"He had all the qualities of a great poet, but he wasted his genius
writing love verses to Radegonde. The story is a curious one. Radegonde
was the daughter of the King of Thuringia; she was made prisoner by
Clotaire I., son of Clovis, who forced her to become his wife. On the
murder of her father by her husband, she fled and founded a convent at
Poictiers. There she met Fortunatus, who, it appears, loved her. It is
of course humanly possible that their love was not a guilty one, but it
is certain that the poet wasted the greater part of his life writing
verses to her and her adopted daughter Agnes. In a beautiful poem in
praise of virginity, composed in honour of Agnes, he speaks in a very
disgusting way of the love with which nuns regard our Redeemer, and the
recompence that awaits them in Heaven for their chastity. If it had not
been for the great interest attaching to his verse as an example of the
radical alteration that had been effected in the language, I do not
think I should have spoken of this poet. Up to his time rhyme had
slipped only occasionally into the verse, it had been noticed and had
been allowed to remain by poets too idle to remove it, a strange
something not quite understood, and yet not a wholly unwelcome intruder;
but in St Fortunatus we find for the first time rhyme cognate with the
metre, and used with certainty and brilliancy. In the opening lines of
the hymn, 'Vexilla Regis,' rhyme is used with superb effect....

"But for signs of the approaching dissolution of the language, of its
absorption by the national idiom, we must turn to St Gregory of Tours.
He was a man of defective education, and the _lingua rustica_ of France
as it was spoken by the people makes itself felt throughout his
writings. His use of _iscere_ for _escere_, of the accusative for the
ablative, one of St Gregory's favourite forms of speech, _pro or quod_
for _quoniam_, conformable to old French _porceque_, so common for