properly apply to masculine nouns only are extended to feminines, as in _perdice_ (pl.) 7831, _humilités_, _pités_ (sing.), 12499, 13902. Besides these two principal helps to rhyme the later Anglo-Norman versifier might occasionally fall back upon others. In so artificial a language as that in which he wrote, evidently the older forms of inflexion might easily be kept up for literary purposes in verbs also, and used side by side with the later. Thus in the 1st pers. pl. of the present tense we find _lison_ (_lisoun_) repeatedly in rhyme, and occasionally other similar forms, as _soion_ 18480. The 1st pers. sing. of the present tense of several strong verbs is inflected with or without _s_ at pleasure: thus from _dire_ we have _di_, _dy_, as well as _dis_; _faire_ gives _fai_ or _fais_; by the side of _suis_ (sum), _sui_ or _suy_ is frequently found; and similarly we have _croy_, _say_, _voi_. In the same part of first-conjugation verbs the atonic final _e_ is often dropped, as _pri_, _appell_, _mir_, _m’esmai_, _suppli_. In the third person singular of the preterite of _i_ verbs there is a variation in the ending between _-it_ (_-ist_) and _-i_ (_-y_). Thus in one series of rhymes we have _nasquit_, _s’esjoït_ (in rhyme with _dit_, &c.), 268 ff., in another _s’esjoÿ_, _chery_, _servi_ (in rhyme with _y_), 427 ff.; in one stanza _fuÿt_, _partist_, 11416 ff., and in the next _respondi_, 11429; so _chaït_ (_chaïst_) and _chaÿ_, _obeït_ and _obeï_, &c. It may be doubted also whether such words as _tesmoignal_, _surquidance_, _presumement_, _bestial_ (as subst.), _relinquir_, &c., owe their existence to any better cause than the requirements of rhyme or metre. In introducing _ent_, 11471, for the usual _en_ the poet has antiquity on his side: on the other hand when he writes _a_ repeatedly in rhyme for the Anglo-Norman _ad_ (which, except in these cases, is regularly used) he is no doubt looking towards the ‘French of Paris,’ which naturally tended to impose itself on the English writers of French in the fourteenth century. By the same rule he can say either _houre_ or _heure_, _flour_ or _fleur_, _crestre_ or _croistre_, _crere_ or _croire_; but on the whole it is rather surprising how little his language seems to have been affected by this influence.