with his former one. We were not aware that the odds were so favorable, even when we look over the finished poetry of Pope, who has written so much, or of Gray, who has written so little. Boileau tells us he always chose a rhyme for his second line before he wrote out his first, that by this means he might secure the integrity of the sense; and this he called "the difficult art of rhyming." These are mysteries which only confirm the hazard which rhymers incur; and, on the whole, though we do marvellously escape, the poet at every rhyming line still stands in peril.

This torture of rhyme-finding seems to have occasioned a general affliction among modern poets; and an unhappy substitute was early found in arranging collec tions of rhymes, and which subsequently led to a monstrous device. In Goujet's "Bibliothèque Française," vol. iii., will be found a catalogue of these rhyming dictionaries: the earliest of the French was published in 1572. Indeed, some of these French critics looked upon these rhyming dictionaries as part of the art of poetry, recommending pocket editions for those who in their walks were apt to poetise, as if finding a rhyme would prompt a thought.

Among these early attempts is an extravagant one by Paul Boyer. It is a kind of encyclopedia, in which all the names are arranged by their terminations, so that it furnishes a dictionary of rhymes.

The demand for rhymes seems to have continued; for in 1660 d'Ablancourt Fremont published a Dictionnaire, which was enlarged by Richelet in 1667. It seems we were not idle in thridding rhymes in our own country, for Poole, in 1657, in his "Parnassus" furnishes a collection of rhymes; and he has had his followers. But the perfect absurdity or curiosity of a rhyming lexicographer appears in one of Walker's Dictionaries of the English language. As he was a skilful philologist, he has contrived to make it useful for orthography and pro

nunciation. He advances it as on a plan "not hitherto attempted;" and his volume on the whole, as Moreri observes of Boyer's, is a thing "plaisant à considérer."

A dictionary of rhymes is as miserable a contrivance to assist a verse as counting the syllables by the finger is to regulate the measure; in the case of rhyme it is sense which should regulate the verse, and in that of metre it is the ear alone which can give it melody.

4.9

THE ARTE OF ENGLISH POESIE.

AMONG the arts of English poesie, the most ample and most curious is an anonymous work.* The history of an anonymous book is sometimes liable to the most contradictory evidence. The present, first

printed in 1589, we learn from the work itself, was in hand as early as in 1553. The author inscribed the volume to Queen Elizabeth, and the courtly critic has often adroitly addressed "the most beautiful, or rather the beauty, of queens ;" and to illustrate that figure which he terms "the gorgeous," has preserved for us some of her regal verses.

Yet notwithstanding this votive gift to royalty, the printer has formally dedicated the volume to Lord Burleigh, acknowledging that "this book came into my hands with its bare title without any author's name." The author himself could not have been at all concerned in delivering this work to the press, for having addressed the volume to the queen, he would never have sought for a patron in the minister.

This ambiguous author remained unknown after the publication, for Sir John Harrington, who lived in the circle of the court, designates him as "the unknown God-father, that, this last year save one (1589), set forth a book called 'The Arte of English Poesie.' About twelve years afterward, Carew, in his "Survey of Cornwall," appears to have been the first who disclosed the writer's name as "Master Puttenham ;" but this was so little known among literary men, that three years later, in 1605, Camden only alludes to the writer

• The Arte of English Poesie, contrived in three bookes-the first of Poets and Poesie, the second of Proportion, the third of Ornament, 1589,

4to.

VOL. II.-5.

as "the gentleman who proves that poets are the first politicians, the first philosophers, and the first historiographers." Eleven years after, Edmund Bolton, in his "Hypercritica," notices "this work (as the fame is) of one of Queen Elizabeth's pensioners, Puttenham." The qualifying parenthesis "as the fame is," leaves the whole evidence in a very ticklish condition.

Even

Who was Puttenham ? A name unknown, and whose writings are unnoticed by any contemporary. the baptismal name of this writer has been subject to contradiction.*

In the work itself the writer has interspersed many allusions to himself, from his nursery to his court-days. His nurse, a right-lined ancestor of the garrulous nurse of the Capulets, had exercised his prurient faculties in expounding an indecent riddle,† which our mature

* Ames appears first to have called him Webster Puttenham. Possibly Ames might have noted down the name from Carew, as Master Puttenham, which by an error of the pen, or the printer, was transformed into the remarkable Christian name of Webster. I cannot otherwise account for this misnomer. Steevens, in an indistinct reference to a manuscript, revealed it to be George; and probably was led to that opinion by the knowledge of a manuscript work in the Harleian Collection by a George Puttenham. It is a defence of Elizabeth in the matter of the Scottish Queen. Ellis, our poetic antiquary, has distinguished our author as Webster, alias George." All this taken for granted, the last editor, probably in the course of his professional pursuits, falls on a nuncupative will, dated 1590, of a George Puttenham; already persuaded that such a name appertained to the author of the Art of English Poetry, he ventured to corroborate what yet remained to be ascertained. All that he could draw from the nuncupative will of this George Puttenham is, that he "left all his goods, moveable and immoveable, moneys, and bonds," to Mary Symes, a favorite female servant; but he infers that "he probably was the author." Yet, at the same time, there turned up another will of one Richard Puttenham, a prisoner in her Majesty's Bench." Richard therefore may have as valid pretensions to "The Arte of English Poesie" as George, and neither may be the author. This matter is trivial, and hardly worth an inquiry.

Haslewood, laborious but unfortunately uneducated, is the editor of an elegant reprint of this " Arte of English Poesie." A modern reader may therefore find an easy access to a valuable volume which had been long locked up in the antiquary's closet.

See page 157 of "The Arte of English Poesie."

critic still deemed "pretty;" but, according to one of his rhetorical technical terms, "it holds too much of the cachemphaton or foule speech, and may be drawn unto a reprobate sense." Our author was a travelled gentleman, and by his residence at various courts, seems to have been connected with the corps diplomatique, for he had been present on some remarkable occasions at foreign courts, which we discover by coeval anecdotes of persons and places. One passage relating to himself requires attention. Alluding to the polished hypocrisy practised in courts, he observes :-"These and many such-like disguisings we find in men's behaviour, and especially in the courtiers of foreign countries, where in my youth I was brought up, and very well observed their manner of life and conversation; for of mine own country I have not made so great experience."

This seems as ambiguous as any part of our author's history, for at eighteen years of age he had addressed Edward the Sixth by "Our Eclogue of Elphine." When he tells us that "he had not had so great experience of his own country as of others," we may be surprised, for no contemporary writer has displayed such intimacy with the court anecdotes of England, which have studded many of his pages. Neither does the style, which bears no mark of foreign idiom, nor the collected matter of his art of poetry, which discovers a minute acquaintance with every species of English composition, preserving for us much fragmentary poetry, at all betray a stranger's absence from home. But, what seems more extraordinary, the writer frequently alludes to learned disquisitions, critical treatises, and to dramatic compositions of his own-to "our comedy" and to "our interlude," and has frequent illustrations drawn from poems of all sorts and measures of his own growth. It is one of the singularities of this unknown person that his writings were numerous,