In the introduction to my edition of the pre-Lutheran German Bible I had occasion to refer to the Epistola de Constantinopolitana urbe capta of Leonardus Chiensis, a German translation of which had been described in an auction catalogue of the year 1913.

According to whether we count, in verse, all syllables, regardless of accent, or only the accented syllables, we recognize in the modern languages two systems of versification, the foot system and the syllabic system. In each of the following verses of Boileau, for example, we may enumerate twelve syllables, or find four feet thus graphically illustrated:

En vain | contre le Cid | un mini | stre se ligue,
Tout Paris | pour Chimè | ne a les yeux | de Rodrigue.

The poetry of Wordsworth seems, at first thought, to draw less from the visual sense than that of Milton, or Shelley, or Keats, or many another. For Wordsworth's manner is not a pictorial manner; his poetic methods are not those of the artist; he was no searcher out of the striking; and beauty, as commonly understood, was not to him the supreme inspiration.

In these Publications, vol. XII (1897), Professor R. E. Neil Dodge, in an article entitled Spenser's Imitations from Ariosto, described and commented on a large number of parallels between the two poets. This work was so thoroughly done that no one can expect to add greatly to his lists. Yet one cannot ever be sure of having exhausted the similarities between The Faerie Queene and the Orlando Furioso, and later gleaners, as Professor Dodge understood, may expect to be regarded with scattered ears. Since our knowledge of the relation of these two poems cannot be too full, I present here a few additional observations.

Scholars have long made an earnest search for analogues to The Dream of the Rood, but the very remoteness of the parallels thus afforded so far is a unique testimony to the high degree of originality in the poem. Closer in some ways than any of them, in that it gives us a dialogue with the cross, the “Disputation between Mary and the Cross” might have been cited; but here again comparison shows that the Dream is a poem standing apart in the unusually fine quality of its inspiration and in its genuine feeling. The poet seems to have had little to work on for a basis, either as a source or as a guide. Yet we know that he was deeply religious and we can be sure that he must have been thoroughly acquainted with those parts of the ecclesiastical service which were devoted to the celebration of the cross. In writing such a poem he could hardly rid his mind of all the echoes of the hymns and responsive utterances and the liturgical offices which he was accustomed to hear at various times during the church year.

In actual practice the English broadside ballad did not exist before the introduction of printing; but it is not accurate to assert that “street ballads begin about 1540,” or even to call Skelton's ballad on Flodden Field (1513)—said to be the earliest printed street ballad extant—the beginning of the genre. Undoubtedly the ballad had begun to play an important rôle before 1500, and in its origin runs much farther back, far antedating the art of printing. To all intents the street ballad was matured as early as 1500; while satirical poems, invectives, lamentations, and short jocular and religious stanzas of a still earlier period have many of the features that characterize printed broadside ballads and unquestionably prepared the way for them. Early in the fifteenth century, writers of such ballad-poems tried to circulate them on manuscript broadsheets. Naturally, therefore, the advent of printing merely facilitated and increased the production of rimed broadsides, until, in the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, they came to be the chief publications of the London press and the works most dear to the common people.