aditions of the vanquished Celts to blend with
theirs, and, in spite of their conversion to Christianity, they
preserved, almost without change, the main characteristics of the race
from which they were descended.

Their vocabulary, save for the introduction of a few words, taken from
the Church Latin, their grammar, their prosody, all remain Germanic. In
their verse the cadence is marked, not by an equal number of syllables,
but by about the same number of accents; they have not the recurring
sounds of rhyme, but they have, like the Germans and Scandinavians,
_alliteration_, that is, the repetition of the same letters at the
beginning of certain syllables. "Each long verse has four accented
syllables, while the number of unaccented syllables is indifferent, and
is divided by the caesura into two short verses, bound together by
alliteration: two accented syllables in the first short line and one in
the second, beginning with any vowel or the same consonant"[40] (or
consonants giving about the same sound):

_F_lod under _f_oldan | nis thaet _f_eor heonon.

"The water sinks underground; it is not far from here." (_Beowulf._) The
rules of this prosody, not very difficult in themselves, are made still
easier by a number of licenses and exceptions. The taste for
alliteration was destined to survive; it has never completely
disappeared in England. We find this ornamentation even in the Latin of
poets posterior to the Norman Conquest, like Joseph of Exeter in the
twelfth century:

_Au_dit et _au_det
Dux _f_alli: _f_atisque _f_avet quum _f_ata recuset.[41]

The famous Visions of Langland, in the fourteenth century, are in
alliterative verse; under Elizabeth alliteration became one of the
peculiarities of the florid prose called Euphuism. Nearer to our own
time, Byron makes a frequent use of alliteration:

Our bay
Receives that prow which proudly spurns the spray;
How gloriously her gallant course she goes:
Her white wings flying--never from her foes. (_Corsair._)

The purely Germanic period of the literary history of England lasted six
hundred years, that is, for about the same length of time as divides us
from the reign of Henry III. Rarely has a literature been more
consistent with itself than the literature of the Anglo-Saxons. They
were not as the Celts, quick to learn; they had not the curiosity,
loquacity, taste for art wh