardly any such thing as quantity, and on the other hand abounding in
