on English pronunciation. The study of AngloSa-xon and OldEnglish grammar will be attended with like results. We may, therefore, hope that the further corruption of our orthoepy will be arrested, and that we may recover something of the fulness and distinctness of articulation, which appear to have characterized the ancient Anglican tongue.* * Scholars familiar with Ellis's learned and able essay on Early English pronunciation will find many of the foregoing observations superfluous, many more, I fear, ill-founded; but it is too late for me to attempt a revisal of my statements, and I must let them go for what they are worth, contenting myself with referring to the labors of Mr. Ellis as not only more complete, but as better authority than my own. I would also once more refer the reader to a very able article on this subject in the North American Review, 1864. LECTURE XXIII. RHYME. An important difference between the great classes of languages which we have considered in former lectures-those, namely, abounding in grammatical inflections, and those comparatively destitute of them—is the more ready adaptability of the inflected tongues to the conventional forms of poetical composition. In other words, they more easily accommodate themselves to those laws of arrangement, sequence, and recurrence of sound-of rhythm, metre, and rhyme-by which verse addresses itself to the sensuous ear and enables that organ, without reference to the subject, purport, or rhetorical character of a given writing, to determine whether it is poetry or prose. An obvious element in this facility of application to poetical use, is the independence of the laws of position in syntax which belongs especially to inflected languages, for it is evidently much easier to give a prosodical form to a period, if we are unrestricted in the arrangement of the words which compose it, than if the parts of speech are bound to a certain inflexible order of succession. Metrical convenience has introduced inversion among the allowable licenses of English poetry, and some modern writers have indulged in it to a very questionable extent; but at all events its use is necessarily very limited, and it cannot be employed at all without some loss of perspicuity. A more important poetical advantage of a flectional grammar, is the abundance of consonances which necessarily characterizes it. Wherever there are uniform terminations for number, gender, case, conjugation, and other grammatical accidents, where there are augmentative, diminutive, and frequentative forms, there of course must be a corresponding copiousness of rhymes. English, possessing few inflections, has no large classes of similar endings. On the contrary, it is rich in variety of terminations, and for that reason poor in con sonances. The number of English words which have no rhyme in the language, and which, of course, cannot be placed at the end of a line, is very great. Of the words in Walker's Rhyming Dictionary, five or six thousand at least are without rhymes, and consequently can be employed at the end of a verse only by transposing the accent, coupling them with an imperfect consonance or constructing an artificial rhyme out of two words. Of this class are very many important words well adapted for poetic use, such as warmth, month, wolf, gulf, sylph, music, breadth, width; depth, silver, honor, virtue, worship, circle, epic, earthborn, iron, citron, author, echo; others, like courage, hero, which rhyme only with words that cannot be used in serious poetry; others again which have but a single consonance, as babe, astrolabe, length, strength. Our poverty of rhyme is perhaps the greatest formal difficulty in English poetical composition. In the infancy of our literature, it was felt by Chaucer, who concludes the Complaint of Mars and Venus with this lamentation: And eke to me it is a great penaunce, Sith rime in English hath soch scarcite, Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce. The successors of Chaucer have felt the burden of the embarrassment, if they have not echoed the complaint. Walker's Rhyming Dictionary contains about thirty thousand words, including the different inflected forms of the same word. In this list the number of different endings is not less than fourteen or fifteen thousand, and inasmuch as there are in the same list five or six thousand words or endings without rhyme, as I have already stated, there remain about nine thousand rhymed endings to twenty-five thousand words, so that the average number of words to an ending, or, which comes to the same thing, the number of rhymes to the words capable of rhyming, would be less than three. The Rhyming Dictionary indeed contains scarcely half the English words admissible in poetry, and of those that form its vocabulary, many are wholly un-English and unauthorized, but there is no reason to suppose that the proportions would be changed by extending the list. If we compare our own with some