his impatience, "has been said on a subject of so little importance; "'* and it is curious to observe, that the same vexatious exclamation occurred to a French literary antiquary. "We must not believe," said Lenglet du Fresnoy, "that we began to rhyme in France about 1250, as Petrarch pretends. The romance of Alexander existed before, and it is not probable that the first essay of our versification was a great poem. Abelard composed love-songs in the preceding century. I believe Rhyme was still more ancient; and it is useless to torment ourselves to discover from whom we learned to rhyme. As we always had poets in our nation, so we have also had Rhyme." Thus two great poetical antiquaries in England and France had been baffled in their researches, and came to the same mortifying conclusion. They were little aware how an inquiry after the origin of Rhyme, could not be decided by chronology.

The origin of Rhyme was an inquiry which, however unimportant Warton in his despair might consider it, had, though inconclusively treated, often engaged the earnest inquiries of the learned in Italy and in Spain, in Germany and in France. It is remarkable that all the parties were equally perplexed in their researches, and baffled in their conclusions. Each inquirer seemed to trace the use of Rhyme by his own people to a foreign source, for with no one it appeared to be of native growth. The Spaniard Juan de la Enzina, one of the fathers of the Spanish drama, and who composed an "Art of Poetry," (Arte de Trovar, as they expressively term the art of invention,) fancied that Rhyme had passed over into Spain from Italy, though in the land of Re

* Warton's Second Dissertation on the Introduction of Learning into England.

Lenglet du Fresnoy - Preface to his edition of the Roman de la Rose.

dondillas the guitar seemed attuned to the chant of their Moorish masters; but in Italy Petrarch, at the opening of his epistles, declares that they had drawn their use of Rhyme from Sicily; and the Sicilians had settled that they had received it from the Provençals; while those roving children of fancy were confident that they had been taught their artless chimes by their former masters, the Arabians! Among the Germans it was strenuously maintained that this modern adjunct to poetry derived its origin and use from the northern Scalds. Fauchet, the old Gaulish antiquary, was startled to find that rhyme had been practised by the primitive Hebrews!

Fauchet, struck by discovering the use of rhyme among this ancient people, and finding it practised by the monks in their masses in the eighth century, suggested for its modern prevalence two very dissimilar causes. With an equal devotional respect for "the people of God," and for the monks, whom he considered as sacred, he concluded that "possibly some pious Christian by the use of rhyme designed to imitate the holy people;" but at the same time holding, with the learned, rhyme to be a degenerate deviation from the classical metres of antiquity, he insinuates, "or perchance some vile poetaster, to eke out his deficient genius, amused the ear by terminating his lines with these ending unisons." He had further discovered that the Greek critics had, among the figures of their rhetoric, mentioned the homoioteleuton, or consonance. The abundance of his knowledge contradicted every system which the perplexed literary antiquary could propose; and impatiently he concludes,-"rhyme has come to us from some part of the world, or nation, whoever it may be; for I confess I know not where to seek, nor what to conclude. It was current among the people,

and the languages which have arisen since the ruin of the Roman empire."*

Since the days of ancient Fauchet, no subsequent investigators, even such great recent literary historians as Warton, Quadrio, Crescembini and Gray, Tiraboschi, Sismondi and Ginguené, have extricated us by their opposite theories from these uncertain opinions. It was reserved for the happy diligence of the learned. Sharon Turner to explore into this abyss of darkness.† To defend the antiquity of the rhyming Welsh bards, he pursued his researches through all languages, and demonstrated its early existence in all. His researches enable us to advance one more step, and to effect an important result, which has always baffled the investigators of these curious topics.

Rhyming poems are found, not only in the Hebrew but in the Sanscrit, in the Bedas, and in the Chinese poetry, as among the nations of Europe. It was not nnknown to the Greeks, since they have named it as a rhetorical ornament; and it appears to have been practised by the Romans, not always from an accidental occurrence, but of deliberate choice.

To deduce the origin of rhyme from any particular people, or to fix it at any stated period, is a theory no longer tenable. The custom of rhyming has predominated in China, in Hindustan, in Ethiopia; it chimes in the Malay and Javanese poetry, as it did in ancient Judea this consonance trills in the simple carol of the African women; its echoes resounded in the halls *Much curious matter will be found in the rare volume of Fauchet's Recueil de l'Origine de la Langue et Poesie Françoise Ryme et Romans; plus les Noms et Summaire des Œuvres de cxxvii. Poètes François vivant avant l'an мccc.; liv. i. ch. vii., 1610, 4to."

† See "Two Inquiries respecting the Early Use of Rhyme," by Sharon Turner, Esq. Archeologia, vol. xiv. The subject further enlarged, "On the Origin and Progress of Rhyme in the Middle ages.”—Hist. of England, iv. 386.

The second book the Chinese children read is a collection conveyed in rhyming lines. - Davis on the Chinese.

of the frozen North, in the kiosque of the Persian, and in the tent of the Arab, from time immemorial. RHYME must therefore be considered as universal as poetry itself.

De

Yet rhyme has been contemned as a "monkish jingle," or a "Gothic barbarism;" but we see it was not peculiar to the monks nor the Goths, since it was prevalent in the vernacular poetry of all other nations save the two ancient ones of Greece and Rome. lighting the ear of the man as it did of the child, and equally attractive in the most polished as in the rudest state of society, rhyme could not have obtained this universality had not this concord of returning sounds a foundation in the human organization influencing the mind. We might as well inquire the origin of dancing as that of rhyming; the rudest society as well as the most polished practised these arts at every era. thus it has happened, as we have seen, that the origin of rhyme was everywhere sought for and everywhere found.

And

46

RHYMING DICTIONARIES.

If our poets in rhyme dared to disclose one of the grand mysteries of their art, they would confess that, to find rhymes for their lines is a difficulty which, however overcome, after all has botched many a fine verse; the second line has often altered the original conception of the preceding one. The finest poems in the language, if critically examined, would show abundant evidence of this difficulty not overcome. This difficulty seems to have occurred to our earliest critics, for GasCOIGNE, in his "Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Rhyme in English”—and WEBBE, in his "Discourse," repeats the precept-would initiate the young poet in the art of rhyme-finding: the simplicity of the critic equals the depth of his artifice.

"When you have one verse well settled and decently ordered, which you may dispose at your pleasure to end it with what word you will; then whatsoever the word is, you may speedily run over the other words which are answerable thereunto (for more readiness through all the letters alphabetically)* whereof you may choose that which will best fit the sense of your matter in that place; as, for example, if your last word end in book, you may straightway in your own mind run them over thus-book, cook, crook, hook, look, nook, pook, &c., &c. Now it is twenty to one but always one of these shall jump with your former word and matter in good sense."

The poet in rhyme has therefore in his favor "twenty to one" of a chance that his second line may "jump”

* Here is the first idea of "A Dictionary of Rhymes," which has inspired so many unhappy bards.