has been written, with more and with less learning,
with ingenuity greater or smaller, on the origins of rhyme, on the
source of the decasyllabic and other staple lines and stanzas; and,
lastly, on the general system of modern as opposed to ancient
scansion. Much of this has been the result of really careful study,
and not a little of it the result of distinct acuteness; but it has
suffered on the whole from the supposed need of some new theory, and
from an unwillingness to accept plain and obvious facts. These facts,
or the most important of them, may be summarised as follows: The
prosody of a language will necessarily vary according to the
pronunciation and composition of that language; but there are certain
general principles of prosody which govern all languages possessing a
certain kinship. These general principles were, for the Western
branches of the Aryan tongues, very early discovered and formulated by
the Greeks, being later adjusted to somewhat stiffer rules--to
compensate for less force of poetic genius, or perhaps merely because
licence was not required--by the Latins. Towards the end of the
classical literary period, however, partly the increasing importance
of the Germanic and other non-Greek and non-Latin elements in the
Empire, partly those inexplicable organic changes which come from time
to time, broke up this system. Rhyme appeared, no one knows quite how,
or why, or whence, and at the same time, though the general structure
of metres was not very much altered, the quantity of individual
syllables appears to have undergone a complete change. Although metres
quantitative in scheme continued to be written, they were written, as
a rule, with more or less laxity; and though rhyme was sometimes
adapted to them in Latin, it was more frequently used with a looser
syllabic arrangement, retaining the divisional characteristics of the
older prosody, but neglecting quantity, the strict rules of elision,
and so forth.

[Footnote 100: It is sufficient to mention here Guest's famous
_English Rhythms_ (ed. Skeat, 1882), a book which at its first
appearance in 1838 was no doubt a revelation, but which carries things
too far; Dr Schipper's _Grundriss der Englischen Metrik_ (Wien, 1895),
and for foreign matters M. Gaston Paris's chapter in his _Litterature
Francaise au Moyen Age_. I do not agree with any of them, but I have a
profound respect for all.]

[Sidenote: _Anglo-Saxon prosody._]

On the other hand, some