The following short passage (ll. 23-34) will suffice to illustrate these combinations of metres:
_Nís no wúmmen ibóren | þét þe béo ilíche, Ne nón þer nís þin éfning | wiðínne héoueríche. Héih is þi kínestól | onúppe chérubíne, Biuóren ðíne léoue súne | wiðínnen séraphíne. Múrie dréameð éngles | biuóren þín onséne, Pléieð and swéieð | and síngeð bitwéonen. Swúðe wél ham líkeð | biuóren þe to béonne, Vor heo néuer né beoð séad | þi uéir to iséonne. Þíne blísse ne méi | nówiht únderstónden, Vor ál is gódes ríche | anúnder þíne hónden. Álle þíne uréondes | þu mákest ríche kínges; Þú ham [gh]íuest kínescrúd, | béies and góldrínges._
Lines 26 and 34, perhaps also 25 and 30, are Septenaries, l. 28 is the only line of the poem which contains two beats in both hemistichs (hemistichs of this sort are further found in the first hemistich of ll. 3, 12, 44, 72, 77, and in the second of ll. 30, 45, 46, 52, and 70); the remaining lines of this passage are most naturally scanned as Alexandrines.
§ =144.= Now, this unsystematic combination of Alexandrines and Septenaries is a metre which was especially in vogue in the Middle English period. In this metrical form two religious poems, _The Passion of our Lord_ and _The Woman of Samaria_ (Morris, _Old English Miscellany_), were composed so early as the beginning of the thirteenth century. From the first we quote ll. 21-4:
_Léuedi þu bére þat béste chíld, | þat éuer wés ibóre; Of þe he mákede his móder, | vor hé þe hédde ycóre. Ádam ánd his ófsprung | ál hit wére furlóre, Ýf þi súne nére, | ibléssed þu béo þervóre._
Many lines of these poems may be scanned in both ways; in the third line of the preceding extract, for instance, we may either take the second syllable of the word _ofsprung_, in the manner of the usual even-beat rhythm, to form a thesis (in this case hypermetrical, yielding an epic caesura), or we may regard it as forming, according to ancient Germanic usage, a fourth arsis of the hemistich, which would then belong to a Septenary. At any rate, this scansion would, in this case, be quite admissible, as indeed the other licences of even-beat rhythm all occur here.
It is in this metre that the South English Legends of Saints (_Ms. Harleian_ 2277) and other poems in the same MS., as the _Fragment on Popular Science_ (fourteenth century), are written. The same holds good for Robert of Gloucester's Rhyming Chronicle (cf. _Metrik_, i, §§ 113, 114). Mätzner (in his _Altengl. Sprachproben_, p. 155), and Ten Brink (_Literaturgeschichte_, i, pp. 334, 345) concur in this opinion, while Trautmann (in _Anglia_, v, Anz., pp. 123-5), on a theory of metrical accentuation which we hold to be untenable, pronounces the verses to be Septenaries.