r kind of thing. In
the first place, it appears to be (though it would be rash to affirm
this positively of anything in a form so popular with the French
_trouveres_ as the _debat_) original and not translated. It bears a
name, that of Nicholas of Guildford, who seems to be the author, and
assigns himself a local habitation at Portesham in Dorsetshire.
Although of considerable length (nearly two thousand lines), and
written in very pure English with few French words, it manages the
rhymed octosyllabic couplet (which by this time had become the
standing metre of France for everything but historical poems, and for
some of these) with remarkable precision, lightness, and harmony.
Moreover, the Owl and the Nightingale conduct their debate with plenty
of mother-wit, expressed not unfrequently in proverbial form. Indeed
proverbs, a favourite form of expression with Englishmen at all times,
appear to have been specially in favour just then; and the "Proverbs
of Alfred"[96] (supposed to date from this very time), the "Proverbs
of Hendyng"[97] a little later, are not likely to have been the only
collections of the kind. The Alfred Proverbs are in a rude popular
metre like the old alliteration much broken down; those of Hendyng in
a six-line stanza (soon to become the famous ballad stanza) syllabled,
though sometimes catalectically, 8 8 6 8 8 6, and rhymed _a a b c c
b_, the proverb and the _coda_ "quod Hendyng" being added to each.
The _Owl and the Nightingale_ is, however, as we might expect,
superior to both of these in poetical merit, as well as to the
so-called _Moral Ode_ which, printed by Hickes in 1705, was one of the
first Middle English poems to gain modern recognition.

[Footnote 95: About 600 lines of this are given by Morris and Skeat.
Completely edited by (among others) F.H. Stratmann. Krefeld, 1868.]

[Footnote 96: Ed. Morris, _An Old English Miscellany_. London, 1872.]

[Footnote 97: See _Reliquiae Antiquae_, i. 109-116.]

[Sidenote: _Robert of Gloucester._]

As the dividing-point of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
approaches, the interest of literary work increases, and requires less
and less allowance of historical and accidental value. This allowance,
indeed, is still necessary with the verse chronicle of Robert of
Gloucester,[98] the date of which is fixed with sufficient certainty
at 1298. This book has been somewhat undervalued, in point of strict
literary merit, from a cause rather ludicrous bu