Note {92} — PREFACE TO THIS EDITION (continued 2)

A desperate attempt has been made to support the metrical argument in favour of Fletcher’s authorship by the production of a list in which such words as slavery, emperor, pitying, difference, and even Christians, were actually registered as trisyllabic terminations. To such unimaginable shifts are critics of the finger-counting or syllabic school inevitably and fatally reduced in the effort to establish by rule of thumb even so much as may seem verifiable by that rule in the province of poetical criticism. Prosody is at best no more than the skeleton of verse, as verse is the body of poetry; while the gain of such painful labourers in a field they know not how to till is not even a skeleton of worthless or irrelevant fact, but the shadow of such a skeleton reflected in water. It would seem that critics who hear only through their fingers have not even fingers to hear with.