we have two trisyllabic feet followed by a foot in which both syllables are accented, forming a fine contrast. (c.) These are the usual variations. Such a line as the first of quotation 8 is too rugged to be correct; it has too many syllables: the second of quotation 9 has too few: both may be instances of faulty transmission. It is possible to read them with their proper metre, but the effect is unpleasing, whereas the effect of the other variations quoted is the reverse. All the variations arose, possibly, by accident; it is more than possible they were faulty slips of amateur ballad-singers seized upon by good craftsmen as means of embellishing and varying the sing-song of the measure. 5. (a.) Referring again to quotation 15,— Alàs! | then saỳd | good Rò|byn, | alàs | and wèll | a wòo!| As already suggested in (b) of the previous section, this line has the eighth syllable dropped, and reads normally by the insertion of “Hood” after “Robyn.” It will be noted that the syllable dropped is one which when present bears an accent; and though lines such as this, containing thirteen syllables, do not often occur in English ballads, it is the normal line of the Danish and German ballad. The great German epic, the “Nibelungen Noth,” is written entirely in this thirteen-syllabled line, varied in the same way that the English line is varied. In old pieces it is written as one line; in later compositions it is split in two just as the English line is, and a mid-rime further disguises it; as in Œhlenschlaeger's “Thor in Helheim”:— His mood and trust enduring, He hasted through the night; The darkness, less obscuring, Was slowly lost in light. One saw where torches glimmered Within the chasm, as if The moon had fall'n, and shimmered, Caught in a cloven cliff. In this metre the stanzas are, as a rule, made up of either four lines of thirteen syllables, or eight of seven and six alternately. The latter is the case when mid-rime occurs, as in example quoted; the former is the case where there is no mid-rime, as in the case of the German epic, and in the Danish poet Winther's series of tales entitled “Woodcuts.” A stanza of similar construction is that employed by Allan Ramsay in “Christ's Kirk on the Green.” (b.) Quotation 11, again, has, as noted, a foot dropped in each line:— And yf I toke it twyse, a shame it were to me; And trewly, gentyll knyghte, welcome arte thou to me.