_And his ancestors of old time | have yearded theire longe Before William conquerour | this cuntry did inhabitt. Jesus bring them to blisse | that brought us forth of bale, That hath hearkened me heare | or heard my tale._ Taken as a whole his dissertation on the history of alliterative verse is remarkably correct, and his final remarks are noteworthy: Thus we have traced the alliterative measure so low as the sixteenth century. It is remarkable that all such poets as used this kind of metre, retained along with it many peculiar Saxon idioms, particularly such as were appropriated to poetry: _this deserves the attention of those who are desirous to recover the laws of the ancient Saxon poesy, usually given up as inexplicable:_ I am of opinion that they will find what they seek in the metre of Pierce Plowman. About the beginning of the sixteenth century this kind of versification began to change its form; the author of _Scottish Field_, we see, concludes his poem with a couplet of rhymes; this was an innovation[38] that did but prepare the way for the general admission of that more modish ornament. When rhyme began to be superadded, all the niceties of alliteration were at first retained with it: the song of Little John Nobody exhibits this union very closely.... To proceed; the old uncouth verse of the ancient writers would no longer go down without the more fashionable ornament of rhyme, and therefore rhyme was superadded. This correspondence of final sounds engrossing the whole attention of the poet and fully satisfying the reader, the internal imbellishment of alliteration was no longer studied, and thus was this kind of metre at length swallowed up and lost in our common burlesque alexandrine, now never used but in songs and pieces of low humour, as in the following ballad; and that well-known doggrel: 'A cobler there was and he lived in a stall'. Now it is clear that this verse is of exactly the same structure as the verses quoted by Gascoigne: _No wight in this world that wealth can attayne, Ùnléss hè bèléue, thàt áll ìs bùt vaýne_, where the scheme of accents is Gascoigne's own, showing that he read them as verses of four accents in all, two in each hemistich. They show the same rhythmical structure as the 'tumbling' or alliterative line given by James VI[39] (1585): _Fetching fude for to feid it fast furth of the Farie_, and described by him as having 'twa [feit, i.e. syllables] short, and ane lang throuch all the lyne', in other words with four accented syllables in the verse. Percy detected very acutely that the Middle English alliterative line stood in close connexion with the Old English alliterative line, and suggested as highly probable that the metre of _Pierce Plowman_ would give a key to the rhythm of that older form of verse, which would have to be read with two accented syllables in the hemistich, and therefore four in the whole line.