details and explanations, and to go straight to the points that
repetition had proved to be the most effective, so that the criterion
of excellence must have been immediate popularity with the audience as
in a play. It may be conjectured also that the metre, in length of
line and cadence, formed itself to a great degree on the natural
conditions of oral delivery and listening. For all poetry, I think,
makes its primary appeal to the ear; and the modern habit of reading
it seems to me to have thrown this essential test of quality somewhat
into the background. The arrangement of metre and rhyme may have been
gradually invented to correspond with and satisfy that natural
expectation of the recurrence of certain tones and measures which
always delights primitive men, and of which one may possibly trace
some symptoms even in animals, as when the snake sways slowly to the
simple sounds of a snake-charmer's pipe. The order of all modern
versification (except in blank verse, which is never popular) depends
on the echoing rhyme, which marks time like the stroke of a bell, and
is waited for with keen anticipation by the sensitive listener. It is
strange, to my mind, that such a beautiful creation as the beat of
tonic sounds at a line's terminal should have been comparatively so
recent a discovery in European poetry.

That a master of this art must have been very rare is shown by the
very few pieces of first-class heroic poetry still extant out of the
immense quantity that must have been attempted in different ages and
countries. Yet the materials lie strewn around us, awaiting the
skilful hand; they are to be found wherever a high-spirited warlike
race is fighting its way upward out of barbarism into some less
wretched stage of society that may allow breathing time for working
the precious mines of recent traditions. The state of society
described in some Icelandic Sagas, for example, with its hereditary
blood feuds and perpetual assassinations, with its code of honour
making vengeance a pious duty, its tariff of blood money, and its
council for adjusting civil and criminal wrongs, has a close
resemblance to everyday life among the free Afghan tribes beyond the
North-West Frontier of India. But the Saga writers flourished, I
understand, when this state of things had passed or was passing away;
while the Afghans are still a rude illiterate folk who have only
songs, recited by the professional bards. The best collection of these