Page:Alexander and Dindimus (Skeat 1878).djvu/40

 No oþir dainteys dere · desíre we none; 306. To him þat schop us to schap · schal fáre to blisse; 330. And delíten in no dede · þat doþ men to sinne; 505. Michel holde ȝe of miht · Minérua þe falce; 653; cf. 722. Diuísede here on his day · a dosain of wondrus; 670. That han no rewárd to riht · but redlese wirchen; 907. Þis sonde þat y said haue · sire álixandre riche; 967.

A crucial test is furnished by ll. 74, 75.

Of mé þat míȝhteles am · my-sílf to kepe; I am síkur of my-sílf · to súffre min ende.

Here, in the same word, viz. my-silf, without any change of accent, we have a change in the alliterative letter.

No doubt our pronunciation has changed greatly since the four-teenth century, but accent is a much more persistent thing. No one will be so hardy as to maintain that such accentuations as désire, ólimpias, déliten, mínerua, díuised, réward could ever have been possible; and, for this reason, I refuse to believe in sófisen, or díscorden either. And I am prepared to maintain, as always, that even the chief-letter in the alliterative poetry of our forefathers sometimes fell on wholly unaccented and unimportant syllables, such as schal in l. 330 adn sire in l. 967l So much the worse for the poetry, no doubt, but we must not shut our eyes to plain facts by pretending that poets could not err. Besides, it is easy to see why these unimportant syllables sometimes received the rime-letter. What the poet really wanted was a help to the memory, and this was attained quite as easily (now and then) by help of an unimportant syllable as by close attention to rule. The use of the word schal in l. 330 (as of sire in l. 967) was to give the reciter a start for his second half-line. The cue was quite sufficient for this purpose, and thus the line, though slip-shod, was allowed to pass. This is the simple explanation of the whole matter.

I add a list (perhaps imperfect) of the principal words of French or Latin origin in the poem; omitting proper names. The list is as follows; the references to the lines where they occur will be found in the Glossarial Index. Acorde, age, air, alowe, auterus