pleasing to the ear and suitable to the nature of the lighter kinds of verse, is inconsistent with the gravity and sublimity that characterise the higher forms of poetic expression. At the same time if the interval that separates the rhyming words be too great, their correspondence on the ear, which is the main purpose of rhyme, would be lost. When three heroic lines intervene, they seem to be set as far asunder as can be allowed with propriety. No definite rules bearing upon the subject can be deduced from the writings of our best poets, and little more can be said with certainty beyond the two broad principles stated above. The remarks that are made as to the disposition of rhymes in the pure Italian form of the sonnet, and in the Spenserian stanza, may be appropriately referred to here. In the case of imperfect rhymes, if the broader and longer vowel sound be arranged to come before the corresponding shorter one, and a hard consonant sound precede the corresponding soft sound, the discordance between them is not so disagreeable as when this order is reversed. And the same applies to a word of many syllables, the last, of course, being unaccented, rhyming with a monosyllable, the light ending should always come last.

Rhyme is a non-essential element in verse. Minstrels poured forth their lays of war and love long before the chiming of similar sounds had been thought of. In our own language traces of it are to be found as far back as the tenth century, and although Chaucer may be said to have popularised

it in his Canterbury Tales towards the end of the fourteenth century, and all succeeding poets have made use of it more or less, it was long looked down upon as a barbarous innovation, and is still regarded by some as a meretricious aid to "poesie divine.” All the very greatest poems in all languages are rhymeless. The additional restrictions that it imposes upon the freedom of the poet have caused it to be discarded in all the masterpieces of poetic art. Some few noble and lengthy poems, like Spenser's Fairie Queen and Byron's Childe Harold, no doubt owe much of their charm to its embellishments, but its use seems more suitably restricted to lyrical pieces of all kinds, as well as to verse of a descriptive and humorous kind.

ALLITERATION.

ALLITERATION is the frequent recurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words in a verse, forming a kind of initial rhyme, e.g. :

Carking care,

Green-eyed grief, and dull despair.

Kirke White.

It was an essential element in Anglo-Saxon and Old English poetry, which, for the most part, consists of short couplets containing three or four accented syllables, linked together by alliterative consonance. Here is a specimen from the opening lines of Piers the Plowman's Vision, written by Willam Langlande about 1362:

In a somer seson,

When softe was the sonne,

J. shope me in shrubbes

As I a shepe were ;

In habit as an hermit,
Unholy of workes.

Again, from the same poem:

When Chaucer began to reform our versification, and introduced the regular rhythmic flow of accented syllables and the new element of rhyme, alliteration ceased to be an essential to English verse, but it has always retained its hold as an aid and embellishment to its melody. The Elizabethan poets evinced a marked fondness for its "artful aid," and used it with great taste and skill, as for example:

In the fashionable craze called Euphuism* of Queen Elizabeth's reign, alliteration was carried to a ridiculous excess, which furnished occasion for

* Ephuism takes its name from Euphies, or the Anatomy of Wit by John Lily, a minor dramatist of Elizabeth's reign (1554-1600). It was written in a ridiculously ornate style, abounding in conceits, classical allusions, forced antitheses, and alliterations. It took the popular fancy of the time, and became much in vogue with the wits and dandies of Elizabeth's Court. Sir Walter Scott parodies its use in the Monastery in the person of Sir Percie Shafton; here is an example:

"And now having wished to my fairest Discretion those pleasant dreams which wave their pinions around the couch of sleeping beauty, and to this comely damsel the beauties of Morpheus, and to all others the common good night, I will crave your leave to depart to my place of rest."

Euphuism should not be confounded with Euphemism, which is an expression in which the offensiveness of a thought is somewhat hidden: e.g., He has gone to that other world which is not heaven."

Shakspere's mock imitation of it in Love's Labour's Lost. Holofernes, the pedantic pedagogue, writes some verses which he calls "An Extemporal Epitaph on the Death of the Deer:" they run:

The praiseful princess pierced and pricked a pretty

Pleasing pricket;

Some say, a sore; but not a sore till now made

Sore with shooting.

He ridicules the excessive use of it again in the bombastic words of Bottom:

Whereat, with blade, with bloody, blameful blade,
He bravely broached his boiling, bloody breast.

"Midsummer Night's Dream."

Nevertheless he avails himself of this simple ornament with rare felicity throughout his entire works.

This precious stone set in a silver sea.

"Richard II."

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

"Richard III.”

He capers nimbly in his lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

'Richard III.”

Myself could else out-frown false fortune's frown.

"King Lear."

Whose influence, like a wreath of radiant fire,

On flickering Phoebus front.

King Lear."

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