For the same reason it is impossible to follow Prof. Luick in regarding Layamon's line as having an even-beat rhythm, and containing not only two primary accents, but two secondary accents as well. A further strong objection to this view is to be found in the circumstance, that in the early part of Layamon's _Brut_, although rhyme already occurs not unfrequently, alliterative lines decidedly predominate; in the passage consisting of forty long lines (ll. 106-185, quoted in our _Altenglische Metrik_, pp. 152-3), we have thirty-three regular alliterative lines and only five rhymed lines, two of which are alliterative at the same time. Even in the middle portion of Layamon's _Chronicle_, where the poet, as Prof. Luick thinks, must have attained to a certain skill in handling his metre, alliterative lines are in some passages quite as numerous as rhymed ones. In the passage quoted above (p. 68), for example, which consists of twenty-one long lines, eleven of them are alliterative and ten are rhymed. On the other hand, in the continuation of this passage (quoted _Altengl. Metrik_, p. 156), containing twenty-nine long lines, the reverse is the case, the number of alliterative lines being only seven, and that of rhymed and assonant lines twenty-two in all; of the latter, however, eleven are alliterative at the same time. While then it might be admissible to speak of progressive neglect of alliteration and of increasing predilection for end-rhyme on the part of the poet, as he advances with his work, it is not in accordance with the facts to assert that 'alliteration had ceased to play its former part, and had been reduced to the level of a mere ornament of the verse'. On the contrary, in the first part of the _Chronicle_ alliteration is the predominant form, and, as the work advances, it is still used to a considerable extent as a means to connect the two hemistichs or short lines so as to form one long line. The strict laws formerly observed in the use of alliteration, it is true, are not unfrequently disregarded, chiefly with respect to the head-stave, which often falls on the fourth accented syllable of the long line; and other licences (first occurring in Ælfric's _Metrical Homilies_) may be met with. Nevertheless both _Alfred's Proverbs_ and Layamon's _Brut_ (as is sufficiently shown by the many specimens quoted in our _Altenglische Metrik_, pp. 150 ff.), contain a great number of perfectly regular alliterative lines. The fact that, in the second half of Layamon's _Chronicle_, end-rhyme is used more and more frequently as a means to connect the two hemistichs, is with much more probability to be explained by the continual occupation of the poet with the Norman-French original poem, and by the increasing influence which its short octosyllabic couplets must naturally have exercised upon his own rhythms, than by a supposed intention of the poet to write in 'primitive Germanic four-beat song-metre', the very existence of which is hypothetical.