II. SUBSTITUTION OF ACCENT FOR QUANTITY. III. SEQUENCE-HYMN AND STUDENT-SONG. IV. PASSAGE OF THEMES INTO THE VERNACULAR. In mediaeval Latin poetry the endeavour to preserve a classical style and the irresistible tendency to evolve new forms are more palpably distinguishable than in the prose. For there is a visible parting of the ways between the retention of the antique metres and their fruitful abandonment in verses built of accentual rhyme. Moreover, this formal divergence corresponds to a substantial difference, inasmuch as there was usually a larger survival of antique feeling and allusion in the mediaeval metrical attempts than in the rhyming poems. As in the prose, so in the poetry, the lines of development may be followed from the Carolingian time. But a difference will be found between Italy and the North; for in Italy the course was quicker, but a less organic evolution resulted in verse less excellent and less distinctly mediaeval. By the end of the eleventh century Latin poetry in Italy, rhyming or metrical, seems to have drawn itself along as far as it was destined to progress; but in the North a richer growth culminates a century later. Indeed the most originative line of evolution of mediaeval Latin verse would seem to have been confined to the North, in the main if not exclusively. The following pages offer no history of mediaeval Latin poetry, even as the previous chapter made no attempt to sketch the history of the prose. Their object is to point out the general lines along which the verse-forms were developed, or were perhaps retarded. Three may be distinguished. The first is marked by the retention of quantity and the endeavour to preserve the ancient measures. In the second, accent and rhyme gradually take the place of metre within the old verse-forms. The third is that of the Sequence, wherein the accentual rhyming hymn springs from the chanted prose, which had superseded the chanting of the final _a_ of the Alleluia.[280] I