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This statement itself, however, certain of the learned now vehemently oppose, and bring reasons for their attitude quite different from such arguments as we have been considering for the prose poem. Rhythm itself, they maintain, is the outcome of prose. It is the child, says one bold German, of grammatical inflections and the stress of oratory. Here is fine revolution, indeed, if they have the trick to show it. Strabo, in a classic sentence,^[149] laid down the law which writer after writer has taken without question as undisputed and indisputable authority; poetry came before prose. “Flowery prose,” he said, “is nothing but an imitation of poetry,” which is the “origin of all rhetorical language,” and was at first always sung; “the very term prose,” he concludes, “which is applied to language not clothed in metre, seems to indicate ... its descent from an elevation, or chariot, to the ground.” Hence the sermo pedestris of Latin writers. Against this, now, come sundry scattered hints and at least two elaborate arguments. Vigfusson and Powell,^[150] after a consideration of old Scandinavian poetry, are fain to think that Germanic rhythm was at the start simply “excited and emphatic prose,” and make rhythm in general not an essential so much as an accomplishment and aftergrowth of poetry. Finding no metre in this same Norse poetry, none in Hebrew, Gottsched,^[151] while he allowed that songs were the earliest poetic form, thought them to have been simple unmetrical chants, as if a child should sing the Lord’s prayer. Many ballads, even English and Scottish, seem to show with other supposed primitive traits a rough and faulty structure of verse, so that certain critics, in their haste, make the lack of smooth metres a test of age,—an idea which long prevailed in regard to Chaucer’s versification. It is said^[152] that until the beginning of the seventeenth century Hungarian poetry was “quite without system, without rhythm, full of bad rimes, and mainly made up of verses joined in long, monotonous rows”; this, however, as in India, may have been the case not with lyric, but only with epic. Comparetti thinks that the Kalevala was founded upon earlier poetic or roughly rhythmic prose,—again a matter of epic; and earliest Japanese poetry, so far as it has been preserved, “is not far removed from prose.”^[153] Now and then, but not often, one is told that savage songs have no regular rhythm and no settled order in the verse. If it be true that mere counting of syllables was the earliest form of common Aryan versification, it is at first sight not so unreasonable to assume some sort of excited prose as a common basis for this system as well as for the systems of quantitative and of accentual rhythm. Moreover, as will be shown in later pages, there is a feeling abroad which runs counter to any notion of spontaneity, and insists upon a process of invention and imitation; this, too, would make against a natural rhythm,^[154] would throw out rhythm as an essential and primitive part of poetry.^[155] So much for scattered hints and observations; there are more elaborate attacks.