Until the seventeenth century, the ear of modern Europe was so little wearied with rhyme, that in spite of the protes tations of the classical school, it fairly revelled in this new element of metrical sweetness. The same rhyme was often carried through a great number of verses, and in many poems all the stanzas have the same set of terminations, a sufficient variety to satisfy the taste of the times being obtained by differently arranging the rhymes in consecutive stanzas. Satiety at last produced a reaction which concurred with other influences in restricting the use of like endings, and we often meet with evidences of a disposition to avoid the use of repetitions of sound in prose. Thus, the Germans say Auf- und Niedergang for Aufgang und Niedergang, the Spaniards facil-y subitamente for facilmente y subitamente, and we fair- and softly, for fairly and softly. The Tuscan Canzone, in which the consonances are "few and far between," shows that even the rhyme-loving Italian feels the necessity of making the recurrence of this ornament less frequent, and its regularity less palpable, in the highest order of lyric poetry, than in lighter compositions. The modern license in the use of rhymes has grown, in great measure, out of a wearinesss of perpetual repetition, but it is partly founded on the example of earlier poets, who are mistakenly supposed often to have used imperfect rhymes, when in fact, in the orthocpy of their times, the consonance was complete. The articulation, and, consequently, the prosody of languages is much affected by the character of their grammatical inflections. Where inflections exist, the syntactical relations of the words and the intelligibility of the period depend upon them, and they must consequently be pronounced with a certain distinctness. The orthoepy of most languages in- · clines to make the inflectional element conspicuous. If it consists in the addition of syllables to the radical, then a principal, or at least a secondary accent will fall upon some of the variable syllables. The vowels, though few in number, will be of frequent occurrence, open in articulation, and broadly distinguished from each other. The consonants will be clear and detached in their pronunciation. If inflection is made by vowel-change, the vowels will be numerous and subtilely distinguished, and the consonants, though more numerous, will become relatively less prominent. Examples of this may be found on the one hand in the small number of vowel-sounds and the clear, staccato articulation of the consonants in Italian and Spanish, and on the other in the obscurity of the consonants, and the multiplied shades of vowel-sound in the Danish. So long as the predominant mode of inflection in English was by the letter-change, the attention was constantly drawn to the essential quality of the vowel, and even a slight difference in this respect struck the ear more forcibly than at present, when inflection by terminal augment is so common. Hence, a departure from the law of strict consonance was much less likely to be tolerated, and I am persuaded that the number of imperfect rhymes in old English authors will be found to be constantly fewer as we advance in the knowledge of their orthoepy. After the introduction of Norman words, with their aug mentative inflections, the system of letter-change fell into great confusion, and all well-grounded principle of declension and conjugation seems to have been lost sight of. The derangement of the strong inflections continued for centuries, and the poets took advantage of this to vary the characteristic vowel in almost any way that suited the convenience of their rhymes. Guest sneers at the ignorance of those who suppose that Spenser's licenses in this respect were unauthor ized innovations of his own, but I cannot assent to this view of the subject. For though Spenser may have found in ballads and other popular literature precedents for most of his inflectional extravagances, yet some of them, at least, were violations of the analogies of the language, and without the sanction of any real authoritative example. But the licenses of Spenser were by no means limited to anomalous vowelchanges, for he abbreviated or elongated words for the sake of rhythm or consonance as unscrupulously as he substituted an open vowel for a close, or the contrary. We have already seen that he resolved the diphthongal i into its elements, and made like a dissyllable rhyming with seek, and with equal boldness he cuts down cherish to cherry, that he may pair it off with merry, embathe to embay, for the sake of a rhyme to away, and converts contrary into a verb by dropping the final vowel; on the other hand he lengthens nobless into nobeless, and dazzled into dazzeled. Thomas Heywood uses double and triple rhymes with much grace and dexterity, and it is the more remarkable that so expert a versifier should have allowed himself to disguise so important a word as Deity for the sake of a consonance: By the reflex of Iustice and true Piety, This, however, is but a tame license compared to that by which, in the third book of the Hierarchie, he reduces the goodly polysyllable intoxicated to the humble form of 'toxt.* *On the same page (edition of 1635, p. 134) there is a catachresis in the employment of indenturing, which makes it very enigmatical to all readers except those who know how legal indentures were anciently drawn up and cut apart. But Heywood, like many old English writers, was of opinion that man is the lord, not the slave of language, and he often proved a hard master to the words that served him. The great number of English words which are incapable of rhyme, and the few which agree in any one of our numerous endings, reduce the poet to a very limited variety of choice, and there are many pairs of words which are found as invariably together as length and strength, breath and death, or wealth and stealth, gold and cold. When you see frivolity at the end of a line, you do not need your eyes to tell you that jollity cannot be far off; mountains and foun tains are as indissolubly united in rhyme as they are in physical geography, and if a poet qualifies an object as frigid, he never fails to inform you in the next line that it is also rigid. The consequence of this perpetual repetition is a weariness of all exactness in rhymes, and a tendency to great license in the use of imperfect consonances. The proper relief is to be found, not in a self-indulgent laxity, a repudiation of the fetters of verse, but in a bold return to the poetical wealth, both of form and substance, of our ancient tongue; and the certainty that we shall there find unexhausted, though long neglected, mines of ores and gems, should be, for poetic natures, an argument of no small force for the study of primitive English. There are, in both the Gothic and the Romance languages, equivalents or substitutes for rhyme, some of which have not been employed at all, others not systematically, in English poetry. The introduction of them well deserves inquiry, and the character of these devices, and the possibility of their restoration as metrical elements will be considered and illustrated in other lectures. LECTURE XXIV. ACCENTUATION AND DOUBLE RHYMES. THE modes of consonance which may be, and y different nations have been, employed as essential elements of the poetical form, are very various. The prosody or metrical system of the classical languages is founded on quantity, that of modern literature on accentuation. Each system necessarily excludes the characteristic element of the other, not indeed from accidental coincidence, or altogether, from consideration in practice, but from theoretical importance as an ingredient in poetic measure. Quantity, as employed by the ancients, has been generally supposed to consist simply in the length or relative duration of different syllables in time of utterance. To us, mere quantity is so inappreciable, that we * * The terms long and short, employed in popular English orthoepy, are usually wholly misapplied. Most of our vowels have two long sounds, and the corresponding short sounds are often expressed not by the same, but by different letters. The propriety of the terms long and short, as truly descriptive appellations, expressive, simply, of relative duration in time, is, to say the least, very questionable, even when applied to cases where the same character is employed for both. It is not true that short sounds, simply by a more leisurely utterance, necessarily pass into long ones, and vice versa, for if so, the short vowels of a slow delivery would be the long ones of a rapid pronunciation, which is by no means the fact. An attentive examination of the position of the organ |