Leonine Verses, irregular forms of Latin verse which arose in the middle ages under the influence of the minstrels, who applied the accentual system of verse to Latin in defiance of quantity. They were used for epigrams, satires, and also for the hymns of the church, and were fairly naturalised in Europe by the end of the 11th century. The name specially applies to verses rhymed as well as accentual, and more especially to groups of alternate hexameter and pentameter verses, rhymed at the middle and end. They owe their name to Leoninus, a canon of the church of St Victor, in Paris, about the middle of the 12th century, or, as others say, to Pope Leo II., who was a lover and improver of music. The finest poem in this form is the famous De Contemptu Mundī of Bernard of Morlaix. A familiar example is the couplet:
Demon languebat, monachus tunc esse volebat,
Ast ubi convalluit, mansit ut ante fuit.
Another is the famous epitaph of Bede in the Galilee Chapel of Durham Cathedral:
Hāc sunt in fossā Bædæ venerabilis ossa.
Traces of this kind of versification appear here and there in the Roman poets, especially in Ovid, in some of whose Epistles, indeed, they are as common on an average as once in every eight lines. An example from Ovid is
Quot cælum stellas, tot habet tua Roma puellas.
Camden gives some curious specimens from Walter de Mapes, Michael, the Cornish poet, and Dan Elingham, a monk of Linton. The story of the Jew who, having fallen into a refuse-pit on Saturday, would not be helped out, because it was his Sabbath, while the Christian, who offered him assistance, refused to do so next day, because it was his, runs thus in Leonine verse:
Tende manus, Salomon, ego te de stercore tollam;
Sabbata nostra colo, de stercore surgere nolo.
Sabbata nostra quidem, Salomon, celebrabis ibidem.
We find the same metrical device employed in many English poems, as in Shelley's Cloud.