little use in debating the weightier matters of the law.

The discussion, which might have raged for ever among the critics, was
happily cut short by the healthy instinct of the poets. Against
alliteration the question had already been given by default. Revived,
after long disuse, by Langland and other poets of the West Midlands
in the fourteenth century, it had soon again been swept out of fashion
by the irresistible charm of the genius of Chaucer. The _Tale of
Gamelyn_, dating apparently from the first quarter of the fifteenth
century, is probably the last poem of note in which the once universal
metre is even partially employed. And what could prove more clearly
that the old metrical form was dead? The rough rhythm of early English
poetry, it is true, is kept; but alliteration is dropped, and its place
is taken by rhyme.

Nor were the efforts to impose classical measures on English poetry
more blest in their results. The very men on whom the literary
Romanizers had fixed their hopes were the first to abandon the
enterprise in despair. If any genius was equal to the task of
naturalizing hexameters in a language where strict quantity is unknown,
it was the genius of Spenser. But Spenser soon ranged himself heart
and soul with the champions of rhyme; his very name has passed down
to us as a synonym for the most elaborate of all rhyming stanzas that
have taken root in our verse. For the moment, rhyme had fairly driven
all rivals from the field. Over the lyric its sway was undisputed. In
narrative poetry, where its fitness was far more disputable, it
maintained its hold till the closing years of Milton. In the drama
itself, where its triumph would have been fatal, it disputed the ground
inch by inch against the magnificent instrument devised by Surrey and
perfected by Marlowe.