The Spanish Apollonius,[199] however, is noteworthy, because it is written in a form which is also used by Berceo, and which has sometimes been thought to be spoken of in the poem itself as _nueva maestria_. This measure is the old fourteener, which struggles to appear in the _Cid_, regularly divided into hephthemimers, and now regularly arranged also in mono-rhymed quatrains. The "Life of St Mary of Egypt,"[200] on the other hand, is in octosyllabic couplets, treated with the same freedom that we find in contemporary German handlings of that metre, and varying from five syllables to at least eleven. The rhymes are good, with very rare lapses into assonance; one might suspect a pretty close adherence to a probably Provencal original, and perhaps not a very early date. Ticknor, whose Protestantism or whose prudery seems to have been shocked by this "coarse and indecent history"--he might surely have found politer language for a variant of the Magdalene story, which is beautiful in itself and has received especial ornament from art--thought it composed of "meagre monkish verse," and "hardly of importance" except as a monument of language. I should myself venture--with infinitely less competence in the particular language, but some knowledge of other things of the same kind and time--to call it a rather lively and accomplished performance of its class. The third piece[201] of those published, not by Sanchez himself, but as an appendix to the Paris edition, is the _Adoracion de Los Santos Reyes_, a poem shorter than the _Santa Maria Egipciaca_, but very similar in manner as well as in subject. I observe that Ticknor, in a note, seems himself to be of the opinion that these two pieces are not so old as the Apollonius; though his remarks about "the French _fabliaux_" are not to the point. The _fabliaux_, it is true, are in octosyllabic verse; but octosyllabic verse is certainly older than the _fabliaux_, which have nothing to do with the Lives of the Saints. But he could hardly have known this when he wrote. [Footnote 199: Sanchez-Ochoa, _op. cit._, pp. 525-561.] [Footnote 200: Ibid., pp. 561-576.] [Footnote 201: Sanchez-Ochoa, _op. cit._, pp. 577-579.] [Sidenote: _Berceo._] Berceo, who appears to have written more than thirteen thousand lines, wrote nothing secular; and though the religious poetry of the Middle Ages is occasionally of the highest order, yet when it is of that rank it is almost invariably Latin, not vernacular, while its vernacular expression, even where not despicable, is apt to be very much of a piece, and to present very few features of literary as distinguished from philological interest. Historians have, however, very properly noted in him the occurrence of a short lyrical fragment in irregular octosyllabics, each rhymed in couplets and interspersed after every line with a refrain. The only certain fact of his life seems to be his ordination as deacon in 1221. [Sidenote: _Alfonso el Sabio._]