At the same time this comic degradation, as may be seen in its earliest and perhaps its greatest practitioner Aristophanes--no bad citizen or innovating misbeliever--leads naturally to elaborate and ingenious exercises in style, to a thorough familiarity with the capacities of language, metre, rhyme. And expertness in all these things, acquired in the Latin, was certain sooner or later to be transferred to the vernacular. No one can read the Latin poems which cluster in Germany round the name of the "Arch-Poet,"[7] in England round that of Map, without seeing how much freer of hand is the Latin rhymer in comparison with him who finds it "hard only not to stumble" in the vernacular. We feel what a gusto there is in this graceless catachresis of solemn phrase and traditionally serious literature; we perceive how the language, colloquially familiar, taught from infancy in the schools, provided with plentiful literary examples, and having already received perfect licence of accommodation to vernacular rhythms and the poetical ornaments of the hour, puts its stammering rivals, fated though they were to oust it, out of court for the time by its audacious compound of experience and experiment. [Footnote 7: On this Arch-Poet see Scherer, _History of German Literature_ (Engl. ed., Oxford, 1886), i. 68.] [Sidenote: _Examples of its verbal influence._] The first impression of any one who reads that exceedingly delightful volume the Camden Society's _Poems attributed to Walter Mapes_ may be one of mere amusement, of which there are few books fuller. The agreeable effrontery with which the question "whether to kiss Rose or Agnes" is put side by side with that "whether it is better to eat flesh cooked in the cauldron or little fishes driven into the net;" the intense solemnity and sorrow for self with which Golias discourses in trochaic mono-rhymed _laisses_ of irregular length, _De suo Infortunio_; the galloping dactylics of the "Apocalypse"; the concentrated scandal against a venerated sex of the _De Conjuge non Ducenda_, are jocund enough in themselves, if not invariably edifying. But the good-for-nothing who wrote "Fumus et mulier et stillicidia Expellunt hominem a domo propria," was not merely cracking jokes, he was exercising himself, or his countrymen, or at farthest his successors, in the use of the vernacular tongues with the same lightness and brightness. When he insinuated that "Dulcis erit mihi status Si prebenda muneratus, Reditu vel alio, Vivam, licet non habunde, Saltem mihi detur unde Studeam de proprio,"-- he was showing how things could be put slyly, how the stiffness and awkwardness of native speech could be suppled and decorated, how the innuendo, the turn of words, the _nuance_, could be imparted to dog-Latin. And if to dog-Latin, why not to genuine French, or English, or German? [Sidenote: _The value of burlesque._]