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| | §3. Foreign Influence. XVIII. The Prosody of Old and Middle English. Vol. 1. From the Beginnings to the Cycles of ... |
 | | Further, this heritage of Old English manifests itself in the octosyllabic couplet; and, in the version of Genesis and Exodus, which is assigned to about the middle of the thirteenth century, anticipates exactly the Christabel metre which Coleridge thought he invented more than five hundred years later. |
 | | In one all-important particular, however, the foreign influence exercisedby French altogether and, by Latin, in the greatest part by far of its recent and accentual verse writingin the direction of strict syllabic uniformity, is not, indeed, universally, but to a very large extent, and stubbornly, resisted. |
 | | But, in one point which had made for this latter, English refused to surrender; and that was the admission of trisyllabic feet, as some phrase it, or, as some prefer to describe the process, the admission of extra unstressed syllables. |
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