THERE with the death of Andrew Lang we must break oil,
for to deal with recent writers is not the office of a book in-
tended to trace the long recount, which must beware of the
contemporary estimate. What it is important to do at the
end of the chronicle is to note the strength of the original
elements, still prevailing in our verse, and bring together in
closer context some of those scattered instances which have
helped to build up in Énglish the Lyric Canon.

Throughout its history two great adaptations are to be
noted that have affected the stock. One is that connected
with the names of Cnut, and of St Godric, prime "rebel against
Anglo-Saxon versification," as he has been called, who died
about 1170. Before them the Teutonic stave still governed
the idiom and verse-movement of the tongue, whose measure
we took in Beowulf and The Seafarer. The first step toward a
new scansion and to melody in early English is to be traced
in the Ely lines and those of Godric calling on St Nicholas,
which end--

"At thy burth, at thy bare
Saintë Nicholas, bring us wel thare!"

The Cnut lines have already been quoted.

The other adaptation was a much longer and more complex
business, which indeed is still going on. It has to do not with
a change in the master rhythm of a tongue; but with the
effects of the printed book and the literary habit in cloistering
song and giving poetry an unsocial or exclusive habit in place
of the old folk-custom. This later is closely
associated with that other, which M. Jeanroy has helped us
to realise in his study of the Lyric origins in mediæval France,

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