of the Romance languages, we shall find a surprising difference in the relative abundance and scarcity of rhymes. The Spanish poet Yriarte, in a note to his poem La Música, states the number of endings in that language at three thousand nine hundred only, among which are a large number that occur only in a single word. Now as the Spanish vocabulary is a copious one, we shall be safe in saying that there are probably more than thirty thousand Spanish words capable of being employed in poetry. The inflections are very numerous, and while our verb love admits of but seven forms, namely, love, loves, lovest, loveth, lovedest, loving, and loved, the corresponding Spanish verb amar has more than fifty. Nouns distinguish the numbers; pronouns and adjectives generally, and articles always, both genders and numbers, and we may assume that the words, upon an average, admit of at least three forms. This would give about one hundred thousand forms with less than four thousand endings, or twenty-five rhymes to every word. This is but a rough estimate, and it must be observed that, from the strictness. of the laws of Castilian prosody, as compared with the Italian, many rhymes, which Tasso would have used without scruple, would be disapproved in Spanish, except in ballads and other popular poetry. Words of the same class, whose consonance depends wholly on grammatical ending, are sparingly coupled, and absolute coincidence of sound is disallowed, as in most other languages. Hence, while a maba and callaba would be regarded as a license, hallaba and callaba would be inadmissible. For this reason, and because also the article and other unimportant words cannot well be used at the end of a verse, the number of Spanish rhymes available in practice is considerably less than the calculation I have just given would make it. I am inclined to believe that the endings are more numerous, and consequently the rhymes fewer, in Italian than in Spanish, although still very abundant as compared with the poverty of English consonances; and this may explain the greater freedom of the Italian poets in the use of them.* Tasso even employs * · Rosasco, Rimario Toscano, Padova, 1763, gives the number of Italian endings at 5,042. The list of unrhymed words contains 500, each capable of two forms. identical rhymes almost as liberally as Gower; and in the second canto of the Gerusalemme Liberata I find the following pairs: Viene conviene, face verb and face noun, voti devoti, immago mago, impone appone, irresolute solute, riveli veli, esecutrice vendicatrice, volto participle and volto noun, spiri sospiri, lamenti rammenti tormenti, sole console, compiacque piacque, and nearly twenty more equally objectionable on the score of too perfect consonance. Poverty in rhyme is one of the reasons why the talent of improvisation, so common and so astonishingly developed in degree in Italy, is almost unknown in England and among ourselves.* Besides the ease of rhyming, the general flexibility of the Italian language, and its great freedom of syntactical movement as compared with the rigidity of most other European tongues, adapt it to the rhythmical structure of verse as remarkably as the abundance of similar inflectional endings facilitates the search for rhymes. It is this quality of flexibility of arrangement which gives it so great an advantage over the Spanish in ease of versification, notwithstanding the greater number of like terminations in the latter. The structure of the Spanish period, whether in poetry or in *To those who have not witnessed the readiness and dexterity of Italian improvisatori, their performances are incredible, and they are perhaps even more inexplicable to those who have listened to them. The following is an instance which fell under my own observation: An eminent improvisatore, in spending an evening in a private circle, was invited to give some specimens of his art. He composed and declaimed several short poems on subjects suggested by us, with scarcely a moment's preparation. They were in a great variety of metres, and very often accommodated to bouts rimés, or blank rhymes, furnished by the party, and purposely made as disparate as possible. In one instance, he communicated to me privately the general scope of thought to be woven into a sonnet, and proposed that the party should furnish the blank rhymes, a subject, and two lines from any Italian poet which might occur to us. He was then to accommodate the proposed train of thought to the rhymes and the subject, and to introduce the two verses which should be suggested. The rhymes were prepared, and the subject given was the Penknife. I remember but one of the lines which he was required to interweave. It was, Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella! (Depart in peace, fair and blessed soul !) The sonnet, really a very spirited one, was composed and ready for delivery in less time than we had spent in collecting and arranging the rhymes. |