where the rhyme "in the tail" appears clearly enough. It is also not inappropriate to the form in which Robert of Brunne writes his verse of the kind, as in Guest's example:
When ye have the prize of your enemies, none shall ye save:
Smite with sword in hand; all Northumberland with right shall ye have.
Sometimes, however, he also batches the two first divisions:
For Edward's good deed
} a wicked bountỳ.
The Balliol did him meed
But it came generally to be written in short lines straight on after the form now familiar. How or why it became so favourite a measure for romance is not, I believe, known. Direct French influence could certainly have had little to do here; for though the six-line measure appears in Marot (early sixteenth century), it is not common earlier, and I am not even aware of any perfect example[169] of it, in the abundant variety of French and Provençal lyric during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; while it is quite unknown to the longer French romances. But it is nearly as easy to remember—or to extemporise in default of memory—as the couplet itself. And it looks as if it were less monotonous; though—as those who drew down on it the lash of Sir Thopas, and Sir Thopas itself, show—nothing can be more monotonous in actuality. Its extensions and variations, and its migration from long narrative to short lyrical use, have been noticed already. These may have been to some extent influenced by the great popularity of Marot's Psalms, though the metre had long been naturalised.
III. Octosyllabic and Decasyllabic Couplet.—Of the two great couplet metres in English, the octosyllabic requires little notice, because it is almost indissolubly connected with the octosyllabic line. As soon as rhyme appears, the old iambic dimeter, four-accent line, or whatever you like to call it, must fall into this shape, and does. There remains indeed the problem why we have no period, in French, of octosyllabic tirade or batch-writing as we have (see immediately below) of decasyllabic.[170] But it is certain that the octosyllabic couplet established itself very early in French, and that at the important nick of time, when English prosody was being formed late in the twelfth century, this couplet came to Layamon and others as a great influence in determining the shape which alteration of the old long line or halved stave should take in their hands.
Decasyllabic couplet, on the other hand, has a much more tardy and uncertain history; though, again, much that has to be said about it has been said in reference to the single line. As soon as that line makes its appearance, in the "Saint Eulalia" hymn, it does indeed make its appearance in couplet, rhymed or assonanced.[171] But the attraction of the longer batches in identical rhyme or assonance seems, however surprisingly,[172] to get the better; and this is the form that it takes in the Provençal Boethius and the French Saint Alexis. In fact, as has been hinted above, our own scattered decasyllabic couplet rather precedes the French, though Guillaume de Machault has the credit, rightly or wrongly, of teaching it to Chaucer. After Chaucer, at any rate, there needed nobody to teach it to Englishmen; although it underwent various vicissitudes, which are duly traced elsewhere.
IV. Quatrain.—At a very early period, indeed as soon as they appear, Latin accentual rhythms have a tendency to batch themselves in four; as had, earlier still, Greek and Latin stanzas, Sapphic, Alcaic, and what not. The development of alternate rhyme in the octosyllabic quatrain or (v. sup.) ballad metre was certain to lead to a similar arrangement of decasyllables; and when rhyme-royal became popular the first four lines were so arranged, and might easily be broken off for separate use, as there is little doubt that the final couplet was. "Fours" of various arrangement are also abundant in lyric and in drama from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. But the greatest impulse was probably given to the alternate decasyllabic form by its adoption for the bulk of the English sonnet; and from this to separate use, which became common in the later Elizabethan poetry, there is but a very short step. The metre has always been a popular one since, and, in the hands of Dryden and Gray especially, is very effective. But a certain grave monotony about it has constantly invited modifications, of which the greatest and most successful, without altering the line-length, are those of FitzGerald in Omar Khayyám[173] and Mr. Swinburne in Laus Veneris;[174] with altered line-lengths, those of Tennyson in "The Poet,"[175] "The Palace of Art," and "A Dream of Fair Women." It was also tried in the seventeenth century as what may be called by anticipation "long In Memoriam measure"—that is to say, with the rhymes arranged abba.
V. In Memoriam Metre itself may have been suggested quite casually in the endless rhyme-welter of mediæval experiment. For instance, it occurs in lines 3 to 6 of Chaucer's nine-line stanza[176] in the Complaint of Mars, and the last eight of his ten-line in the Complaint to his Lady,[177] with decasyllabic lines, of course. It occurs also, with six-syllable lines, in the last halves of the octaves of No. XIX. of the York Plays.[178] Sidney has it as a "sport" or chance. But the first person to use it regularly and with octosyllables was Ben Jonson,[179] who was followed by Lord Herbert of Cherbury and George Sandys. Yet it was not widely taken up, though few measures could better have suited the "metaphysical" poets; and after that generation it remained unused till Tennyson, and by unwitting coincidence Rossetti, hit upon it just before the middle of the nineteenth century. Rossetti has also a very effective extension of it to seven lines abbacca.[180]