“He had all the qualities of a great poet, but he wasted his genius writing love verses to Radegonde.  The story is a curious one.  Radegonde was the daughter of the King of Thuringia; she was made prisoner by Clotaire I., son of Clovis, who forced her to become his wife.  On the murder of her father by her husband, she fled and founded a convent at Poictiers.  There she met Fortunatus, who, it appears, loved her.  It is of course humanly possible that their love was not a guilty one, but it is certain that the poet wasted the greater part of his life writing verses to her and her adopted daughter Agnes.  In a beautiful poem in praise of virginity, composed in honour of Agnes, he speaks in a very disgusting way of the love with which nuns regard our Redeemer, and the recompence that awaits them in Heaven for their chastity.  If it had not been for the great interest attaching to his verse as an example of the radical alteration that had been effected in the language, I do not think I should have spoken of this poet.  Up to his time rhyme had slipped only occasionally into the verse, it had been noticed and had been allowed to remain by poets too idle to remove it, a strange something not quite understood, and yet not a wholly unwelcome intruder; but in St Fortunatus we find for the first time rhyme cognate with the metre, and used with certainty and brilliancy.  In the opening lines of the hymn, ‘Vexilla Regis,’ rhyme is used with superb effect....

“But for signs of the approaching dissolution of the language, of its absorption by the national idiom, we must turn to St Gregory of Tours.  He was a man of defective education, and the lingua rustica of France as it was spoken by the people makes itself felt throughout his writings.  His use of iscere for escere, of the accusative for the ablative, one of St Gregory’s favourite forms of speech, pro or quod for quoniam, conformable to old French porceque, so common for parceque.  And while national idiom was oozing through grammatical construction, national forms of verse were replacing the classical metres which, so far as syllables were concerned, had hitherto been adhered to.  As we advance into the sixth and seventh centuries, we find English monks attempting to reproduce the characteristics of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse in Latin; and at the Court of Charlemagne we find an Irish monk writing Latin verse in a long trochaic line, which is native in Irish poetry.

“Poets were plentiful at the court of Charlemagne.  Now, Angilbert was a poet of exquisite grace, and surprisingly modern is his music, which is indeed a wonderful anticipation of the lilt of Edgar Poe.  I compare it to Poe.  Just listen:—­

    “’Surge meo Domno dulces fac, fistula versus: 
    David amat versus, surge et fac fistula versus. 
    David amat vates, vatorum est gloria David
    Qua propter vates cuncti concurrite in unum