A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY The documents?Layamon B?The later Moral Ode?The Bestiary ?Sinners Beware, etc.?The Lme-Rune?The Owl and the Nightingale?Tendency to syllabic rigidity?The correctives of this?Versicular survival: Proverbs of Alfred?Modified in Proverbs of Hendyng?Genesis and Exodus?The Northern Psalter ? Robert of Gloucester ? The earliest Romances : ffaveloh?King Horn?The earliest English fabliaux. The The documents anterior to the thirteenth century, or (to documents. take tne sijghtly later date, which is not material to us, of 1210) to its second decade, are of the highest interest, but they should have been sufficiently examined. Those assigned to the thirteenth century itself are of interest hardly inferior, as well as much more numerous, and must be examined now. One group is dated by philologists before 1250; another before 1300. Let us follow this division without questioning : and see what it gives us. Of the first group the most important documents are :? 1 It is an obvious objection, " If you do not feel competent to date them for yourself, what is your competence for the present examination ? " But the answer is as obvious as the objection, and much more cogent. These dates have been arrived at by a process and on principles quite unliterary and purely philological. They may be?they probably are in some cases?incorrect; but at any rate they are untainted by even the slightest theory about the literary, or the prosodic, character of the documents themselves. Hence, as granted, they are, if not concessions to the adversary, at any rate things not vitiated by any preconceived theories on the part of the granter. From the purely literary and critical point of view there are, as a rule, no premises for coming to any but the widest conclus...Read More