commonest and most important form of dactylic verse, so called from its consisting of six feet or measures. In the first four places of the line these feet may be dactyls or spondees indifferently, but the fifth is almost invariably a dactyl, and the sixth always a spondee. In a few rare cases, either to vary the rhythm or to produce some special effect, a spondee is introduced in the fifth place, and the line is then called a spondaic line. The correctness and beauty of hexameter verse depend in great measure on the proper distribution of the casual pauses. See Cesura.

So far as extant data enable us to judge, we may conclude that the classical tongues of Greece and Rome are alone adapted to the successful cultivation of the hexameter metre. It is certain, at least, that all attempts to naturalize it in modern poetry have only proved failures of different degrees of badness. The first who endeavoured to accommodate it to the structure of the English language was Gabriel Harvey, the friend of Spencer, and the "Hokey no!" whose poem is prefixed to the Faery Queen. So ill was the attempt received, however, that no one stepped forward to take part in his defence, when he found himself assailed with the bitterest sarcasms by the leading wits of the days. Tom Nash in particular, the Lucian of his age, assailed the luckless innovator with a keen-edged malignity that was further whetted by a fond of long standing between him and Harvey. A poem of the latter, entitled Encomium Lauri, begins with these absurd lines:

"What might I call this tree? A Lawrell? O beauteous Lawrell! Needes to thy bowes will I bow this knee and vayle my bonnetto!"

Nash happily burlesques these lines by describing Harvey sitting under a yew tree in the grounds of Trinity College, Cambridge, inditing a sonnet to the weather-clock on the spire of Allhallows,

"O thou wether cocke that stands on the top of Allhallows, Come thy waies down if thou darst, for thy crowne, and take the wall on us."

"The hexameter," he continues, "I grant to be a gentleman of an ancient house (so is many an English beggar), yet this clyme of ours hee cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggry for him to set his plough in; hee goes twitching and hopping in our language, like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable and down the dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gate, which he vaunts himself with among the Greeks and Latins."

The objections brought forward by Tom Nash, three centuries ago, still hold good; and the partial successes of Southey, Lockhart, and more recently of Longfellow, only go to confirm the verdict then pronounced. In German the result of the experiment, apparently different, is in reality the same. The hexameters of Schiller and Goethe contain too many beauties of thought and poetry to be readily forgotten, yet in so far as they are merely hexameters, they only serve as a beacon to warn less skillful pilots off a coast where shipwreck is certain. English and German being thus doubtful vehicles for the hexameter verse, French and Italian may be given up as wholly impracticable, nor are we aware of a single successful effort in this metre in either of those tongues.