But besides the occasional occurrence of rhyme in classic poetry—as in Virgil’s famous jeu d’ esprit,
“Sic vos non vobis edificatis aves,” etc.—
there seems to have existed forms of popular Latin verse in which rhyme and accent held the place which quantity held in classic poetry. It is this popular form of verse which the Church’s hymns began to reproduce, just as they also in many cases are written in that lingua rustica, or countrified speech of the peasantry of Italy and France, which was to become the basis of the Romance languages. It is a matter of dispute whether the Saturnian verse-form, to whose early prevalence and prolonged existence among the classes not pervaded by Greek culture Horace alludes, was based on an accentual scansion or merely on a numbering of syllables and a rude approach to quantity. The general consensus of scholars is that the Saturnian metres were based on accent, and that rhyme, which is the natural and invariable product of the accentual scansion, was also in use.[4]
So this hidden current of rhymed and accented poetry of the common people rose to light again after many ages in the hymns of the Western Church. Thus Damasus brings us to the parting of the ways. In Hilary, Ambrose and his school, Prudentius, Ennodius, Fortunatus, Elpis, Gregory, and Bede we have the perpetuation of the classic tradition of quantitative verse in the service of Christendom and for the ear of the cultivated classes. And while that tradition expires in the Middle Ages, we see it revive again in the sacred poets of the Renaissance—in Zacharius Ferrari, George Fabricius, Marcus Antonius Muretus, Famiano Strada and the other revisers of the Roman Breviary, the two Santeuls in the Breviary of Clugny, and Charles Coffin in the Paris Breviary. But Damasus stands at the head of a still more illustrious line. Catching, perhaps, from the Etruscan and Sabine peasants, who thronged the Catacombs on the day when the Martyr Agatha was commemorated, the accents of the popular poetry, he became the founder of the tradition which lives in the broader current of Latin sacred song. In this line of succession we find already a few of the Ambrosian hymns, and then a long series in which the two Bernards, Adam of St. Victor, Thomas of Celano, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura are the most illustrious names. And as indeed the tradition of accent and rhyme seems to have made its way into the literature of the modern world through the Latin hymns, Dante and all the great poets who have illustrated its power to give pleasure might be said to belong here.
The hymn in commemoration of the Martyr Agatha—whose story of suffering and triumph had seized on the imagination of the people as did those of the martyrs Cecilia and Sebastian—we give with the English version of the Rev. J. Anketell, which he has kindly permitted us to use.
Martyris ecce dies Agathae
Virginis emicat eximiae,
Christus eam Sibi qua sociat,
Et diadema duplex decorat.
Stirpe decens, elegans specie,