opportunity for any such use or misuse in the infant vernaculars; there was abundant opportunity in literary Latin. Accordingly we find, and should expect to find, very early parodies of the offices and documents of the Church,—things not unnaturally shocking to piety, but not perhaps to be justly set down to any profane, much less to any specifically blasphemous, intention. When the quarrel arose between Reformers and "Papists," intentional ribaldry no doubt began. But such a thing as, for example, the "Missa de Potatoribus"[6] is much more significant of an unquestioning familiarity than of deliberate insult. It is an instance of the same bent of the human mind which has made very learned and conscientious lawyers burlesque law, and which induces schoolboys and undergraduates to parody the classics, not at all because they hate them, but because they are their most familiar literature.

At the same time this comic degradation, as may be seen in its earliest and perhaps its greatest practitioner Aristophanes—no bad citizen or innovating misbeliever—leads naturally to elaborate and ingenious exercises in style, to a thorough familiarity with the capacities of language, metre, rhyme. And expertness in all these things, acquired in the Latin, was certain sooner or later to be transferred to the vernacular. No one can read the Latin poems which cluster in Germany round the name of the "Arch-Poet,"[7] in England round that of Map, without seeing how much freer of hand is the Latin rhymer in comparison with him who finds it "hard only not to stumble" in the vernacular. We feel what a gusto there is in this graceless catachresis of solemn phrase and traditionally serious literature; we perceive how the language, colloquially familiar, taught from infancy in the schools, provided with plentiful literary examples, and having already received perfect licence of accommodation to vernacular rhythms and the poetical ornaments of the hour, puts its stammering rivals, fated though they were to oust it, out of court for the time by its audacious compound of experience and experiment.

The first impression of any one who reads that exceedingly delightful volume the Camden Society's Poems attributed to Walter Mapes may be one of mere amusement, of which there are few books fuller. The agreeable effrontery with which the question "whether to kiss Rose or Agnes" is put side by side with that "whether it is better to eat flesh cooked in the cauldron or little fishes driven into the net;" the intense solemnity and sorrow for self with which Golias discourses in trochaic mono-rhymed laisses of irregular length, De suo Infortunio; the galloping dactylics of the "Apocalypse"; the concentrated scandal against a venerated sex of the De Conjuge non Ducenda, are jocund enough in themselves, if not invariably edifying. But the good-for-nothing who wrote

was not merely cracking jokes, he was exercising himself, or his countrymen, or at farthest his successors, in the use of the vernacular tongues with the same lightness and brightness. When he insinuated that

he was showing how things could be put slyly, how the stiffness and awkwardness of native speech could be suppled and decorated, how the innuendo, the turn of words, the nuance, could be imparted to dog-Latin. And if to dog-Latin, why not to genuine French, or English, or German?

And he was showing at the same time how to make verse flexible, how to suit rhythm to meaning, how to give freedom, elasticity, swing. No doubt this had in part been done by the great serious poetry to which we shall come presently, and which he and his kind often directly burlesqued. But in the very nature of things comic verse must supple language to a degree impossible, or very seldom possible, to serious poetry: and in any case the mere tricks with language which the parodist has to play, familiarise him with the use of it. Even in these days of multifarious writing, it is not absolutely uncommon to find men of education and not devoid of talent who confess that they have no notion how to put things, that they cannot express themselves. We can see this tying of the tongue, this inability to use words, far more reasonably prevalent in the infancy of the vernacular tongues; as, for instance, in the constant presence of what the French call chevilles, expletive phrases such as the "sikerly," and the "I will not lie," the "verament," and the "everidel," which brought a whole class of not undeserving work, the English verse romances of a later time, into discredit. Latin, with its wide range of already consecrated expressions, and with the practice in it which every scholar had, made recourse to constantly repeated stock phrases at least less necessary, if necessary at all; and the writer's set purpose to amuse made it incumbent on him not to be tedious. A good deal of this comic writing may be graceless: some of it may, to delicate tastes, be shocking or disgusting. But it was at any rate an obvious and excellent school of word-fence, a gymnasium and exercising-ground for style.

And if the beneficial effect in the literary sense of these light songs is not to be overlooked, how much greater in every way is that of the magnificent compositions of which they were in some cases the parody! It will be more convenient to postpone to a later chapter of this volume a consideration of the exact way in which Latin sacred poetry affected the prosody of the vernacular; but it is well here to point out that almost all the finest and most famous examples of the mediæval hymn, with perhaps the sole exception of Veni, Sancte Spiritus, date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[8] Ours are the stately rhythms of Adam of St Victor, and the softer ones of St Bernard the Greater. It was at this time that Jacopone da Todi, in the intervals of his eccentric vernacular exercises, was inspired to write the Stabat Mater. From this time comes that glorious descant of Bernard of Morlaix, in which, the more its famous and very elegant English paraphrase is read beside it, the more does the greatness and the beauty of the original appear. And from this time comes the greatest of all hymns, and one of the greatest of all poems, the Dies Iræ. There have been attempts—more than one of them—to make out that the Dies