Excerpt from The Princess of Hanover "Shakespeare ... as he threw off the trammels of his early style ... came to determine his rhythm by stress, and Milton did just the same. ... Immediately English verse is written free from a numeration of syllables, it falls back on the number of stresses as a determining law." "Milton's Prosody." - Robert Bridges. For a writer of verse to preface his own work by remarks on the theory of English verse, is plainly a rash proceeding. He appears to be saying, "Here is the correct theory and there the model performance." I have no such meaning, but think it convenient to put the few remarks I have to make on a subject obviously not interesting to the general public, in a place where no one expects to find anything of interest - namely, a preface. That it is a subject which does not engage attention is proved by the small effect which Mr. Robert Bridges' scholarly tract, from which I have quoted above, has produced. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.