In metrical effects the style of the lesser English poet is an
exact counterpart of the style of the lesser Greek; there is the same
comparative tenuity and fluidity of verse, the same excess of short
unemphatic syllables, the same solution of the graver iambic into soft
overflow of lighter and longer feet which relaxes and dilutes the solid
harmony of tragic metre with notes of a more facile and feminine strain.
But in _King Henry VIII_. it should be remarked that though we not
unfrequently find the same preponderance as in Fletcher's work of verses
with a double ending--which in English verse at least are not in
themselves feminine, and need not be taken to constitute, as in
Fletcher's case they do, a note of comparative effeminacy or relaxation
in tragic style--we do not find the perpetual predominance of those
triple terminations so peculiarly and notably dear to that poet; {92} so
that even by the test of the metre-mongers who would reduce the whole
question at issue to a point which might at once be solved by the simple
process of numeration the argument in favour of Fletcher can hardly be
proved tenable; for the metre which evidently has one leading quality in
common with his is as evidently wanting in another at least as marked and
as necessary to establish--if established it can be by any such test
taken singly and, apart from all other points of evidence--the
collaboration of Fletcher with Shakespeare in this instance.
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