a dozen lines were made to rhyme together.
This movement, pedantic as it was, showed an advance in finding
similarities in things dissimilar, a change in the appreciation of the
harmony. Previously rhymes were considered ludicrous, as they seem to us
now in prose, and even in the French drama. The old Welsh poetry
depended merely upon alliteration--as in the words ascribed to the
British Queen--

"Ruin seize thee, ruthless king."

And among our old proverbs we have "Many men of many minds." "Fools
build houses, for wise men to live in." "First come, first served." The
motto of the Duke of Athole runs "Furth fortune and fill the fetters."

The "Exeter Book," presented to his cathedral by Leofric, first Bishop
of Exeter in 1046 deserves notice, as indicative of the course of early
Anglo-Saxon literature. Here we have first religious meditations and
legends of Saints, then proverbial, or as they are called "gnomic"
verses, next allegorical descriptions by means of animals, and finally
riddles. The last are very long, and generally consist of emblematic
descriptions.

It is a part of the great system of compensation under which we live,
that those who are most highly praised are most exposed to the attacks
of the envious, and that those who stand on an eminence above others
should have their bad as well as their good deeds recorded. And thus we
find that the earliest shafts of censure were directed against princes
and priests, and the first Norman satires of which we hear were some
songs called Sirventois, against Arnould, who was chaplain to Robert
Courthose in the time of William Rufus. He was apparently an excellent
man, established schools at Caen, and was afterwards promoted to be
patriarch of Jerusalem. The next attack of which we have any record was
that made by Luc de la Barr against Henry I. The nature of the
imputations it contained may be conjectured from the fact, that the king
ordered the writer's eyes to be put out. Another satire was directed
against Richard, "King of the Romans," who was taken prisoner at Lewes.
It was written to triumph over him, and taunt him with his defeat, and
the nearest approach to humour in it is where it speaks of his making a
castle of a windmill, which is supposed to refer to his having been
captured in such a building. The humour in the satires of this time was
almost entirely of a hostile or optical character. We have two metrical
ballads of the thirteenth century directe