Chapter IV

THE ALLITERATIVE LINE IN ITS CONSERVATIVE FORM
DURING THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES

A. THE ALLITERATIVE VERSE WITHOUT RHYME.

§ 52. Homilies and lives of the saints in rhythmical prose.
Poems in regular alliterative verse 85
53. Use and treatment of words in alliterative verse 87
54. Examples of alliteration 88
55. Comparison of Middle and Old English alliterative verse 90
56. The versification of _Piers Plowman_ 93
57. Modification of forms in the North of England and in the
Midlands 95

B. THE ALLITERATIVE LINE COMBINED WITH RHYME.

58. Growing influence of verse formed on foreign models 97
59. Lyrical stanzas: four-beat and two-beat lines 97
60. Forms of structure and versification 99
61. Narrative verse 101
62. Relation between rhyme and alliteration 101
63. Features of alliterative-rhyming lines 105
64. Structures of the _cauda_ 105
65. Two-beat lines in tail-rhyme stanzas 106
66. Rhyming alliterative lines in Mystery Plays 108
67. Alliteration in Moralities and Interludes 109
68. Four-beat scansion of Bale's verses 110
69. Examples of the presence or absence of anacrusis in the
two hemistichs 110
70. Entire tail-rhyme stanzas 113
71. Irregular tail-rhyme stanzas: Skeltonic verse 114

C. REVIVAL OF THE FOUR-BEAT ALLITERATIVE VERSE IN THE
MODERN ENGLISH PERIOD.

72. Examples from Gascoigne, Wyatt, Spenser, &c. 117
73. Attempted modern revival of the old four-beat
alliterative line without rhyme 119
74. Examples of the development of the four-beat
alliterative line in reversed chronological order 120
75. Summing-up of the evidence 124

=PART II. FOREIGN METRES=

DIVISION I. THE FOREIGN METRES IN GENERAL

CHAPTER V