There is no reason, however, to call in question the two hymns—one to the Martyr Agatha and the other to the Apostle Andrew—which are ascribed to him in the collections. And the former is especially remarkable as being the oldest hymn in which rhyme is employed intentionally and throughout. Of course if it were true that Hilary wrote the _Jesu refulsit omnium_ or the _Jesu quadrigenariae_, which sometimes are printed as his, we should be obliged to assign to him the honor thus claimed for Damasus. But the preponderance of evidence and of presumption is against ascribing these hymns to him. Koch assigns the latter to the fifth century and not to the fourth. Mone ascribes the former to one of the early Irish hymn-writers, whose name is lost to us. He finds in it a tendency to alliterative construction, which indicates either Celtic or Teutonic authorship; and he is decided for the former by the mixture of Greek words, which was a favorite practice with the Irish hymn writers. Also the metrical form is one affected by them. On these grounds it is fair to claim that the hymn of Damasus marks the introduction of end-rhymes into the Latin hymns. Rhyme was by no means unknown in the poetry of the Greeks and the Romans. But in languages which occupied that stage of grammatical development in which the relations of words are expressed by terminations, the resemblances in these were so numerous and so constant that rhyme must have appeared rather a cheap form for poetry. So in this stage we find the Southern Aryans of Europe employing the quantity of syllables and those of Northern Europe the coincidences of initial sounds (_stabreim_ or alliteration) and assonance in their verse. It was when the development of languages substituted auxiliary and connecting words for terminations that the coincidences of final sounds became so much a source of pleasure to the ear as to justify their continuous employment for that purpose. But besides the occasional occurrence of rhyme in classic poetry—as in Virgil’s famous _jeu d’ esprit_, “Sic vos non vobis edificatis aves,” etc.— there seems to have existed forms of popular Latin verse in which rhyme and accent held the place which quantity held in classic poetry. It is this popular form of verse which the Church’s hymns began to reproduce, just as they also in many cases are written in that _lingua rustica_, or countrified speech of the peasantry of Italy and France, which was to become the basis of the Romance languages. It is a matter of dispute whether the Saturnian verse-form, to whose early prevalence and prolonged existence among the classes not pervaded by Greek culture Horace alludes, was based on an accentual scansion or merely on a numbering of syllables and a rude approach to quantity. The general consensus of scholars is that the Saturnian metres were based on accent, and that rhyme, which is the natural and invariable product of the accentual scansion, was also in use.[4]