as I am aware, the songs of Wandering Students offer almost absolutely
untrodden ground to the English translator; and this fact may be
pleaded in excuse for the large number which I have laid under
contribution.

In carrying out my plan, I shall confine myself principally, but not
strictly, to the _Carmina Burana_. I wish to keep in view the
anticipation of the Renaissance rather than to dwell upon those
elements which indicate an early desire for ecclesiastical reform.




IV.


We have reason to conjecture that the Romans, even during the
classical period of their literature, used accentual rhythms for
popular poetry, while quantitative metres formed upon Greek models
were the artificial modes employed by cultivated writers. However this
may be, there is no doubt that, together with the decline of antique
civilisation, accent and rhythm began to displace quantity and metre
in Latin versification. Quantitative measures, like the Sapphic and
Hexameter, were composed accentually. The services and music of the
Church introduced new systems of prosody. Rhymes, both single and
double, were added to the verse; and the extraordinary flexibility of
medieval Latin--that sonorous instrument of varied rhetoric used by
Augustine in the prose of the _Confessions_, and gifted with poetic
inspiration in such hymns as the _Dies Irae_ or the _Stabat
Mater_--rendered this new vehicle of literary utterance adequate to