YUGOSLAVIA, BULGARIA 323

decasyllabic, with caesura after the fifth syllable, and the use of the
variety with pause after the fourth is associated, even In women's
songSj with narrative. The men's songs use the heroic decasyllabic
with pause after the fourth syllable. Under more modern and less
lofty conditions the octosyllable is found, especially in Bulgarian
verse; and there are some seventy-six surviving samples of an ir-
regular metre older than the heroic line. This older verse is called
'bugarstica*. The word must be connected with (Bugar* 'Bul-
garian5 ; but one is deterred from associating the thing with
Bulgaria, both because of the derivative character of Bulgarian folk-
poetry as we now have it, and because the irregular lines surviving
in Bulgarian have quite a different character. The second half of a
'bugarstica' line shows a fairly regular succession of trochees:

. . . hero Marko Kraljevicu

. . . and his brother Andrijasu

. . . glittering sabre bright and golden.

These are the second halves of trochaic tetrameters, though, they
are not unlike the second halves of 'politic1 lines also. It is to the
first hemistich that no exact rule was applied.

But indeed they two were not, oh my friends, a pair of paupers,
for of twain the one was hero Marko Kraljevicu,
hero Marko Kraljevicu, and his brother Andrijaiu,

warriors so young! (Dune iv. i. i.)

If we allow the name to influence our hypotheses, we must grant
that a Bulgar empire arose before the Serbian, and in its striving
for culture laid itself open to Byzantine influences. The Bulgarians
may have transmitted to the Serbs some notion of the Greek
trochaic tetrameter (with a more precise conception of the second
hemistich than of the first); or they may have passed on the
politic metre of the capital, adapting it to the trochaic rhythm, as
characteristic of their language as is the iambic of Greek, In any
case, this oldest of Yugoslav traditional metres witnesses by its
name to its eastern origin; and other eastern characteristics of
Serbian verse are the absence of rhyme, the use of certain set
phrases, the negative comparisons., the speaking birds, and many
leading motifs.

The 'bugarstice* are found in documents of the sixteenth cen-
tury, but from the seventeenth and onwards the heroic decasyllabic
prevails. It may have been used to renovate lost 'bugarstice*. On