(See Illustrative Hymns, X. _Deus immensa trinitas_, “O glorious immensity.”) The possible influence of Arabian music and poetry upon the Christian hymn has been a tempting idea and one most elusive of pursuit. Studies of medieval Spanish music and musical instruments have failed to demonstrate that the ecclesiastical chant in Spain was thereby affected. Such novelties as it may have possessed have been traced to influences similar to those which had long before affected the Ambrosian chant and been transmitted to the west. As for the tentative assumption that Arabian lyric poetry influenced contemporary hymn writers in Spain, the evidence narrows to the mono-rhyme or repeated end-rhyme common to Arabian poetry and to several Mozarabic hymns.[34] The whole subject of the Arabian impact, highly controversial as it is, appears to be concerned with influences, which when scrutinized, are observed to spring from cultures prior both to Christianity and to Islam. The Mozarabic Hymnal in its fully developed version possessed an unusually large number of hymns honoring local saints. This feature must be referred to the history of the Roman persecution in the Iberian peninsula where the complete destruction of the Church was intended and martyrdom was the rule. Again the Hymnal is unique in its hymns for public occasions either of mourning and intercession in time of war, pestilence, drought and flood or of joy, in festivals of the consecration of bishops, the coronation of kings and thanksgiving for full harvests. III. Characteristics For the most part the hymn writers of the later hymn cycles are anonymous, like their predecessors in this field. Anonymity is then the first characteristic to be noted concerning the hymnal in this period, which makes it necessary to survey the whole as an objective achievement of the age, not of a few individuals. Next to the anonymity of its authorship, possibly the most conspicuous feature of the new hymnal is the enlargement of each of its general divisions, the Common and the Proper of the Season and the Common and the Proper of Saints. The old hymn cycle, it will be recalled, comprised thirty-four hymns as listed by Blume. The later cycle in its nucleus numbers thirty-seven hymns of which seven are repeated from the old cycle. In ten representative tenth century hymnals, the hymns number from about fifty to about one hundred, many of them common to several lists.[35]