Beeching wanted something to counter the prevailing da-DUM-da-DUM style of reading, that artificially distorted words to fit the regular pattern of the iambic pentameter rhythm.
George Saintsbury disagreed with Bridges, and stated that Milton had simply been using standard extra-metrical liberties, but Bridges was able to answer this objection by showing that every single instance in the poem of such a variation from the norm could be explained by his natural definition of elision; this would be extremely unlikely to be the case if the poet had simply been allowing himself extra-metrical variations as described by Saintsbury.
Bridges' investigation of Milton's twelve syllable lines led him to ideas of prosody embodied in his own Neo-Miltonic syllabics.
"[4] Bridges bases much of his account of Recession of Accent on the work of Alexander Schmidt's analysis of Shakespeare's practice.
Bridges argues that Milton excluded the 'licence' of recession of accent because it would have given rise to uncertainty about where a stress should lie.