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The reason why the 'common metre' of our hymn books and the fourteen syllable line of Chapman's Homer is such easy reading is because of the short alternate lines of six and eight syllables.

As it is a variety of ‘common metre’, it is easily fitted to popular tunes, and so it becomes a regular type of verse, both for ambitious poets and for ballad-minstrels like the author quoted above.

For purposes of poetry there was only one nation—the Germanic—split into many dialects and groups, but possessed of a common metre, a common style, a common standard of heroic feeling: and any deed of valour performed by any Germanic chief might become a fit subject for the poetry of any Germanic tribe of the heroic age.

C.M., chirurgi� magister, master in surgery; common metre.

Orchest. under διποδία, διαποδισμὸς ποδίκρα.1603.Perhaps it was connected with the trochaic dipodia, which appears to have been the common metre in these choral songs, though mixed with cretics, spondees, dactylic, and logaœdic verses.1604.Aristoph.