In world is non so wytor mon Heir swyre is whittere than the swon Icham for wouyng al for-wake, Herkene to my roune. The next," With longyng y am lad," is pretty, though less so and is in ten-line stanzas of sixes, rhymed a ab, aab, baab. Those of VIII. are twelve-lined in eights, rhymed ab, ab, ab, ab, c, d, e, d; but it is observable that there is some assonance here instead of pure rhyme. IX. is in the famous romance stanza of six or rather twelve lines, à la Sir Thopas; X. in octaves of eights alternately rhymed with an envoy quatrain; XI. (a very pretty one) in a new metre, rhymed a a ab a, b. And this variety continues after a fashion which it would be tedious to particularise further. But it must be said that the charm of "Alison" is fully caught up by "Lenten ys come with love to toune, With blosmen ant with bryddes roune, Dayes-eyes in this dales, Notes suete of nytengales, Ilk foul song singeth;" by a sturdy Praise of Women which charges gallantly against the usual mediæval slanders; and by a piece which, with " Alison," is the flower of the whole, and has the exquisite refrain— "Blow, northerne wynd, Send thou me my suetyng, Blow, northerne wynd, blou, blou, blou " Here is Tennysonian verse five hundred years before Tennyson. The "cry" of English lyric is on this northern wind at last; and it shall never fail afterwards. The prosody of the modern languages. This seems to be the best place to deal, not merely with the form of English lyric in itself, but with the general subject of the prosody as well of English as of the other modern literary languages. A very great deal has been written, with more and with less learning, with ingenuity greater or smaller, on the origins of rhyme, on the source of the decasyllabic and other staple lines and stanzas; and, lastly, on the general system of modern as opposed to ancient scansion. Much of this has been the result of really careful study, and not a little of it the result of distinct acuteness; but it has suffered on the whole from the supposed need of some new theory, and from an unwillingness to 1 It is sufficient to mention here Guest's famous English Rhythms (ed. Skeat, 1882), a book which at its first appearance in 1838 was no doubt a revelation, but which carries things too far; Dr Schipper's Grundriss der Englischen Metrik (Wien, 1895), and for foreign matters M. Gaston Paris's chapter in his Littérature Française au Moyen Age. I do not agree with any of them, but I have a profound respect for all. Historical retrospect. accept plain and obvious facts. These facts, or the most important of them, may be summarised as follows: The prosody of a language will necessarily vary according to the pronunciation and composition of that language; but there are certain general principles of prosody which govern all languages possessing a certain kinship. These general principles were, for the Western branches of the Aryan tongues, very early discovered and formulated by the Greeks, being later adjusted to somewhat stiffer rules to compensate for less force of poetic genius, or perhaps merely because licence was not required by the Latins. Towards the end of the classical literary period, however, partly the increasing importance of the Germanic and other non-Greek and non-Latin elements in the Empire, partly those inexplicable organic changes which come from time to time, broke up this system. Rhyme appeared, no one knows quite how, or why, or whence, and at the same time, though the general structure of metres was not very much altered, the quantity of individual syllables appears to have undergone a complete change. Although metres quantitative in scheme continued to be written, they were written, as a rule, with more or less laxity; and though rhyme was sometimes adapted to them in Latin, it was more frequently used with a looser syllabic arrangement, retaining the divisional characteristics of the older prosody, but neglecting quantity, the strict rules of elision, and so forth. On the other hand, some of the new Teutonic tongues which were thus brought into contact with Anglo-Saxon Latin, and with which Latin was brought prosody. into contact, had systems of prosody of their own, based on entirely different principles. The most elaborate of these probably, and the only one from which we have distinct remains of undoubtedly old matter in considerable quantities, is Anglo-Saxon, though Icelandic runs it close. A detailed account of the peculiarities of this belongs to the previous volume: it is sufficient to say here that its great characteristic was alliteration, and that accent played a large part, to the exclusion both of definite quantity and of syllabic identity or equivalence. While these were the states of things with regard to Latin on the one hand, and to the tongues most separated from Latin on the other, the Ro Romance prosody. mance languages, or daughters of Latin, had elaborated or were elaborating, by stages which are almost entirely hidden from us, middle systems, of which the earliest, and in a way the most perfect, is that of Provençal, followed by Northern French and Italian, the dialects of the Spanish Peninsula being a little behindhand in elaborate verse. The three firstnamed tongues seem to have hit upon the verse of ten or eleven syllables, which later crystallised itself into ten for French and eleven for Italian, as their staple measure.1 Efforts have been made to father this directly on some classical original, and some authorities have even been uncritical enough to speak of the connection-this or that—having been "proved" 1 Vide Dante, De Vulgari Eloquio. for these verses or others. No such proof has been given, and none is possible. What is certain, and alone certain, is that whereas the chief literary metre of the last five centuries of Latin had been dactylic and trisyllabic, this, the chief metre of the daughter tongues, and by-and- by almost their only one, was disyllabic iambic, or trochaic, as the case may be, but generally iambic. Rhyme became by degrees an invariable or almost invariable accompaniment, and while quantity, strictly speaking, almost disappeared (some will have it that it quite disappeared from French), a syllabic uniformity more rigid than any which had prevailed, except in the case of lyric measures like the Alcaic, became the rule. Even elision. was very greatly restricted, though cæsura was pretty strictly retained, and an additional servitude was imposed by the early adoption in French of the fixed. alternation of "masculine" and "feminine" rhymesthat is to say, of rhymes with, and rhymes without, the mute e. prosody. But the prosody of the Romance tongues is perfectly simple and intelligible, except in the one crux of the English question how it came into being, and what part "popular" poetry played in it. We find it, almost from the first, full-blown: and only minor refinements or improvements are introduced afterwards. With English prosody it is very different.1 As has been said, the older prosody itself, with 1 What is said here of English applies with certain modifications to German, though the almost entire loss of Old German poetry and the comparatively late date of Middle make the process less striking and |