Note 663 — Chapter III · GOETHE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

The Germans had been creditably troubled about their prosodic souls ever since Opitz (see the large concernment of this matter in Borinski, op. cit. sup.); and the middle of the eighteenth century saw the strict iambic Alexandrines of Opitz himself and others deserted, partly for the so-called “British”“British” or Miltonic scansion (decasyllables with certain licences of substitution), partly for classical metres and unrhymed “Pindarics,” both of which had a great reflex influence on ourselves.