eady
consecrated expressions, and with the practice in it which every
scholar had, made recourse to constantly repeated stock phrases at
least less necessary, if necessary at all; and the writer's set
purpose to amuse made it incumbent on him not to be tedious. A good
deal of this comic writing may be graceless: some of it may, to
delicate tastes, be shocking or disgusting. But it was at any rate an
obvious and excellent school of word-fence, a gymnasium and
exercising-ground for style.

[Sidenote: _Hymns._]

And if the beneficial effect in the literary sense of these light
songs is not to be overlooked, how much greater in every way is that
of the magnificent compositions of which they were in some cases the
parody! It will be more convenient to postpone to a later chapter of
this volume a consideration of the exact way in which Latin sacred
poetry affected the prosody of the vernacular; but it is well here to
point out that almost all the finest and most famous examples of the
mediaeval hymn, with perhaps the sole exception of _Veni, Sancte
Spiritus_, date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[8] Ours are
the stately rhythms of Adam of St Victor, and the softer ones of St
Bernard the Greater. It was at this time that Jacopone da Todi, in the
intervals of his eccentric vernacular exercises, was inspired to write
the _Stabat Mater_. From this time comes that glorious descant of
Bernard of Morlaix, in which, the more its famous and very elegant
English paraphrase is read beside it, the more does the greatness and
the beauty of the original appear. And from this time comes the
greatest of all hymns, and one of the greatest of all poems, the _Dies
Irae_. There have been attempts--more than one of them--to make out
that the _Dies Irae_ is no such wonderful thing after all: attempts
which are, perhaps, the extreme examples of that cheap and despicable
paradox which thinks to escape the charge of blind docility by the
affectation of heterodox independence. The judgment of the greatest
(and not always of the most pious) men of letters of modern times may
confirm those who are uncomfortable without authority in a different
opinion. Fortunately there is not likely ever to be lack of those who,
authority or no authority, in youth and in age, after much reading or
without much, in all time of their tribulation and in all time of
their wealth, will hold these wonderful triplets, be they Thomas of
Celano's or another's, as n