§ =139.= In lyrical poems of this time and in later popular ballad poetry the Septenary is employed in another manner, namely, in four-lined stanzas of four- and three-foot verse, rhyming crosswise, each of which must be looked on as consisting of pairs of Septenaries with middle rhyme inserted (interlaced rhyme), as is clearly shown by the Latin models of these metrical forms quoted above (p. 192). Latin and English lines are thus found connected, so as to form a stanza, in a poem of the fifteenth century:
_Fréeres, fréeres, wó [gh]e bé! Mínistrí malórum, For mány a mánnes sóule bringe [gh]é Ad póenas ínfernórum._ Political Poems, ii. 249.
In many lyrical poems of the older period some stanzas rhyme in long lines, others rhyme in short lines, which shows the gradual genesis of the short-lined metre, rhyming throughout. Thus, in the poem in Wright's _Spec. of Lyr. P._, p. 90, the opening verses of the first stanza rhyme in long lines:
_My déþ y lóue, my lýf ich háte, | fór a léuedy shéne, Héo is bríht so daíes líht, | þat ís on mé wel séne_,
whereas those of the second rhyme in short lines:
_Sórewe and sýke and dréri mód | býndeþ mé so fáste, Þát y wéne to wálke wód, | [gh]ef hít me léngore láste._
Instances of this kind are frequent; but the four lines of the single stanzas are never completely rhymed throughout as short-lines, as, for instance, is the case in the opening parts or 'frontes' of the stanzas of the poems in Wright's _Spec. of Lyr. P._, pp. 27 and 83, the lines of which are far more regularly constructed. The rhymes are in these compositions still generally disyllabic.
The metrical structure of the old ballads _The Battle of Otterborn_ and _Chevy Chase_ is similar to that of the poem just quoted. In those ballads some original long lines are provided with middle rhyme, others not, so that the stanzas partly rhyme according to the formula _a b c b_, partly according to the formula _a b a b_. The versification is, moreover, very uneven, and the endings are, as a rule, if not without exception, masculine:
_Sir Hárry Pérssy cam to the wálles, The Skóttish óste for to sé; And sáyd, and thou hast brént Northómberlónd, Full sóre it réwyth mé._
The ballads of the end of the Middle English period are generally composed in far more regular lines or stanzas. The feminine endings of the Septenary are, however, as a rule replaced by masculine endings, whether the lines rhyme crosswise or only in the three-foot verses. Cf. the ballad, _The Lady's Fall_ (Ritson, ii. 110), which, however, was probably composed as late as the Modern English period: