n the best remaining examples of mediaeval
hymn-writing may look a little pale. It is possible for criticism,
which is not hypercriticism, to object to the pathos of the _Stabat_,
that it is a trifle luscious, to find fault with the rhyme-scheme of
_Jesu dulcis memoria_, that it is a little faint and frittered; while,
of course, those who do not like conceits and far-fetched
interpretations can always quarrel with the substance of Adam of St
Victor. But those who care for merits rather than for defects will
never be weary of admiring the best of these hymns, or of noticing
and, as far as possible, understanding their perfection. Although the
language they use is old, and their subjects are those which very
competent and not at all irreligious critics have denounced as
unfavourable to poetry, the special poetical charm, as we conceive it
in modern days, is not merely present in them, but is present in a
manner of which few traces can be found in classical times. And some
such students, at least, will probably go on to examine the details of
the hymn-writers' method, with the result of finding more such things
as have been pointed out above.

[Sidenote: _The rhythm of Bernard._]

Let us, for instance, take the rhythm of Bernard the Englishman (as he
was really, though called of Morlaix). "Jerusalem the Golden" has made
some of its merits common property, while its practical discoverer,
Archbishop Trench, has set those of the original forth with a
judicious enthusiasm which cannot be bettered.[10] The point is, how
these merits, these effects, are produced. The piece is a crucial one,
because, grotesque as its arrangement would probably have seemed to
an Augustan, its peculiarities are superadded to, not substituted
for, the requirements of classical prosody. The writer does not avail
himself of the new accentual quantification, and his other licences
are but few. If we examine the poem, however, we shall find that,
besides the abundant use of rhyme--interior as well as final--he
avails himself of all those artifices of what may be called
word-music, suggesting beauty by a running accompaniment of sound,
which are the main secret of modern verse. He is not satisfied, ample
as it may seem, with his double-rhyme harmony. He confines himself to
it, indeed, in the famous overture-couplet--

"Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus!
Ecce! minaciter imminet arbiter ille supremus."

[Footnote 10: _Sacred Lati