this metre—as may be seen by the following two lines from the poem ‘De contemptu mundi,’ of the eleventh century, Cumque laborum | cumque dolorum | sit sitabundus, Nos irritans | nos invitans | ad mala mundus— utterly neglect the fundamental rules of ancient prosody. The same might be said, even in a higher degree, of Godfrid of Viterbo. He goes so far as to join two leonine hexameters and one pentameter in a stanza; for example: Imperii sidus | plaudunt tibi mensis et idus, Metra tibi fidus | regalia dat Gotefridus Quæ tibi sæpe legas | ut bene regna regas. The principle of dividing the stanza into three parts which is the basis of Italian and German strophes, can be easily recognised here; and the mediæval poet might have written his sham hexameters much more properly in this way:— { Imperii sidus { Plaudunt tibi mensis et idus. Pedes { { Metra tibi fidus { Regalia dat Gotefridus. Cauda { Quæ tibi sæpe legas { Ut bene regna regas. One of the most striking features of this rising poetry is the rhyme—an element quite independent of the metrical principle, and founded entirely on the sound and rhetorical accent of the words. This rhyme is used no longer as an occasional effect, in different places of the verse, but defined by the strictest rules of art. It has been a favourite subject of investigation with literary scholars, to determine who first used the rhyme. Monkish mediæval poets and Provençal troubadours have found enthusiastic defenders of their claims to this great invention. It appears however that the question itself was a mistake. Nobody invented the rhyme: it has existed as long as poetry itself. Horace and Homer knew it as well as Byron and Goethe; but the rhythmical principle prevailed too largely in the Latin and Greek languages to allow the rhyme, as a rhetorical element, to attain that influence which it gained by a natural process, when verses began to be measured according to the modern principle of rhetorical accent. Wilhelm Grimm, in his monograph ‘Zur Geschichte des Reims,’ has collected with great care the numerous instances of rhyme in the classic Roman period. The rule is, as Grimm shows, that the chief cæsura in the third foot of the hexameter rhymes with the end of the verse; but in other places also the rhyming words may be found. Grimm, however, decidedly goes too far when he sees an intentional rhyme in all these cases. The Latin language, owing to its consonant final syllables in declensions and conjugations, possessed an immense quantity of rhyming material, and moreover each adjective had to agree with its noun, if it followed the same declension. It is therefore difficult to see how the poet could have avoided bringing into the same verse very often two or even more words ending in the same way. In a verse, for instance, like that quoted by Grimm from Virgil’s ‘Bucolics,’ Vare tuas cupiant et tristia condere bella,