Page:Romances of Chivalry on Greek Soil.djvu/27

22 poetry behind them, so the Greek romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had an epic background too. In both cases the treatment of romantic motives was affected by influences derived directly or indirectly from the Hellenistic world; in France, through deliberate recourse to Latin literature and especially Ovid; in Greece, through a literary tradition which had never died. If this parallelism is taken along with the fact that stories and motives travelled, by whatever devious ways, from the East to the West, it is not surprising that the Greek and some of the French romances should have a family likeness. For direct literary indebtedness we must wait till the sixteenth century, and visit the Island of Crete, where we shall find a certain Cornaro, a Hellenized Venetian, composing a long and tedious romance (the Erotokritos), which is saturated with Italian influence.

A few words may be said about the language and metre of the poems. Both the epic and the romances are composed in the colloquial language—I do not mean the rustic language, but the speech of educated people in contradistinction to the literary Greek which was employed in serious works. The metre is also the same. It is that form of verse which was most used in the popular poetry of the Middle Ages—alternate verses of eight and seven syllables modulated by accent and not by quantity. It is the metre of—

In Scarlet towne where I was born There was a fair maid dwellin'.

In the period which we have been considering there was no rhyme. Rhyme afterwards came in, and its effect is unfortunate in longer poems; the jingle becomes insupportable. It is possible that this metre, which corresponds in beat to the iambic tetrameters of Greek