Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/63

been to copy French rimes. This art was Alliterative poetry, as seen in Cadmon's lines on the Deluge: —

For mid Fearme
Fære ne moston
Wæg liðendum
Wætres brogan
Hæste Hrinon
ac hie Halig god
Ferede and nerede.
Fiftena stod
Deop ofer Dunum
Sæ Drence flod.^[1]

Conybeare traces this love of Alliteration in English poets down to 1550, and Earle traces it on farther to 1830. Byron's noble line on the Brunswicker's death at Quatre Bras is well known. I can bear witness, from my own schoolboy recollections, to the popularity of this old metre in 1849.^[2] This it is that has kept alive phrases like ‘weal and woe,’ ‘born and bred,’ ‘sooth to say,’ ‘fair or foul,’ ‘kith and kin,’ ‘bed and board,’ ‘make or mar,’ ‘might and main.’^[3]

1. Conybeare's Anglo-Saxon Poetry, xxxiii.
2. We were fond of an old ballad, beginning with —

   ‘All round the rugged rocks
   The ragged rascal ran.’

3. It has sometimes substituted a Romance for a Teutonic word; thus we now say ‘safe and sound,’ not ‘hale and sound,’ our fore­fathers' phrase.