2.13. Of your verses perfect and defectiue, and that which the Graecians called the halfe-foote.
The Greekes and Latines vsed verses in the odde sillable of two sortes,
which they called Catalecticke and Acatalecticke, that is odde
vnder and odde ouer the iust measure of their verse, & we in our vulgar
finde many of the like, and specially in the rimes of Sir Thomas Wiat,
strained perchaunce out of their originall, made first by Francis
Patrarcha: as these
Like unto these, immeasurable mountaines,
So is my painefull life the burden of ire:
For hie be they, and hie is my desire
And I of teares, and they are full of fountaines.
Where in your first second and fourth verse, ye may find a sillable
superfluous, and though in the first ye will seeme to helpe it, by drawing
these three sillables, [im me su] into a dactil, in the rest it can
not be so excused, wherefore we must thinke he did it of purpose, by the
odde sillable to giue greater grace to his meetre, and we finde in our old
rimes, this odde sillable, sometimes placed in the beginning and sometimes
in the middle of a verse, and is allowed to go alone & to hang to any
other sillable. But this odde sillable in our meetres is not the halfe foote as
the Greekes and Latines vsed him in their verses, and called such measure
pentimimeris and eptamimeris, but rather is that, which they
called the catalectik or maymed verse. Their hemmimeris or
halfe foote serued not by license Poeticall or necessitie of words, but to
bewtifie and exornate the verse by placing one such halfe foote in the middle
Cesure, & one other in the end of the verse, as they vsed all their
pentameters elegiack: and not by coupling them together, but by
accompt to make their verse of a iust measure and not defectiue or
superflous: our odde sillable is not altogether of that nature, but is in a
maner drownd and supprest by the flat accent, and shrinks away as it were
inaudible and by that meane the odde verse comes almost to be an euen in
euery mans hearing. The halfe foote of the auncients was reserued
purposely to an vse, and therefore they gaue such odde sillable, wheresoeuer
he fell the sharper accent, and made by him a notorious pause as in this
pentameter.
Nil mi hi rescribas attamen ipse ve ni.
Which in all make fiue whole feete, or the verse Pentameter. We in
our vulgar haue not the vse of the like half foote.