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,
[īm mĕ sŭ] 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, sometime placed in the beginning and sometimes in the middle of a verse, and is al∣lowed to go alone & to hāg to any other sillable. But this odde sil∣lable in our meetres is not the halfe foote as the Greekes and La∣tines vsed him in their verses, and called such measure
pentimime∣ris and
eptamimeris, but rather is that, which they called the
cata∣lectik or maymed verse. Their
hemimeris or halfe foote serued not by licence Poeticall or necessitie of words, but to bewtifie and ex∣ornate the verse by placing one such halfe foote in the middle
Ce∣sure, & one other in the end of the verse, as they vsed all their
pen∣tameters elegiack: and not by coupling them together, but by ac∣compt 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 a∣way 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.
Nīl mĭ hĭ rēscrībàs āttămĕn īpsĕ vĕ nì.
Which in all make fiue whole feete, or the verse Pentameter. We in our vulgar haue not the vse of the like halfe foote.