They were sung to a musical accompaniment, and were composed chiefly in bacchiac, anapaestic, or cretic metres, rapidly interchanging with trochaic lines.

This is in Hunt’s reformed heroic couplet: the rest are in a chirruping and gossiping anapaestic sing-song which is perhaps the writer’s most congenial vein.

The metre also lacks uniformity, veering from iambic to anapaestic form.