These writers were followed in the 5th and early in the 6th century by the priest Sedulius, whose reputation perhaps exceeded his merit; Elpis, a noble Roman lady (considered, by an erroneous tradition, to have been the wife of the philosophic statesman Boetius); Pope Gelasius I.; and Ennodius, bishop of Pavia. Sedulius and Elpis wrote very little from which hymns could be extracted; but the small number taken from their compositions obtained wide popularity, and have since held their ground. Gelasius was of no great account as a hymn-writer; and the works of Ennodius appear to have been known only in Italy and Spain. The latter part of the 6th century produced Pope Gregory the Great and Venantius Fortunatus, an Italian poet, the friend of Gregory, and the favourite of Radegunda, queen of the Franks, who died (609) bishop of Poitiers. Eleven hymns of Gregory, and twelve or thirteen (mostly taken from longer poems) by Fortunatus, came into general use in the Italian, Gallican and British churches. Those of Gregory are in a style hardly distinguishable from the Ambrosian; those of Fortunatus are graceful, and sometimes vigorous. He does not, however, deserve the praise given to him by Dr Neale, of having struck out a new path in Latin hymnody. On the contrary, he may more justly be described as a disciple of the school of Prudentius, and as having affected the classical style, at least as much as any of his predecessors. The poets of this primitive epoch, which closed with the 6th century, wrote in the old classical metres, and made use of a considerable variety of them--anapaestic, anacreontic, hendecasyllabic, asclepiad, hexameters and pentameters and others. Gregory and some of the Ambrosian authors occasionally wrote in sapphics; but the most frequent measure was the iambic dimeter, and, next to that, the trochaic. The full alcaic stanza does not appear to have been used for church purposes before the 16th century, though some of its elements were. In the greater number of these works, a general intention to conform to the rules of Roman prosody is manifest; but even those writers (like Prudentius) in whom that conformity was most decided allowed themselves much liberty of deviation from it. Other works, including some of the very earliest, and some of conspicuous merit, were of the kind described by Bede as not metrical but "rhythmical"--i.e. (as he explains the term "rhythm"), "modulated to the ear in imitation of different metres." It would be more correct to call them metrical--(e.g. still trochaic or iambic, &c., but, according to new laws of syllabic quantity, depending entirely on accent, and not on the power of vowels or the position of consonants)--laws by which the future prosody of all modern European nations was to be governed. There are also, in the hymns of the primitive period (even in those of Ambrose), anticipations--irregular