of the new Teutonic tongues which were thus
brought into contact with Latin, and with which Latin was brought into
contact, had systems of prosody of their own, based on entirely
different principles. The most elaborate of these probably, and the
only one from which we have distinct remains of undoubtedly old matter
in considerable quantities, is Anglo-Saxon, though Icelandic runs it
close. A detailed account of the peculiarities of this belongs to the
previous volume: it is sufficient to say here that its great
characteristic was alliteration, and that accent played a large part,
to the exclusion both of definite quantity and of syllabic identity or
equivalence.

[Sidenote: _Romance prosody._]

While these were the states of things with regard to Latin on the one
hand, and to the tongues most separated from Latin on the other, the
Romance languages, or daughters of Latin, had elaborated or were
elaborating, by stages which are almost entirely hidden from us,
middle systems, of which the earliest, and in a way the most perfect,
is that of Provencal, followed by Northern French and Italian, the
dialects of the Spanish Peninsula being a little behindhand in
elaborate verse. The three first-named tongues seem to have hit upon
the verse of ten or eleven syllables, which later crystallised itself
into ten for French and eleven for Italian, as their staple
measure.[101] Efforts have been made to father this directly on some
classical original, and some authorities have even been uncritical
enough to speak of the connection--this or that--having been "proved"
for these verses or others. No such proof has been given, and none is
possible. What is certain, and alone certain, is that whereas the
chief literary metre of the last five centuries of Latin had been
dactylic and trisyllabic, this, the chief metre of the daughter
tongues, and by-and-by almost their only one, was disyllabic--iambic,
or trochaic, as the case may be, but generally iambic. Rhyme became by
degrees an invariable or almost invariable accompaniment, and while
quantity, strictly speaking, almost disappeared (some will have it
that it quite disappeared from French), a syllabic uniformity more
rigid than any which had prevailed, except in the case of lyric
measures like the Alcaic, became the rule. Even elision was very
greatly restricted, though caesura was pretty strictly retained, and an
additional servitude was imposed by the early adoption in French of
the