Page:The Song of Roland.djvu/27

 He has availed himself of the accenting of finals like ’ing and ’eth which was common from Chaucer to Wyatt, and did not quite cease with Surrey as well as though not too often of Chaucerian “French accentuation” generally. Some slight archaisms in language pay a double debt, and therefore justify their own borrowing doubly. Nor does he always require these. I take for instance a sors of the honestest kind and light upon Stanza XC:—

in which no liberty of any kind is taken with rhythm, vocabulary or vowel-sound, and the effect of which is excellent.

One feature only I do not like, and that is furnished by the laisses in which the assonance is supplied by the penultimate: for instance, CXXX, where the end words are “battle,” “Charlès,” “vassal’s,” “wrathful,” “damage,” “army,” “hereafter,” “Aide,” “clasp you.” English is a very queer language—one of the few points in which foreigners are perhaps nearer the truth about it than some of its own children—and there are all sorts of perhaps unexpected and perhaps inexplicable things that it will not bear—a fact of which some students of its prosody seem specially ignorant. In this matter of assonance it is like some thoroughbreds. It is suspicious of the single assonance, and has to be carefully familiarised, whilst it simply bucks and lashes out at the double. At least so it seems to me.

But it also seems to me, if I may borrow the phrase by which, actually borrowing from Seneca, poor Ben Jonson got himself into such complicated trouble, that there is more—very much more—in this version to be praised than to be pardoned. It is quite certainly nearer to the original than any other version that I have read, and though this of