E fan lor cavals córre | per la varena. The same form of the decasyllabic verse is also found in some northern French epics, as in ‘Audigier,’ a later parody of the old heroic chanson de geste. The equal flow of this verse did not make it adaptable for the formation of stanzas; and there was the less occasion for such formation in the older epic poetry, as the rhyme or assonance remained unchanged through a great number of verses. This explains the tirade monorime which is the characteristic of the popular in contrast to the artificial epic. To break the monotony of this metre, however, many of the popular joglars introduced after a certain number of decasyllabic verses a shorter line, a bordo biocatz according to the expression of the ‘Leys d’Amors,’ which at the same time by its rhyme formed a transition to the following tirade. An instance occurs in the first part of the chronicle of the Albigeois, while in the second the shorter line is without any rhyme—one reason more for believing that the two parts were not both written by the same author, Guillem de Tudela. Moreover, lyric poets used a kind of tirade monorime intermixed with shorter verses, such as is found in the song by which Richard Cœur de Lion beguiled the hours of his imprisonment in Germany. The first stanza of this song may be quoted as an example of this form: Ja nus homs pres non dira sa razon adrechament, si com homs dolens non; mas per conort deu hom faire canson: pro n’ay d’amics, mas paubre son li don. Ancta lur es, se per ma rezenson soi sai dos ivers pres. The word ‘pres’ recurs at the end of each of the shorter verses, and forms a sort of burden. The same song also exists in French, and the latter seems indeed to be the original version. It would lead us too far to follow the traces of the decasyllabic verse through the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese languages. In Italy the position of the cæsura was not fixed by strict rules as in the _langue d’oc_ and _langue d’oïl_; sometimes there are two accents and corresponding pauzas on the fourth and seventh or eighth syllables, and sometimes only one on the sixth. The cæsura in the decasyllabic metre which occurs in the canzos and sirventeses of the troubadours, is different from that in the tirade monorime of the popular epic. It has been seen that here in case of a pauza con accen greu the first part of the verse, and therefore the whole verse, became one syllable too long. The stricter metrical rules of lyric poetry did not admit of such liberties. Hence, if the lyrical cæsura is masculine, the chief accent is on the fourth syllable; if it is feminine the chief metrical accent goes back to the third syllable, and the fourth, which in epic poetry is always strongly accentuated, becomes weak. The masculine lyrical cæsura, which shows no difference from the epical, is found, for instance, in the beginning of Bertrand de Born’s sirventes: