fixed alternation of "masculine" and "feminine" rhymes--that is to
say, of rhymes with, and rhymes without, the mute _e_.

[Footnote 101: _Vide_ Dante, _De Vulgari Eloquio_.]

[Sidenote: _English prosody._]

[Sidenote: _The later alliteration._]

But the prosody of the Romance tongues is perfectly simple and
intelligible, except in the one crux of the question how it came into
being, and what part "popular" poetry played in it. We find it, almost
from the first, full-blown: and only minor refinements or improvements
are introduced afterwards. With English prosody it is very
different.[102] As has been said, the older prosody itself, with the
older verse, seems to have to a great extent died out even before the
Conquest, and what verse was written in the alliterative measures
afterwards was of a feeble and halting kind. Even when, as the authors
of later volumes of this series will have to show, alliterative verse
was taken up with something like a set purpose during the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, its character was wholly changed, and though
some very good work was written in it, it was practically all literary
exercise. It frequently assumed regular stanza-forms, the lines also
frequently fell into regular quantitative shapes, such as the heroic,
the Alexandrine, and the tetrameter. Above all, the old strict and
accurate combination of a limited amount of alliteration, jealously
adjusted to words important in sense and rhythm, was exchanged for a
profusion of alliterated syllables, often with no direct rhythmical
duty to pay, and constantly leading to mere senseless and tasteless
jingle, if not to the positive coining of fantastic or improper
locutions to get the "artful aid."

[Footnote 102: What is said here of English applies with certain
modifications to German, though the almost entire loss of Old German
poetry and the comparatively late date of Middle make the process less
striking and more obscure, and the greater talent of the individual
imitators of French interferes more with the process of insensible
shaping and growth. German prosody, despite the charm of its lyric
measures, has never acquired the perfect combination of freedom and
order which we find in English, as may be seen by comparing the best
blank verse of the two.]

[Sidenote: _The new verse._]

Meanwhile the real prosody of English had been elaborated, in the
usual blending fashion of the race, by an intricate, yet, as it
happens