CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE. LITERARY FOLLIES. THE Greeks composed Lypogrammatic Works; works in which one letter of the alphabet is not employed. A Lypogrammatist is a letter-dropper. In this manner Tryphiodorus wrote his Odyssey; he had not & in his first book; nor ẞ in his second; and so on with the subsequent letters one after another. Addison humourously observes on this Lypogrammatist who excluded the whole four and twenty letters in their turns, and shewed them, one after another, that he could do his business without them. This Odyssey imitated the Lypogrammatic Iliad of Nestor, a poet, who lived in the reign of the emperor Severus. Among other works of this kind Athenæus mentions an ode by Pindar, in which he had purposely omitted the letter S; so that this inept ingenuity appears to have been one of those literary fashions which are sometimes encouraged even by those who should first oppose such progresses into the realms of non sense. There is in Latin a little prose work of Fulgentius, which the author divides into twenty-three chapters, according to the order of the twentythree letters of the Latin alphabet. From A to O are still remaining. The first chapter is without A; the second without B; the third without C; and so with the rest. Du Chat, in the Ducatiana, says, there are five novels in prose of Lopes de Vega; the first without A, the second without E, the third without I, &c. Who will attempt to examine them? The Orientalists are not without this literary folly, as we learn from the following anecdote. A Persian poet read to the celebrated Jami a gazel of his own composition, which Jami did not like; but the writer replied it was notwithstanding a very curious sonnet, for the letter Aliff was not to be found in any one of the words! Jami sarcastically replied, you can do a better thing yet; take away all the letters from every word you have written. To these works may be added the Ecloga de Calvis, by Hugbald the Monk. All the words of this silly work begin with a C. It is printed in Dornavius. Pugna Porcorum; all the words beginning with a P, in the Nugæ Venales. Canum cum cattis certàmen; the words beginning with a C: a performance of the same kind in the same work. Gregorio Leti presented a discourse to the Academy of the humourists at Rome, throughout which he had purposely omitted the letter R, and he entitled it the exiled R. A friend having requested a copy as a literary curiosity, for such he considered this idle performance, Leti to shew it was not so difficult a matter, replied by a copious answer of seven pages, in which he had observed the same severe ostracism against the letter R! When a writer can take pleasure in such puerile fancies, he must be incapable of exerting a sublime or elegant imagination. It has been well observed of these minute triflers that extreme exactness is the sublime of fools, whose labours may be well called, in the language of Dryden, "Pangs without birth, and fruitless industry." 'Tis a folly to sweat o'er a difficult trifle, And for silly devices invention to rifle. I shall not dwell on the wits who composed verses in the forms of hearts, wings, altars, and true-love knots; nor those, not less absurd, who expose to public ridicule the name of their mistress by employing it to form their acrostics. I have seen some of the latter, where both sides and cross name is made acrostic, must ways, the name of the mistress or the patron has been sent down to posterity with eternal torture. The great difficulty where one out four times in the same have been to have found words by which the letters forming the name should be forced to stand in their particular places. Puttenham in that very scarce book "The Art of Poesie,” p. 75, gives several odd specimens of poems in the forms of lozenges, rhomboids, pillars, &c. Some of them from Oriental poems communicated by a traveller. Puttenham is a very lively writer, and has contrived to form a defence for describing and making such trifling devices. He has done more, he has erected two pillars himself to the honour of Queen Elizabeth; every pillar consists of a base of eight syllables, the shaft or middle of four, and the capital is equal with the base. The only difference between the two pillars, consists in this; in the one "ye must read upwards,” and in the other the reverse. These pillars, notwithstanding this fortunate device and variation, are of equal duration, and may be fixed as two columns in the porch of the vast temple of literary folly. It was at this period when either words or verse were tortured into such fantastic forms, that the trees in gardens were gardens were twisted or mangled into giants, or peacocks, or flower-pots, and obelisks, &c. In a copy of verses "To a hair |