Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/206

Rh infinite variety may be obtained, even with only two forms of line.

X. The metres of Jordan's Drama of The Creation (1611) do not differ materially in intention from those of the Ordinalia, on which they are evidently modelled. But in this play one begins to find signs of a tendency to arless accurate ear for exact syllabic rhythm. About eighty lines out of the 2548 of which the play consists have eight syllables, about twenty have only six, and in each case these ought to be seven-syllabled. Also there are two cases of three and six of five syllables in what ought to be four-syllabled lines, and there are several cases of nine syllables in a line, and one case of ten. No doubt some of these discrepancies may be accounted for by elisions and contractions not expressed in writing (as is often the case in Latin), and some of the short lines contain diphthongs which may be meant to count as two syllables, but by no means all are explainable by anything but the influence of English, or, as is less probable, a reversion to some such archaic idea of rhythm as that of the Add. Charter fragment.

After this we come to the verses of late Cornish. These are few, poor, corrupt, and illiterate, and for the most part without value for metrical purposes. The strictly syllabic metres of the older Cornish have nearly disappeared, and though the tonic accent is still disregarded when convenient, extra unaccented syllables, as often in inferior, and sometimes in good English verse, are freely introduced by vay of anacrusis, etc., in a manner that shows that accent was considered in a sort of way, and that the accents of a line rather than the syllables were counted. John Boson wrote a few lines in three-lined stanzas somewhat after the fashion of the Welsh Triban Milwr, and Lhuyd's artificial elegy on William of Orange is another instance of the same.