crampness

For a number of the airs in the works just mentioned, but particularly in the 'Select Melodies,' he had experienced difficulty in procuring suitable words, owing chiefly to the crampness of the measures -- a serious drawback which appears to pervade, more or less, the sweetest melodies of other nations as well as those of our own.

The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century Various

The close crampness of the whole of these instances raises a very strong suspicion that it cannot be the writing of Tacitus, but merely a servile imitation of his manner.

Tacitus and Bracciolini The Annals Forged in the XVth Century John Wilson Ross 1852

In the translation of Gray's Elegy there is a more than usual crampness; occasioned, perhaps, by his having rendered into hexameters the stanzas of four lines, to which the elegiac measure of the Romans would have been better suited.

Lives of the English Poets Cary, Henry F 1846