t voice of the doom of life, to be "le seul livre aimable" which
Judaism had produced. The ages of St Francis and of the _Imitation_ do
not compel us to look about for a _seul livre aimable_, but it may
safely be said that there is none more amiable in a cheerful human way
than the _Ancren Riwle_.

It would serve no purpose here to discuss in detail most of the other
vernacular productions of the first half of the thirteenth century in
English.[92] They are almost without exception either religious--the
constant rehandling of the time cannot be better exemplified than by
the fact that at least two paraphrases, one in prose, one in verse, of
one of the "doles" of the _Ancren Riwle_ itself exist--or else
moral-scientific, such as the _Bestiary_,[93] so often printed. One of
the constantly recurring version-paraphrases of the Scriptures,
however--the so-called _Story of Genesis and Exodus_,[94] supposed to
date from about the middle--has great interest, because here we find
(whether for the first time or not he would be a rash man who should
say, but certainly for almost, if not quite, the first) the famous
"Christabel" metre--iambic dimeter, rhymed with a wide licence of
trisyllabic equivalence. This was to be twice revived by great poets,
with immense consequences to English poetry--first by Spenser in the
_Kalendar_, and then by Coleridge himself--and was to become one of
the most powerful, varied, and charming of English rhythms. That this
metre, the chief battle-ground of fighting between the accent-men and
the quantity-men, never arose till after rhymed quantitative metre had
met accentual alliteration, and had to a great extent overcome it, is
a tell-tale fact, of which more hereafter. And it is to be observed
also that in this same poem it is possible to discover not a few very
complete and handsome decasyllables which would do no discredit to
Chaucer himself.

[Footnote 92: Substantial portions of all the work mentioned in this
chapter will be found in Messrs Morris and Skeat's invaluable
_Specimens of Early English_ (Oxford, Part i. ed. 2, 1887; Part ii.
ed. 3, 1894). These include the whole of the _Moral Ode_ and of _King
Horn_. Separate complete editions of some are noted below.]

[Footnote 93: Wright, _Reliquiae Antiquae_, i. 208-227.]

[Footnote 94: Ed. Morris, E.E.T.S., London, 1865.]

[Sidenote: _The_ Owl and the Nightingale.]

[Sidenote: _Proverbs._]

But the _Owl and the Nightingale_[95] is anothe