Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/202

190 Comensis, in which is told the destruction of Como by Milan between 1118 and 1127; then the metrically jingling Pisan chronicle narrating the conquest of the island of Majorca, and beginning (like the Aeneid) with Arma, rates, populum vindictam coelitus octam Scribimus, ac duros terrae pelagique labores."

We also note Peter of Ebulo, with his narrative in laudation of the emperor Henry VI., written about 1194; Henry of Septimella and his elegies upon the checkered fortunes of divers great men; and lastly the more famous Godfrey of Viterbo, of probable German blood, and notary or scribe to three successive emperors, with his cantafable Pantheon or Memoria saecularum. Godfrey's poetry is rhymed after a manner of his own.

In the North, or more specifically speaking in the land of France north of the Loire, the twelfth century brought better metrical poetry than in Italy. Yet it had something of the deadness of imitation, since the vis vivida of song had passed over into rhyming verse. Still from the academic point of view, metre was the proper vehicle of poetry; as one sees, for instance, in the Ars versificatoria of Matthew of Vendome, written toward the close of the twelfth century. "Versus est metrica descriptio," says he, and then elaborates his, for the most part borrowed, definition: "Verse is metrical description proceeding concisely and line by line through the comely marriage of words to flowers of thought, and containing nothing trivial or irrelevant." A neat conception this of poetry; and the same writer denounces leonine rhyming as unseemly, but praises the favourite metre of the Middle Ages, the elegiac; for he regards the hexameter and pentameter as together forming the perfect verse. It was in this metre that Hildebert wrote his almost classic