This Suabian, singing his uncouth Latin rhymes, and footing his way to Paris, suggests the common, delocalized influences which were developing a mass of student-songs, “Carmina Burana,” or “Goliardic” poetry. The authors belonged to that large and broad class of _clerks_ made up of any and all persons who knew Latin. The songs circulated through western Europe, and their home was everywhere, if not their origin. Some of them betray, as more of them do not, the author’s land and race. Frequently of diabolic cleverness, gibing, amorous, convivial, they show the virtuosity in rhyme of their many makers. Like the hymns and later Sequences, they employed of necessity those accentual measures which once had their quantitative prototypes in antique metres. But, again like the hymns and Sequences, they neither imitate nor borrow, but make use of trochaic, iambic, or other rhythms as the natural and unavoidable material of verse. Their strophes are new strophes, and not imitations of anything in quantitative poetry. So these songs were free-born, and their development was as independent of antique influence as the melodies which ever moulded them to more perfect music. Many and divers were their measures. But as that great strophe of Adam’s _Heri mundus exultavit_ (the strophe of the _Stabat Mater_) was of mightiest dominance among the hymns, so for these student-songs there was also one measure that was chief. This was the thirteen-syllable trochaic line, with its lilting change of stress after the seventh syllable, and its pure two-syllable rhyme. It is the line of the _Confessio poetae_, or _Confessio Goliae_, where nests that one mediaeval Latin verse which everybody still knows by heart: “Meum est propositum in taberna mori, Vinum sit appositum morientis ori, Tunc cantabunt laetius angelorum chori, ‘Sit Deus propitius huic potatori.’” It is also the line of the quite charming Phyllis and Flora of the _Carmina Burana_: “Erant ambae virgines et ambae reginae, Phyllis coma libera, Flora compto crine: Non sunt formae virginum, sed formae divinae, Et respondent facie luci matutinae.”[327] Another common measure is the twelve-syllable dactylic line of the famous _Apocalypsis Goliae Episcopi_: “Ipsam Pythagorae formam aspicio, Inscriptam artium schemate vario. An extra corpus sit haec revelatio, Utrum in corpore, Deus scit, nescio. In fronte micuit ars astrologica; Dentium seriem regit grammatica; In lingua pulcrius vernat rhetorica, Concussis aestuat in labiis logica.” An example of the not infrequent eight-syllable line is afforded by that tremendous satire against papal Rome, beginning: “Propter Sion non tacebo, Sed ruinam Romae flebo, Quousque justitia Rursus nobis oriatur, Et ut lampas accendatur Justus in ecclesia.” Here the last line of the verse has but seven syllables, as is the case in the following verse of four lines: