George Saintsbury

“ If you do not convey the steady, fearless, ruthless tramp of the single line repeating itself; if you fail to reproduce the dropping fire of the assonance with its strangely combined advantage of repetition in the individual laisse or bundle, and freedom from monotony both in character and in quantity of sound in the several laisses—you do not give the effect of the Chanson de Roland to those who do know it, while you give something else to those who do not. ”

“ We are so fond of throwing back the accent that we have comparatively few words sounding fully on the ultimate. The habit of slurring vowel-sound, though not so usual with well educated and well-bred people as phoneticians seem to think, does to too great an extent deprive us of the sharp, full ringing effect that assonance requires, and that Old French, and Spanish of all times, afford. Lastly, there is the multiplicity,—valuable in itself and not to be sacrificed to any simplifying simpleton,—of our sound-values for the same vowel. ”

“ He has availed himself of the accenting of finals like ’ing and ’eth which was common from Chaucer to Wyatt, and did not quite cease with Surrey as well as though not too often of Chaucerian “French accentuation” generally. Some slight archaisms in language pay a double debt, and therefore justify their own borrowing doubly. Nor does he always require these. ”