Reformers and
"Papists," intentional ribaldry no doubt began. But such a thing as,
for example, the "Missa de Potatoribus"[6] is much more significant of
an unquestioning familiarity than of deliberate insult. It is an
instance of the same bent of the human mind which has made very
learned and conscientious lawyers burlesque law, and which induces
schoolboys and undergraduates to parody the classics, not at all
because they hate them, but because they are their most familiar
literature.

[Footnote 5: _Carmina Burana_, Stuttgart, 1847; _Political Songs of
England_ (1839), and _Latin Poems attributed to Walter Mapes_ (1841),
both edited for the Camden Society by T. Wright.]

[Footnote 6: Wright and Halliwell's _Reliquiae Antiquae_ (London, 1845),
ii. 208.]

At the same time this comic degradation, as may be seen in its
earliest and perhaps its greatest practitioner Aristophanes--no bad
citizen or innovating misbeliever--leads naturally to elaborate and
ingenious exercises in style, to a thorough familiarity with the
capacities of language, metre, rhyme. And expertness in all these
things, acquired in the Latin, was certain sooner or later to be
transferred to the vernacular. No one can read the Latin poems which
cluster in Germany round the name of the "Arch-Poet,"[7] in England
round that of Map, without seeing how much freer of hand is the Latin
rhymer in comparison with him who finds it "hard only not to stumble"
in the vernacular. We feel what a gusto there is in this graceless
catachresis of solemn phrase and traditionally serious literature; we
perceive how the language, colloquially familiar, taught from infancy
in the schools, provided with plentiful literary examples, and having
already received perfect licence of accommodation to vernacular
rhythms and the poetical ornaments of the hour, puts its stammering
rivals, fated though they were to oust it, out of court for the time
by its audacious compound of experience and experiment.

[Footnote 7: On this Arch-Poet see Scherer, _History of German
Literature_ (Engl. ed., Oxford, 1886), i. 68.]

[Sidenote: _Examples of its verbal influence._]

The first impression of any one who reads that exceedingly delightful
volume the Camden Society's _Poems attributed to Walter Mapes_ may be
one of mere amusement, of which there are few books fuller. The
agreeable effrontery with which the question "whether to kiss Rose or
Agnes" is put side by side with that "whether i