and also of the historian’s repartee—
Ego nolo Cæsar esse
Ambulare per Britannos
Scythicas pati pruinas.
The simple grandeur of such strains as—
Dies iræ, dies illa,
Solvet sæclum in favilla, &c.
and other monkish hymns, go far to rescue the old Saturnian from the charge of ruggedness and rusticity ascribed to it by Horace and others, whose taste was formed by Greek poetry, and whose fastidious ears could not brook any harmony but that which had been consecrated to the outpourings of Greek genius.
From this species of verse, which probably prevailed among the natives of Provence (the Roman Provincia) the Troubadours derived the metre of their ballad poetry, and thence introduced it into the rest of Europe. But whatever phases the external form of ancient poetry underwent, the classical writers both of Greece and Rome eschewed rhyme. Even to a modern ear the beautiful effect of the ancient metres is entirely destroyed by it. It was a false taste and a less refined ear which could accept it as a compensation for the imperfections of prosody.
Although rhyme was introduced as an embellishment of verses framed on the principle of ictus, and not of quantity, at a very early period of Christian Latin literature, it is not quite certain when it came to be added as a new difficulty to the metres of classical antiquity. It is recorded by Gray[[86]] that when the children educated in the monastery of St. Gall addressed a Bishop of Constance on his first visitation with expostulatory orations, the younger ones recited the following doggerel rhymes:—