Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/624

Rh 586 A L L A L L woe,&quot; &quot;fair or foul,&quot; &quot;spick and span,&quot; &quot;fish, flesh, or fowl,&quot; &quot;kith and kin.&quot; The poets of nearly all times anc tongues have not been slow to seize upon the emphasis which could thus be produced. Accordingly we read in Shakespeare : &quot; Full fathom five thy father lies : Of his bones are corals made.&quot; In Pope : &quot;Here files of pins extend their shining rows Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux In Gray : &quot;Weave the warp and weave the woof, The winding-sheet of Edward s race.&quot; In Coleridge : &quot;The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free ; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea.&quot; Churchill describes himself as one &quot;Who often, but without success, had prayed For apt alliteration s artful aid, &quot; an example which is itself a proof of his failure; for allitera tion is never effective unless it runs upon consonants. As thus far considered, alliteration is a device wholly dependent on the poet s fancy. He may use it or not, or use it much or little, at his pleasure. But there is an extensive range of poetry whose metrical laws are entirely based on alliteration. This, for example, is the principle on which Icelandic verse is founded ; and we have a yet nearer interest in it, because it furnishes the key to Anglo-Saxon and a large portion of early English verse. For a specimen take the following lines, the spelling modernised, from the beginning of Piers the Ploughman : &quot;But in a jl/ay morning | on ITalvern hills, Me be/el a/erly | of /airy methought; I was weary of wandering | and went me to rest Under a 6road Sank | by a turn-side ; And as I lay and leaned | and Zooked on the waters, I slumbered in a sleeping | it sounded so merry.&quot; The rule of this verse is indifferent as to the number of syllables it may contain, but imperative as to the number f.f accented ones. The line is divided in the middle by a pause, and each half ought to contain two accented syllables. Of the four accented syllables, the first three should begin with the same letter ; the fourth is free, and may start with any letter. Those who wish for a more minute analysis of the laws of alliterative verse, as practised by the Anglo-Saxon and early English poets, may consult an exhaustive essay on the subject by the Eev. W. W. Skeat, prefixed to vol. iii. of Bishop Percy s Folio Manu script; only the reader must be on his guard against an error which pervades it, and which this able writer seems to have derived from Rask. The question arises What is the nature of the cadence in alliterative verse 1 Now all metrical movement is of two kinds, according as the beat or emphasis begins the movement or ends it. If the beat is initial, we say in classical language that the move ment is trochaic or dactylic, according to the number of its syllables ; and if the beat is final, we in like manner say that the movement is iambic or anapaestic. Mr Skeat and many others object with some reason to use the classical terms, and therefore brushing them aside, let us put the question in the simplest form Has the movement of alliterative verse got the initial or the final beat 1 In the middle of last century Bishop Percy decided this question with sufficient accuracy, though he mixed up his statement with a blunder which it is not easy to account for. He points out how the poets began to introduce rhyme into alliterative verse, until at length rhyme came to pre dominate over alliteration, and &quot;thus was this kind of metre at length swallowed up and lost in our common burlesque Alexandrine or anapaestic verse, as A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall.&quot; Percy made a serious mistake when he gave the name of Alexandrine to anapaestic verse ; but he is quite right in his general statement that alliterative verse became lost in a measure, the movement of which had the final beat. Conybeare has stated the fact still more accurately. &quot; In the Saxon poetry a trochaic character is predominant. In Piers Plowman there is a prevailing tendency to an anapaestic cadence.&quot; It is the result of a change in the language the loss of inflection. Take the word man. The genitive in Saxon would be mannes, a trochee; in English, of man, an iambus. The tendency of the language was thus to pass from a metrical movement, in which the beat was initial, to one in which it was final. It may therefore be quite right to speak of Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry as trochaic or dactylic, and quite wrong to apply the same terms to the cadence of our later alliterative verse. And this is precisely the error into which Mr Skeat has fallen. He says &quot;Lines do not always begin with a loud syllable, but often one or two and sometimes (in early English especially) even three soft syllables precede it. These syllables are necessary to the sense, but not to the scansion of the line.&quot; That is just the point at issue. By leaving out of account the light syllable or syllables at the beginning of a line, and taking his start from the first syllable that has the alliterative beat, Mr Skeat may certainly prove that all the later alliterative poetry has a movement of initial beat. But English ears will not submit to this rule. It is those light syllables of no account which have altered the rhythm of English descant from one of initial to one of final beat. (E. s. D.) ALLIX, PIERRE, a distinguished divine of the French Reformed Church, was born at Alenon in 1641. He was pastor first at St Agobile in Champagne, and then at Charenton, near Paris. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 compelled him to take refuge in London, where, under the sanction of James II., he opened a church for the French exiles. His reputation for learning was such as to obtain for him, soon after his arrival, the degree of doctor of divinity from both universities, and in 1690 he received from Bishop Burnet the more substantial honour of the treasurership and a canonry in Salisbury cathedral. He died at London in March 1717. The works of Allix, which are very numerous, are chiefly of a controversial and apologetic character, and, like most works of that class, are not thoroughly trustworthy. At the invitation of a number of English ministers, he is said to have written a history of the councils of the church, which, however, owing to want of support, never was piiblished. In opposition to Bossuet he issued Some Remarks upon the Ecclesiastical History of the Ancient Churches of Piedmont (1690), and Remarks upon the Eccle siastical History of the Ancient Churches of the Albigenses (1692), with the view of showing that the Albigenses were not Manichaeans, but historically identical with the Wai- denses. His Dissertation on the First Rise of the Trisagium or Doxology (1674), and Reflections upon the Books of Holy Scripture (1688), are of little present value. ALLOA, a seaport town of Scotland, in the county of lackmannan, situated on the north side of the Firth of Forth, 25 miles from Edinburgh, and 6 below Stirling, with which it is connected by railway. The town as a whole is irregularly built, although in the modern portions there are several spacious streets, with good shcps and houses. The parish church, opened in 1819, is a fine Gothic difice, with a handsome spire 200 feet high; there are also places of worship belonging to the other denomina-