Rhyme is to the modern European ear so agreeable, if not so indispensable, an ornament of verse, that, once heard, it is sure to creep in, and can only be expelled by deliberate and unnatural crotchet from any but narrative and dramatic poetry. On the other hand, it is almost inevitable that when rhyme is expected, the lines which it tips should be reduced to an equal or at any rate an equivalent length. Otherwise the expectation of the ear--that the final ring should be led up to by regular and equable rhythm--is baulked. If this is not done, as in what we call doggerel rhyme, an effect of grotesque is universally produced, to the ruin of serious poetic effect. With these desiderata present, though unconsciously present, before them, with the Latin hymn-writers and the French poets for models, and with Church music perpetually starting in their memories cadences, iambic or trochaic, dactylic or anapaestic, to which to set their own verse, it is not surprising that English poets should have accompanied the rapid changes of their language itself with parallel rapidity of metrical innovation. Quantity they observed loosely--quantity in modern languages is always loose: but it does not follow that they ignored it altogether. [Sidenote: _Accent and quantity._] Those who insist that they did ignore it, and who painfully search for verses of so many "accents," for "sections," for "pauses," and what not, are confronted with difficulties throughout the whole course of English poetry: there is hardly a page of that brilliant, learned, instructive, invaluable piece of wrong-headedness, Dr Guest's _English Rhythms_, which does not bristle with them. But at no time are these difficulties so great as during our present period, and especially at the close of it. Let any man who has no "prize to fight," no thesis to defend, take any characteristic piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry and "Alison," place them side by side, read them aloud together, scan them carefully with the eye, compare each separately and both together with as many other examples of poetic arrangement as he likes. He must, I think, be hopelessly blinded by prejudice if he does not come to the conclusion that there is a gulf between the systems of which these two poems are examples--that if the first is "accentual," "sectional," and what not, then these same words are exactly _not_ the words which ought to be applied to the second.[103] And he will further see that with "Alison" there is not the slightest difficulty whatever, but that, on the contrary, it is the natural and all but inevitable thing to do to scan the piece according to classical laws, allowing only much more licence of "common" syllables--common in themselves and by position--than in Latin, and rather more than in Greek.