o show it in any great volume or
variety. The Spanish ballads are uniformly written in trochaic
octosyllables (capable of reduction or extension to six, seven, or
nine), regularly assonanced in the second and fourth line, but not
necessarily showing either rhyme or assonance in the first and third.
This measure became so popular that the great dramatists adopted it,
and as it thus figures in the two most excellent productions of the
literature, ballad and drama, it has become practically identified in
the general mind with Spanish poetry, and not so very long ago might
have been described by persons, not exactly ignorant, as peculiar to
it.

[Sidenote: _Ballad-metre theory._]

But when we turn to the _Poema del Cid_ we find nothing like this. It
is true that its latest and most learned student, Professor Cornu of
Prague,[195] has, I believe, persuaded himself that he has discovered
the basis of its metre to be the ballad octosyllables, full or
catalectic, arranged as hemistichs of a longer line, and that he has
been able to point out some hundreds of tolerably perfect verses of
the kind. But this hypothesis necessitates our granting that it was
possible for the copyists, or the line of copyists, of the unique MS.
in the vast majority of cases to mistake a measure so simple, so
universally natural, and, as history shows, so peculiarly grateful to
the Spanish ear, and to change it into something quite different.

[Footnote 195: I have not seen Professor Cornu's paper itself, but
only a notice of it by M. G. Paris in _Romania_, xxii. 153, and some
additional annotations by the Professor himself at p. 531 of the same
volume.]

[Sidenote: _Irregularity of line._]

For there is no question but that at first sight, and not at first
sight only, the _Poema del Cid_ seems to be the most irregular
production of its kind that can claim high rank in the poetry of
Europe. It is not merely that it is "rough," as its great northern
congener the _Nibelungenlied_ is usually said to be, or that its lines
vary in length from ten syllables to over twenty, as some lines of
Anglo-Saxon verse do. It is that there is nothing like the regular
cadence of the one, or (at least as yet discovered) the combined
system of accent and alliteration which accounts for the other. Almost
the only single feature which is invariable is the break in the middle
of the line, which is much more than a mere caesura, and coincides not
merely with the end of