[6] The names of the several kinds of feet are of course borrowed from
classical prosody, where they are used to mark feet made up not of
accented and unaccented, but of long and short syllables. The different
significance of the terms as applied to the verse of different languages
has given rise to some confusion, and it is proposed by some to abandon
the classical terms; their use, however, seems to be too well
established in English to permit of change. Some would even abandon the
attempt to measure English verse by feet, contending that its rhythm is
too free to admit of any such measuring process; thus, see Mr. J. M.
Robertson, in the Appendix to _New Essays toward a Critical Method_, and
Mr. J. A. Symonds in his _Blank Verse_. See also in Mr. Robert Bridges's
_Milton's Prosody_, Appendix G "On the Use of Greek Terminology in
English Prosody." (1901 ed. p. 77.)
[7] On the historical problem of the distinction between elided and
genuinely hypermetrical syllables in the French and English decasyllabic
verse, see Motheré: _Les théories du vers héroique anglais et ses
relations avec la versification française_ (Havre, 1886).