As in the days of Greece and Rome, the development of poetry was accompanied by a considerable activity in the fabrication of metres.  This did not limit itself to a distich or alternate rhyme called “tailed” or “interlaced,” but included the “horned,” “crested,” and “squared” verses—­the last forming double acrostics.  Sometimes half a dozen lines were made to rhyme together.  This movement, pedantic as it was, showed an advance in finding similarities in things dissimilar, a change in the appreciation of the harmony.  Previously rhymes were considered ludicrous, as they seem to us now in prose, and even in the French drama.  The old Welsh poetry depended merely upon alliteration—­as in the words ascribed to the British Queen—­

  “Ruin seize thee, ruthless king.”

And among our old proverbs we have “Many men of many minds.”  “Fools build houses, for wise men to live in.”  “First come, first served.”  The motto of the Duke of Athole runs “Furth fortune and fill the fetters.”

The “Exeter Book,” presented to his cathedral by Leofric, first Bishop of Exeter in 1046 deserves notice, as indicative of the course of early Anglo-Saxon literature.  Here we have first religious meditations and legends of Saints, then proverbial, or as they are called “gnomic” verses, next allegorical descriptions by means of animals, and finally riddles.  The last are very long, and generally consist of emblematic descriptions.

It is a part of the great system of compensation under which we live, that those who are most highly praised are most exposed to the attacks of the envious, and that those who stand on an eminence above others should have their bad as well as their good deeds recorded.  And thus we find that the earliest shafts of censure were directed against princes and priests, and the first Norman satires of which we hear were some songs called Sirventois, against Arnould, who was chaplain to Robert Courthose in the time of William Rufus.  He was apparently an excellent man, established schools at Caen, and was afterwards promoted to be patriarch of Jerusalem.  The next attack of which we have any record was that made by Luc de la Barr against Henry I. The nature of the imputations it contained may be conjectured from the fact, that the king ordered the writer’s eyes to be put out.  Another satire was directed against Richard, “King of the Romans,” who was taken prisoner at Lewes.  It was written to triumph over him, and taunt him with his defeat, and the nearest approach to humour in it is where it speaks of his making a castle of a windmill, which is supposed to refer to his having been captured in such a building.  The humour in the satires of this time was almost entirely of a hostile or optical character.  We have two metrical ballads of the thirteenth century directed against the Scotch and French, but containing little but animosity.  There is also one complaining of heavy taxation in the reign of Edward I., but generally the church was