#Dialect:# Southern, free from South-Eastern influence. The wavering in the representation of #a# before nasals points to the Middle South, but ihure 10, ihurd 205 are South-Western. But this representation of #īe#, as well as lyen (= lēan), is found in MS. e of the Poema Morale, which is generally taken as of the Middle South. The forms vyches, eueruyches occur elsewhere in MS. J, and are probably due to the scribe. #Metre:# The system is that of Layamon and the Bestiary; the Worcester Fragment B shows an earlier stage of its development. It is a mixture of the national alliterative verse loosely constructed and rhyming couplets. The latter are bound together by perfect, imperfect, even inflectional rhymes, and assonances. The halves of the couplets as they appear in MS. J are of varying lengths, two measures as 73, 216, more frequently two and a half 7, 44 &c., three 51 &c., three and a half 8 &c. Three-syllable measures are common, as, ‘hé wes þe | wýsuste | mòn,’ 17, ‘his sé | des to sów | èn,’ 59, ‘his mé | des to mów | èn’ 60. The alliterative combinations present every possible variety, 2 + 2, as 16; the normal 2 + 1, as 67; 1 + 2, as 142; 1 + 1, as 23 and often. The couplet has sometimes the added ornament of alliteration, as 46, 47. Where a line has neither alliteration nor rhyme, it may be assumed that the formless text is corrupt, as at 26, 68 &c. There is then little to be gained by a metrical analysis of the poem in its present condition. It had originally a quite definite and regular structure, but this has been spoiled by copyists with little feeling for the structure of the verse and possessed by a strong desire to renovate the antique. It is highly probable that the last of them, the writer of MS. J, had a large hand in this alteration, for the copy of the Poema Morale in the same MS. has undergone a drastic revision which sets it apart among the versions of that poem, and the version of the Owl and Nightingale has suffered, though not to the same extent. On the other hand MS. T was copied by a man who was incapable of remodelling it; though a ruin, it often preserves in details the original.