ment of our earliest versifiers certainly was to transplant the fictions of the Nor

which flow exactly like the lines in L'Allegro :

"The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty.

*

"And pomp, and feast, and revelry,

"With masque, and antique pageantry."

Those Latin lines are, in fact, a prototype of our own eight syllable iambic. It is singular that rhyme and such metres as the above, which are generally supposed to have come into the other modern languages from the Latin rhymes of the church, should not have found their way from thence into the Anglo-Saxon vernacular verse. But they certainly did not, we shall be told; for there is no appearance of them in the specimens of Anglo-Saxon verse, before the Conquest. Of such specimens, however, it is not pretended that we have any thing like a full or regular series. On the contrary, many Saxon ballads, which have been alluded to by AngloNorman writers as of considerable antiquity, have been lost with the very names of their composers. And from a few articles saved in such a wreck, can we pronounce confidently on the whole contents of the cargo? The following solitary stanza, however,

man school, and to naturalize them in

our language.

has been preserved, from a ballad attributed to Canute the Great.

"Merry sungen the Muneches binnen Ely,

"The Cnut Ching reüther by,

"Roweth Cnites noer the land,

"And here we thes Muniches sang."

"Merry sang the Monks in Ely,
"When Canute King was sailing by :
"Row, ye knights, near the land,
"And let us hear these Monks' song."

There is something very like rhyme in the AngloSaxon stanza. I have no doubt that Canute heard the monks singing Latin rhymes; and I have some suspicion that he finished his Saxon ballad in rhyme also. Thomas of Ely, who knew the whole song, translates his specimen of it in Latin lines, which, whether by accident or design, rhyme to each other. The genius of the ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry, Mr. Turner observes, was obscure, periphrastical, and elliptical; but, according to that writer's conjecture, a new and humble but perspicuous style of poetry was introduced at a later time, in the shape of the

The most liberal patronage was af forded to Norman minstrelsy in England by the first kings of the new dynasty. This encouragement, and the consequent cultivation of the northern dialect of French, gave it so much the superiority over the southern or troubadour dialect, that the French language, according to the acknowledgment of its best informed antiquaries, received from England and Normandy, the first of its works which deserve to be cited. The Norman trouveurs, it is allowed, were more eminent narrative poets than the Provençal troubadours. No people had a better right to be the founders of chivalrous poetry than the Normans. They were the most energetic generation of

narrative ballad. In this plainer style we may conceive the possibility of rhyme having found a place; because the verse would stand in need of that ornament to distinguish it from prose, more than in the elliptical and inverted manner. With regard to our

modern men.

Their leader, by the conquest of England in the eleventh century, consolidated the feudal system upon a broader basis than it ever had before possessed. Before the end of the same century, Chivalry rose to its full growth as an institution, by the circumstance of martial zeal being enlisted under the banners of superstition. The crusades, though they certainly did not give birth to jousts and tournaments, must have imparted to them a new spirit and interest, as the preparatory images of a consecrated warfare. And those spectacles constituted a source of description to the romancers, to which no exact counterpart is to be found in the heroic poetry of antiquity. But the growth of what may properly be called

anapæstic measure, or triple-time verse, Dr.Percy has shewn that its rudiments can be traced to Scaldic poetry. It is often found very distinct in Langlande; and that species of verse, at least, I conceive, is not necessarily to be referred to a Norman origin.

romantic poetry, was not instantaneous after the Conquest; and it was not till

English Richard ploughed the deep," that the crusaders seem to have found a place among the heroes of romance. Till the middle of the twelfth century, or possibly later, no work of professed fiction, or bearing any semblance to epic fable, can be traced in Norman verse— nothing but songs, satires, chronicles, or didactic works, to all of which, however, the name of romance, derived from the Roman descent of the French tongue, was applied in the early and wide acceptation of the word. To these succeeded the genuine metrical romance, which, though often rhapsodical and desultory, had still invention, ingenuity, and design, sufficient to distinguish it from the dry and dreary chronicle. The reign of French metrical romance may be chiefly assigned to the latter part of the twelfth, and the whole of the thir