Through glades and glooms the mingled measure stole, Love of peace, and lonely musing, In hollow murmurs died away. Where Meander's amber waves In ling'ring lab'rinths ereep. Lo! where Mœotis sleeps, and hardly flows The freezing Tanais through a waste of snows. Collins. Gray. The last example is said to have been Pope's favourite couplet; but his reasons for the preference are by no means obvious. The voice, to be sure, lingers with the river; but why so many sibilants? CHAPTER VI. RHIME, is the correspondence, which exists between syllables, containing sounds similarly modified. When the same modification of sound recurs at definite intervals, the coincidence very readily strikes the ear; and when it is found in accented syllables, such syllables fix the attention more strongly, than if they merely received the accent. Hence we may perceive the importance of rhime in accentual verse. It is not, as is sometimes asserted, a mere ornament; it marks and defines the accent, and thereby strengthens and supports the rhythm. Its advantages have been felt so strongly, that no people have ever adopted an accentual rhythm, without also adopting rhime. Every accented syllable contains a vowel; hence a rhiming syllable may be divided into three parts—the initial consonants, or those which precede the vowel, the vowel itself, and lastly the final consonants. Rhime may be divided into different kinds, accordingly as one or more of these elements correspond. The first species is the perfect rhime, or that which requires a correspondence in all the three. It is called by the French the rich rhime, and by that people is not only tolerated but sought after. With us it has been very generally discountenanced. The second kind is alliteration, or that in which only the initial sounds correspond. It pervades all our earlier poetry, and long held control over our English rhythms. We do not, however, stop here to discuss its properties; we shall content ourselves merely with one observation. Rask tells us, that when the rhiming syllables of an AngloSaxon verse began with vowels, such vowels were, if possible, different. This rule, which was first laid down by Olaus Wormius, appears to be a sound one. It seems to me a simple deduction from one more general. The alliterative syllables of an Anglo-Saxon verse rhimed, I believe, only with the initial consonants. In very few instances have I found the vowels corresponding. When the initial consonants were wanting, the law of alliteration was looked upon as satisfied, and the vowels, now become the initial letters, were found to be different. The third and fourth kinds of rhime are the vowel and consonantal. The former, which required only a correspondence in the vowels, was once common among the Irish; but has never been adopted into English verse. The latter rhimed only with the consonants. It was well 66 known to our ancestors and the kindred races of the north: Olaus Wormius exemplifies it in the following quotation from Cicero: non docti sed facti." When both the final and the initial consonants correspond, it may be called, for distinction's sake, the full consonantal rhime. In the fifth kind of rhime, the vowels correspond and also the initial consonants; in the sixth, the vowels and final consonants. The former has been generally confounded with alliteration. It was principally affected by those poets, who wrote after the subversion of our regular alliterative rhythms, and may perhaps be conveniently designated as modern alliteration. The latter is our common rhime, of which we have too much to say elsewhere, to dwell upon it here. We have hitherto assumed the rhime to be confined to a single accented syllable. Sometimes, however, it reaches to the following syllable, and occasionally to the two following syllables. In such case the supernumerary syllable or syllables must be unaccented. The rhime, when thus extended, takes the names of double and triple rhime. ་ It has ever been a rule in our prosody, that, when the rhime becomes double or triple, the unaccented syllables must rhime perfectly. King James, in his "Reulis and Cautelis," warns you warns you "quhen there fallis any short syllabis after the lang syllabe in the line, that ze repeit thame in the lyne quhilk rymis to the uther, even as ze set them downe in the first lyne, as for exempyll ze man not say Bot Then feir nocht Then feir nocht Nor heir nocht. repeating the same nocht in baith lynis; because this syllabe nocht nather serving for cullour nor fute is bot a tayle to the lang fute preceding." The "Reule" is better than the reason. It is but too often violated. Even Chaucer, for the most part so careful in his rhimes, has sometimes broken it. In his roguish apology for the indiscreet disclosures of his Sompnour, he tells us, Of cursing ought eche guilty man him drede, Prologue. Clare, the Northamptonshire poet, whose poems in general show great facility, has tried his hand at the triple rhime; Then come ere a minute's gone, For the long summer's day Puts her wings | swift as linnets on For hieing away; Then come with no doubt ings near To fear a false love, For there's nothing without | thee, dear, Can please in Broomsgrove, &c. * A writ issuing out of Chancery to enforce obedience to the Ecclesiastical Courts. But one of the commonest and most offensive blunders is the misplacing of the accent, as in the following couplet of Swift, But as to comic Aristophanes The rogue | too vicious and too | prophane | is. Another, almost as offensive, and perhaps more common, is the ending one of the rhimes with an accented syllable. Proceed to Tragics: first | Euripides (An author where I some times dip | adays,) : Is rightly censured: by the Stag yrite Because his numbers: do | not fadge | aright. The last syllables of the adverbs ought to be accented, adays, aright. If the reader wish for more examples of the triple rhime, he may consult Swift's letter to Sheridan, from which I have quoted. Out of more than a dozen couplets he may find two or three rhiming decently. FINAL RHIME, or that which occurs at the end of a verse, is now almost the only one recognised in our language. It is, however, in all probability, foreign in its origin, and made its way amongst us slowly and with difficulty. As this opinion. has been controverted, I will lay the reasons, which led me pt to form it, briefly before the reader. In the first place, I know of no poem, written in a Gothic dialect with final rhime, before Otfrid's Evangely. This was written in Frankish, about the year 870. The rhiming Anglo-Saxon poem, which Conybeare discovered in the Exeter MS. can hardly be older than the close of the tenth century; and though other poems contain rhiming passages, I doubt if any of them existed before the ninth. Now we have many rhiming Latin poems written by Englishmen, some as early as the seventh century. This seems to show, that the use of final rhime was familiar to the scholar, before it was adopted into the vernacular language. It may be asked, whence the Latinist |