express the same ideas as they do in the scanning of classic verse. The English poet is guided by his ear, and reads those learned names only to forget them. The length of the verse is dependent on another circumstance to which we shall now advert.

CHAPTER XIII.

OF RHYME AND ALLITERATION.

It is plain that, were every word a monosyllable, we should have no such thing as Accent in the sense of Stress. Its place would be filled by Emphasis, which is regulated solely by the feelings of the speaker. There would then be no marks to inform the reader where those emphases should be laid, and the chant of verse would be uncertain, if not wholly unknown. Such was nearly the case, at a certain period, among the nations of the North; and their poets had recourse to other expedients, to adapt their songs to the music of the harp: those were Rhyme and Alliteration.

The Saxon hriman, or hryman, is to cry out, or make a sound, whether pleasing or mournful; and is so far equivalent to the Swedish skalla, to echo, or to ring. Hringan, or ringan, in Saxon, is to ring; and hrime, rim, or rima, the origin of the English Rhyme, is resonance, or echo. Rim, or rima, was also number,—the rythmos of the Greeks; -and Arithmetic, in the language of our ancestors, was rimcraft. From skalla, the poets of Scan

dinavia had the name of Skalds, in the same manner as our versifiers have been termed Rhymesters: the latter, however, is, with us, become a degraded appellation, because a poet is supposed to have higher qualifications than the petty talent of tagging Rhymes. In modern usage Rhyme is the similitude of sounds, recurring at certain intervals, as distinguished from the Rhythm, or relation of the feet. The arrangement of the Rhythm is the metre, or measure of the verse.

The Rhymes (ring, or clink, of syllables) now mark the termination of the verse; but, in former times, they followed so rapidly that two or three Rhymes were often written in the same line. The following by Snorro Sturlson, an Icelandic poet of the 13th century, has an excess of jingle:

"Ræsir glæsir

Rökkva dökva
Huitom ritom

Hreina reina

Skreytir breytir

Hrafna stafna

Hringa stinga

Hiörtum svörtum

In English" The king richly clothes his rustic warriors. Our bounteous prince adorns them, neat and expert, with bright armour, to

K

These Liliputian Lyrics seem sufficiently ridiculous; but, on examination, we shall find that this extra-rhyming propensity was common among our forefathers. Harum-scarum; Helterskelter; Higgledy-piggledy; Hocus-pocus; Pellmell, and other clinking compounds have found their way into the Dictionaries.

In a legitimate English rhyme, the two corresponding syllables must begin their consonance with the accented vowel and preserve it through the remaining letters. Thus, text and vext, song and long, echo one another, respectively, in the sounds ext and ong. They are the sounds and not the letters which require to be similar; for reign and plain, though different to the eye, form an unobjectionable rhyme. The letter or letters, in the syllable, which precede the accented vowel must not be the same in each, otherwise the consonance would be disagreeable to an English

ear.

Hence tend and the last syllable of contend make a bad rhyme. The practice of the French poets is otherwise; and, provided the meaning of the syllables be different, the initial consonants may not only be the same, but their being so is accounted a beauty. Our older poets differ from the modern, on this subject, allowing them

selves the same latitude as the French. Thus

Chaucer:

And specially fro euery shyres ende

Of Englonde to Canterbury they wende
The holy blisful martir for to seke

That hem hath holpen, when they were seke.

Again;

Here in this tale, as thei should stande
My wit is short, ye maie well understande.

This admission of complete consonances (les Rimes riches, as the French term them) formed a characteristic feature in English rhyme until the beginning of the seventeenth century. They are numerous in Spenser; and Daniel appears to have collected them with great care, as ornaments to his verse: for such rhymes as deed and indeed, charge and discharge, light and delight, are to be found in every page of his works. The practice, however, had not then been universal, for Drayton, who was Daniel's contemporary, has wholly excluded it from his multitude of verses. Milton makes a rhyme of knot and not; but probably the k, in the former word, was pronounced in his time, as it still is in Scotland. This articulation of kn would be sufficiently distinct from that of the simple n, to authorize the rhyme under our