er occur together in a
Durham MS. But whoever Orm or Ormin was, he did two very remarkable
things. In the first place, he broke entirely with alliteration and
with any-length lines, composing his poem in a metre which is either a
fifteen-syllabled iambic tetrameter catalectic, or else, as the reader
pleases, a series of distichs in iambic dimeters, alternately
acatalectic and catalectic. He does not rhyme, but his work, in the
couplet form which shows it best, exhibits occasionally the
alternation of masculine and feminine endings. This latter peculiarity
was not to take hold in the language; but the quantified or mainly
syllabic arrangement was. It was natural that Ormin, greatly daring,
and being almost the first to dare, should neither allow himself the
principle of equivalence shortly to distinguish English prosody from
the French, which, with Latin, he imitated, nor should further hamper
his already difficult task with rhyme. But his innovation was great
enough, and his name deserves--little positive poetry as there is in
his own book--high rank in the hierarchy of British poets. But for him
and others like him that magnificent mixed harmony, which English
almost alone of languages possesses, which distinguishes it as much
from the rigid syllabic bondage of French as from the loose jangle of
merely alliterative and accentual verse, would not have come in, or
would have come in later. We might have had Langland, but we should
not have had Chaucer: we should have had to console ourselves for the
loss of Surrey and Wyatt with ingenious extravagances like Gawain
Douglas's Eighth Prologue; and it is even possible that when the
reaction did come, as it must have come sooner or later, we might have
been bound like the French by the rigid syllable which Orm himself
adopted, but which in those early days only served to guide and not to
fetter.

[Footnote 90: Ed. White and Holt, 2 vols. Oxford, 1878.]

[Sidenote: _Its spelling._]

His second important peculiarity shows that he must have been an odd
and crotchety creature, but one with sense in his crotchets. He seems
to have been annoyed by mispronunciation of his own and other work:
and accordingly he adopts (with full warning and explanation) the plan
of invariably doubling the consonant after every _short_ vowel without
exception. This gives a most grotesque air to his pages, which are
studded with words like "nemmnedd" (named), "forrwerrpenn" (to
despise), "tunderrst