and the relation of the "poésie populaire" to the "poésie
courtoise." For in truth in both the formula of conversion is,
when we look into it, much the same. It may be thought
that the affiliation of song to a mother church would previously
have tended to its over-refinement too. But the spirit of the
faith that lived, not for a class, but for the good of souls at
large, was against any such diversion of the art, as the case
of Adam de St Victor goes to show. A hymn, in his idea, says
his biographer, was not a literary composition intended to be
read sous le cloître, or admired by the beaux esprits. It was
a joyous chant that needed to be sung by the choirs on fête days
instead of the ancient Jubili and Alleluia. If the offices of the
Church helped so far to keep the vital balance and did little to
hasten the literary conversion, it did much to induce the other
change, by which the Anglo-Saxon rhythm and the old stab-
reimvers was led to yield to the solvent. But the northern
idiom and the old accent, as we had them in the Exeter
Book and at the beginning of our sea-poetry in Beowulf and
The Seafarer, have never been quite destroyed. We have
seen how, long afterwards, mediæval poems like Sir Gawaine
and the Greene Knight and The Pearl were affected by them,
even when the verse was manifestly looking for its new attire,
and using curious vocal rhymes, as in the lines--

"Swangeande swete the water con swepe
Wyth a rownande rourde ray-kande aryght
(Swinging sweet, the water can sweep
With a murmuring noise running aright)."

We can trace it at another stage in the early love-song
which tells of the coming change--

"She was brighter of her blee than was the bright sun
Her rudd redder than the rose that on the rise hangeth
Meekly smiling with her mouth, and merry in her looks,
Ever laughing for love, as her liking was: . . ."

and we find it in another line of the same poem which gets
to the very heart of imaginative melody--

"And the grass that was grey greened belive: . . ." ¹

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