, an easily traceable series of compromises and naturalisations.
By the end of the twelfth century, as we have seen, rhyme was
creeping in to supersede alliteration, and a regular arrangement of
elastic syllabic equivalents or strict syllabic values was taking the
place of the irregular accented lengths. It does not appear that the
study of the classics had anything directly to do with this: it is
practically certain that the influence on the one hand of Latin hymns
and the Church services, and on the other of French poetry, had very
much.

[Sidenote: _Rhyme and syllabic equivalence._]

Rhyme is to the modern European ear so agreeable, if not so
indispensable, an ornament of verse, that, once heard, it is sure to
creep in, and can only be expelled by deliberate and unnatural
crotchet from any but narrative and dramatic poetry. On the other
hand, it is almost inevitable that when rhyme is expected, the lines
which it tips should be reduced to an equal or at any rate an
equivalent length. Otherwise the expectation of the ear--that the
final ring should be led up to by regular and equable rhythm--is
baulked. If this is not done, as in what we call doggerel rhyme, an
effect of grotesque is universally produced, to the ruin of serious
poetic effect. With these desiderata present, though unconsciously
present, before them, with the Latin hymn-writers and the French poets
for models, and with Church music perpetually starting in their
memories cadences, iambic or trochaic, dactylic or anapaestic, to which
to set their own verse, it is not surprising that English poets should
have accompanied the rapid changes of their language itself with
parallel rapidity of metrical innovation. Quantity they observed
loosely--quantity in modern languages is always loose: but it does
not follow that they ignored it altogether.

[Sidenote: _Accent and quantity._]

Those who insist that they did ignore it, and who painfully search for
verses of so many "accents," for "sections," for "pauses," and what
not, are confronted with difficulties throughout the whole course of
English poetry: there is hardly a page of that brilliant, learned,
instructive, invaluable piece of wrong-headedness, Dr Guest's _English
Rhythms_, which does not bristle with them. But at no time are these
difficulties so great as during our present period, and especially at
the close of it. Let any man who has no "prize to fight," no thesis to
defend, take any characterist