[146] In Old English Homilies, ed. R. Morris, pp. 190ff.
[147] Trautmann, Anglia, v, Anz., p. 124; Einenkel, ibid., 74; Menthel, Anglia, viii, Anz., p. 70.
[148] According to Guest (ii. 233) ‘because the poulterer, as Gascoigne tells us, giveth twelve for one dozen and fourteen for another’.
[149] These poems are also printed in Böddeker, Altengl. Dichtungen, Geistl. Lieder, xviii, Weltl. Lieder, xiv.
[150] Chaucer’s Sprache und Verskunst, § 305, note.
[151] The verses he calls five-foot lines have, on the other hand, decidedly not this structure, but are four-foot lines with unaccented rhymes; for a final word in the line, such us wrécfúl, as is assumed by Ten Brink, with the omission of an unaccented syllable between the last two accents, would be utterly inconsistent with the whole character of this metre.
[152] According to Ten Brink, Chaucer’s Sprache und Verskunst, § 305, the shifting character of Chaucer’s caesura was chiefly caused by his acquaintance with the Italian endecasillabo. This influence may have come in later, but even in Chaucer’s early Compleynt to Pitee (according to Ten Brink, Geschichte der englischen Literatur, ii. p. 49, his first poem written under the influence of the French decasyllabic verse) the caesura is here moveable, though not to the same extent as in the later poems. The liability of the caesura to shift its position was certainly considerably increased by the accentual character of English rhythm. On the untenableness of his assertion, that in Chaucer’s five-accent verse the epic caesura is unknown, cf. p. 145 (footnote), Metrik, ii. 101–3 note, and Schipper in Paul’s Grundriss, ed. 2, II. ii, pp. 217–21.
[153] For the accentuation of the word cf. inter alia rhymes such as mérie: Cáunterbúry, Prol. 801–2, and Schipper, l.c., pp. 217–18.
[154] This definition is also given by Milton in his introductory note on ‘The Verse’ prefixed in 1668 to Paradise Lost.
[155] Cf. Metrik, ii. §§ 132–5.