The

With regard to double rhymes in the serious heroic couplet, they have been exploded among us, ever since we fell under the formal spirit of the French school of Louis the Fourteenth's time. Waller, I believe, is the last writer of eminence in whom they are to be found; and in him they are very rare, and probably confined to his younger verses. Yet it is curious, that the rhyme in heroic French poetry is alternately single and double; in Italian poetry, it is all double. In both instances, words have dictated to thoughts. Italian language is so abundant in words of more than one syllable, and in accents upon the last syllable but one, that, except in lyric pieces (where the understood accompaniment of music has modified the more formal rules of composition in all languages, and where the Italian singer nevertheless stretches out one terminating sound into two, whenever he can), a rhyming monosyllable has a quaintness and singularity in it, almost as startling as a box on the ear. It is for this reason, that whenever Pulci and the other old poets made use of it, they took the liberty of adding a syllable, or of restoring one which custom had cut off. In the case of the French, their stock of ultimate and penultimate accents is more equally divided than in either Italian or English; and as their poetry, though

in the flow of its lines it really has more of the Italian freedom than ours, yet for want of equal vigour to either, has fallen more under the necessity of distinguishing itself from prose, they gladly availed themselves of the circumstance, and made a rhyming system out of the alternation above-mentioned.* In English, we have so many monosyllables, in addition to our stock of final accents, that when the sense of elegance and regularity became superior with us to passion and the love of truth, the superabundance of single rhymes had a natural tendency to throw out the double ones. Matter became secondary to manner;

* In the works of Drummond of Hawthornden (Songs and Sonnets, Part I.) is a poem written after the French rhyming fashion, the only one (as far as I am aware) in the language. The following is a specimen, selected for the graceful vision in it :

66 Methought through all the neighbour woods a noise
Of choristers, more sweet than lute or voice,
(For those harmonious sounds to Jove are given
By the swift touches of the nine-string'd heaven,-
Such air has nothing else) did wound mine ear,
No soul but would become all ear to hear :
And whilst I listening lay, O lovely wonder !
I saw a pleasant myrtle cleave asunder,-

A myrtle great with birth,-out of whose womb

Three naked nymphs more white than snow, forth come ;

For nymphs they seemed. About their heavenly faces,

In waves of gold, floated their curling tresses," &c.

and by a natural consequence, the manner was not the best, but proceeded upon secondary assumptions. Poetry came under a sort of court regulation. Good sense (as it was interpreted), that is to say, the reigning sense of the artificial world in contradistinction to that of the world universal, undertook to order and put upon its good behaviour the impulses of genius, as though it were a thing for a levee; till at length, like the feelings of the audiences at court theatres in the time of the prince above-mentioned, the sense of the ridiculous, and even of the pathetic, fell under a conventional government; and people were not to laugh or to weep, except as the mode permitted. Luckily, being a king, and not accustomed to have any propensity checked, his Majesty, for all his face-making, could not help laughing at Moliere's humour; upon which, though with reluctance, (for the poet had attacked them), all the courtiers began loyally shaking their shoulders, and comedy carried the day. The feelings of audiences in those times must have been less called upon to restrict themselves to a polite sense of the pathetic, because there was less tragedy to disconcert them; and in both cases, the Parisian city theatres sometimes vindicated nature, and reversed the judgments of the court. Yet so long does fashion

succeed in palming its petty instincts upon the world for those of a nation and of nature, that it is only of late years that the French have ceased to think some of the most affecting passages in Shakspeare ridiculous; such, for instance, as that in which Hamlet speaks of the shoes with which his mother had followed her husband to the grave.

"A little while or ere those shoes were old,

With which she followed my poor father's body," &c.

66

"What?" said they, "a queen, and talk of her shoes!" as if it was the queen and not the wife, of which Hamlet was speaking; or sorrow disrespected things homely; or the very abstract indifference of the shoes did not come in finely, as of a piece with her conduct. Yet the English themselves, no great while since, half blushed at these criticisms, and were content if the epithet "bizarre" ("votre bizarre Shakspeare") was allowed to be translated into a wild, irregular genius." Every thing was wild and irregular except rhymesters in toupees. A petty conspiracy of decorums took the place of what was becoming to humanity, and poets were absolutely thought not to write with nature, unless they could bring the most manifest proofs that they did it with art. A man remaining unmoved over a pathetic passage, or moved only by a sense of its unfashionable style, might with

propriety have adopted the answer given by the clown, when he was asked why he did not weep at an affecting sermon: "I am not of this parish."

I have made a compromise in this matter of double rhymes. I have altered them to single ones, wherever I felt that they could be readily discarded, or without gainsaying the impulse with which I wrote. In the other cases, I have retained them. My first determination, in sitting down to correct the Story of Rimini, was to discard them altogether. I was prevented by a couplet in a great poet, which I cannot at present find. But I was wrong in the misgiving; for I wrote them out of a real impulse, and not a pretended one; and I may venture to think, that impulses of this kind are a proper modification of the style of those who feel them. To deny them for the sake of denying, would be as foolish a thing as for a painter to efface the most involuntary touches of his pencil, not because they were out of nature, but because they were out of fashion. There is a consistency in manner as well as matter. The foliage of every species of tree does not suit every other, nor would be very safely displaced for any. And after all, the use which I have made of double rhymes, is a revival, not an innovation. That they are in themselves not incompatible with the greatest feeling and seriousness, might be shown, not