228 Charles Davidson — English Mystery Plays. 



poetry of the north of England. To this we will turn our attention 

 first. 



In studying the English poetry of the septenar stanza, attention 

 must be paid to the mode of publication, for the poetic form was 

 closely molded to the known needs of utterance. In the North the 

 gleeman was still welcome to the home of the franklin or the hut of 

 the peasant. The tradition of the fathers had not been broken, as 

 in the South, by the intrusion of the jongleur with the fashions and 

 tales of France, We may believe that, harp in hand, the bard still 

 recited the warlike deeds of the fathers in the alliterative measures 

 of the Old English, until the church poets furnished him with bal- 

 lads and pious songs, formed, as we shall see, upon the Latin sep- 

 tenar. These were sung with the accompaniment of the harp in a 

 recitative delivery, imitated, it may be, in part from the rhythmic 

 intonation of the church service. 



For such delivery the harp is preeminently the instrument. It is 

 wholly responsive to the will of the reciter, who can heighten the 

 accent of his lines, and even supply a rhythmic stress, where the 

 poet's art failed him, by a touch of the harp-string. A succession 

 of light unstressed syllables can be run, or two stressed syllables in 

 juxtaposition separated, by a slide of the voice, with the aid of the 

 instrument. To poet and reciter alike the feet of classical metres 

 were unknown ; so long as the musical rhythm of the verse was 

 maintained, he cared nothing for trochees or anapaests, and for this 

 task the harp was his ablest coadjutor. 



The discussion here concerns itself directly with the septenar 

 stanza of the ancient Bernicia, that district extending from the 

 Humber through the Lowlands of Scotland. No position is taken 

 regarding the scansion of later English metres, formed under the in- 

 fluence of classical models, or dominated by French metrical sys- 

 tems. The stanza was formed from a Latin measure that had cast 

 off all the laws of the classics. Under the law of accent, subject 

 only to the requirements of recitative delivery, it ran its career, as 

 we shall see, from the regularity of the Latin septenar to a lawless- 

 ness that tolerated an excess of unstressed syllables so extreme that 

 the voice of the reciter must needs find rest in irregular stresses. 



Indirectly, our contention touches also the metres whose district 

 lies south of this, for the regularity of the Latin and French metres 

 was corrupted through contact with the popular measure of the 

 North. Indeed, it was this principle, best illustrated in the sep- 

 tenar, that, through its sturdy resistance to the classicists of the 



