For there is no question but that at first sight, and not at first sight only, the _Poema del Cid_ seems to be the most irregular production of its kind that can claim high rank in the poetry of Europe. It is not merely that it is "rough," as its great northern congener the _Nibelungenlied_ is usually said to be, or that its lines vary in length from ten syllables to over twenty, as some lines of Anglo-Saxon verse do. It is that there is nothing like the regular cadence of the one, or (at least as yet discovered) the combined system of accent and alliteration which accounts for the other. Almost the only single feature which is invariable is the break in the middle of the line, which is much more than a mere caesura, and coincides not merely with the end of a word, but with a distinct stop or at least pause in sense. Beyond this, except by the rather violent hypothesis of copyist misdeeds above referred to,[196] nobody has been able to get further in a generalisation of the metre than that the normal form is an eight and six (better a seven and seven) "fourteener," trochaically cadenced, but admitting contraction and extension with a liberality elsewhere unparalleled. [Footnote 196: It is perhaps fair to Professor Cornu to admit some weight in his argument that where proper names predominate--_i.e._, where the copyist was least likely to alter--his basis suggests itself most easily.] And the ends of the verses are as troublesome as their bodies. Not only is there no absolute system either of assonance or of rhyme; not only does the consideration that at a certain stage assonance and consonance[197] meet and blend help us little; but it is almost or quite impossible to discern any one system on which the one or the other, or both, can be thought to have been used. Sometimes, indeed frequently, something like the French _laisses_ or continuous blocks of end-sound appear: sometimes the eye feels inclined to see quatrains--a form, as we shall see, agreeable to early Spain, and very common in all European nations at this stage of their development. But it is very seldom that either is clearly demonstrable except in parts, while neither maintains itself for long. Generally the pages present the spectacle of an intensely irregular mosaic, or rather conglomerate, of small blocks of assonance or consonance put together on no discoverable system whatever. It is, of course, fair to remember that Anglo-Saxon verse--now, according to the orthodox, to be ranked among the strictest prosodic kinds--was long thought to be as formless as this. But after the thorough ransacking and overhauling which almost all mediaeval literature has had during the last century, it is certainly strange that the underlying system in the Spanish case, if it exists, should not have been discovered, or should have been discovered only by such an Alexandrine cutting of the knot as the supposition that the copyist has made "pie" of about seventy per cent at least of the whole.