The prosodies of Provence, France, Italy and Spain were de rived from popular accentual Latin verse by a slow and intangible transition. Versification, deprived of all the regulated principles of rhythmical art, received in return the ornament of rhyme, without which the weak rhythm itself would practically have dis appeared. A new species of rhythm, depending on the varieties of mood, was introduced, and stanzaic forms of great elaboration and beauty were invented. The normal line is of ten or eight syllables : the alexandrine of 12 appears later. In Provençal and early French the position of the caesura in each line was fixed by strict rules; in Italian these were relaxed. Dante, in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, gives very minute, although somewhat obscure, ac counts of the essence and invention of stanzaic form (cobla in Provençal), in which the Romance poetries excelled from the first. The stanza was a group of lines formed on a regular and recurrent arrangement of rhymes. It was natural that the poets of Provence should carry to an extreme the invention of stanzaic forms, for their language was extravagantly rich in rhymes. They invented complicated poetic structures of stanza within stanza, and the canzo as written by the great troubadours is a marvel of ingenuity such as could scarcely be repeated in any other language.
In French poetry, successive masters corrected the national versification and drew closer round it the network of rules and principles. Immutable rules were laid down by Malherbe, and by Boileau in his Art Poetique (1674), and for more than a century they were implicitly followed by all writers of verse. It was the genius of Victor Hugo which first enfranchised the prosody of France, not by rebelling against the rules, but by widening their scope in all directions, and by asserting that, in spite of its limitations, French verse was a living thing.
In very early times the inhabitants of the Germanic countries developed a prosodical system which owed nothing whatever to classical sources. The finest examples of this Teutonic verse are found in Icelandic and in Anglo-Saxon. The line consisted of two sections, each containing two strongly stressed syllables, and of these four syllables three (or at least two) were alliterated. In all ancient Teutonic verse three severe and consistent rules can be ob served, viz , that the section, the strong accentuation, and above all the alliteration must be preserved. We find this to be the case in High and Low German, Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon, and in the re vived alliterative English poetry of the 14th century, such as "Piers Plowman." English Metre.—The first writer in whom there has been dis covered a distinct rebellion against the methods of Anglo-Saxon versification is St. Godric, who died in I170 Only three brief fragments of his poetry have been preserved, but there is no doubt that they show, for the first time, a regular composition in feet.
A quotation will show the value of St. Godric's invention :— From this difficult stanza down to the metres of modern English the transition seems gradual and direct, while the tradition of Anglo-Saxon alliterative prosody is abruptly broken. There is still more definition of feet in the Poona Morale (c. 1200). The Ormulum, which belongs to the early part of the 13th century, is monotonously regular. A further advance was made about 5o years later in Genesis and Exodus, of which Saintsbury has said that "it contains more of the kernel of English prosody, properly so called, than. any [other] single poem before Spenser." The phenomenon which we meet with in all these earliest attempts at purely English verse is the unconscious determination of writers, who had no views about prosody, to work the varying stresses of English with the kind of regularity which they heard in French and Latin.
Between 1210 and 1340 not one English poem of importance is known to have been written in the old alliterative measure of the Anglo-Saxons But at the latter date there set in a singular reac tion in favour of alliteration, a movement which culminated, after producing some beautiful romances, in the satires of Langland. Those writers, and they were many, who preserved foot-scansion and rhyme, during this alliterative reaction, became ever closer students of contemporary French verse, and in the favourite octo syllabic metre "the uncompromising adoption of the French, or syllabically uniform, system is the first thing noticeable" (Saints bury). This tendency of Middle English metre culminates in the work of John Gower, which is singularly polished in its rhyming octosyllabics, although unquestionably nerveless still, and inelastic.
It is, however, to Chaucer that we turn for far greater con tributions to English verse. He it was who first, with full conscious ness of power as an artist, adopted the use of elaborate stanzas, always in following of the French , he it was who first gained free dom of sound by a variation of pause, and by an alternation of trochaic and iambic movement. It is the lack of these arts which keeps Gower and his predecessors so stiff. In particular Chaucer, in his first period, invented rime-royal, a stanzaic form (in seven decasyllabic lines, rhymed a b a b b c c), peculiarly English in character, which was dominant in our literature for more than 200 years ; it was used in the long romance of Troilus and Creseide, where English metre for the first time displays its beauty to the full. It seems to have been originally called riding-rhyme, the name by which Gascoigne describes it (1575).