Bede is apparently feeling his way, and evidently trying to find warrant for a new poetic in ancient authority. Victorinus, whom he is quoting,[26] may intend by _rhythmus_ and _numerus_ nothing more than their older, more general sense. Bede’s variations and additions make specific and unmistakable application to the verse of the hymns as distinct from _metra_. The testimony, first to the new habit, and secondly to the recognition of it as a valid and beautiful poetic, is testimony to fact. In a schoolbook of the early eighth century Ambrosians are exhibited as _rhythmi_; and _rhythmi_ are recognized as a distinct, self-sufficient method of verse. Though the change of verse habit was slow, though _metra_ were composed long after _rhythmi_ had won the field, and though on the other hand even early hymns that are metrically correct may have been rendered as _rhythmi_, the progressive prevalence of accentual composition can hardly be doubted; for it answers a shift in the habit of speech itself. By the seventh century Latin was no longer spoken even by the learned, much less by the average monk in England or Spain, as it had been spoken by Cicero. The change of speech tune, doubtless more rapid among men not born to the language, certainly unequal and gradual, seems to be a fact in the history of the language.[27] Some of the earliest verse generally recognized as _rhythmus_ comes from Ireland.[28] The earliest known hymn manuscript is the so-called Antiphonary of [Irish] Bangor,[29] which is not an antiphonary, but a collection of hymns, prayers, and canticles. In poetic art these range all the way from measures of noble beauty, some of which appear to have been composed as _metra_, to mnemonic jingle. The following hymn is probably of the fifth or sixth century: Ignis creator igneus, Lumen, donator luminis, Vitaque vitæ conditor, Dator salutis et salus, Ne noctis huius gaudia Vigil lucerna deserat, Qui hominem non vis mori, Da nostro lumen pectori. Folio 11, _recto_; AH 51: 296. On its face this is a _metrum_, the familiar iambic dimeter. Rendered as a _rhythmus_, it would freely disregard quantities, stress the final syllable of each line, and elsewhere generally stress the word-accent: ígnis creâtor ígneús. Though either measure is satisfying, the safer assumption is that the composer intended a _metrum_. Probably even older, on the other hand, is St. Sechnall’s (Secundinus, fifth century) fervent but rude praise of St. Patrick in twenty-three stanzas beginning with the successive letters of the alphabet. Audite, omnes amantes Deum, sancta merita Viri in Christo beati, Patricii episcopi, Quomodo bonum ob actum similatur angelis Perfectamque propter vitam æquatur apostolis.