hardly sustain itself with rhyme, denuded of this slight dress must have betrayed the squalidness of bare poverty. The "new poetry" in France, however, seems to have perplexed a learned critic; for with the learned his prejudices leaned in its favor, but as a faithful historian the truth flashed on his eyes. The French antiquary, Pasquier, stood in this awkward position, and on this subject has delivered his opinions with great curiosity and honest naïveté. "Since only these two nations, the Greeks and the Romans, have given currency to these measures without rhymes, and that on the contrary there is no nation in this universe which poetises, who do not in their vulgar tongue use rhymes, which sounds have naturally insinuated themselves into the ear of every people for more than seven or eight centuries even in Italy itself, I can readily believe that the ear is more delighted by our mode of poetry than with that of the Greeks and the Romans."* The candor of the avowal exceeds the philosophy. Our venerable antiquary had greater reason in what he said than he was himself aware of; for rhyme was of a far more ancient date than his eight centuries. It was in the Elizabethan period of our literature that, in the wantonness of learned curiosity, our critics attempted these expériments on our prosody, and, on the pretence of "reformed verse," were for revolutionising the whole of our metrical system. The musical impression made by a period consisting of long and short syllables arranged in a certain order is what the Greeks called rhythmus, the Latins numerus, and we melody or measure. But in our verse, simply governed by accent, and whose rhythm wholly depends on the poet's ear, those durations of time, or sounds, like notes in music, slow or quick, long or short, which form the quantities or the time of the measured * Pasquier.-Les Recherches de la France, p. 624, fo. 1533. VOL. II.-4 feet of the ancients, were no longer perceptible as in the inflection, the inversion, and the polysyllabic variety of the voluble languages of Greece and Rome. The arti ficial movements in the hexameter were inflicting on the ear of the uninitiated verse without melody, and, denuded of rhyme, seemed only a dislocated prose, in violation of the genius of the native idiom. Several of our scholars, invested by classical authority, and carrying their fasces wreathed with roses, unhappily influenced several of our poets, among whom were Sidney and Spenser, in their youth subservient to the taste of their learned friend Gabriel Harvey, to submit their vernacular verse to the torturous Roman yoke. Had this project of versification become popular it would necessarily have ended in a species of poetry, not referring so much to the natural ear affected by the melody of motion, as to a mechanical and severe scansion. To this Milton seems to allude in a sonnet to Lawes, the musician "Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song First taught our English music how to span With Midas' ears, committing short and long." The poet of all youthful poets had a narrow escape from "dark forgetfulness" when from the uncouth Latin hexameters, his "Fairy Queen took refuge in the melodious stanza of modern Italy. STANYHURST has left a memorable woful version of Virgil, and the pedantic GABRIEL HARVEY had espoused this Latin. intruder among the English muses. The majestic march of the Latin resounding lines, disguised in the miserable English hexameters, quailed under the lash of the satirical Toм NASH, who scourged with searching humor. "The hexameter verse I grant to be a gentleman of an ancient house (so is many an English beggar), yet this clime of ours he cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough in; he goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gait which he vaunts himself with among the Greeks and Latins." A treatise on "the New Poetry," or the Reformed Verse," for it assumed this distinction, was expressly composed by WILLIAM WEBBE, recommendatory of this "Reformation of our English verse."* Some years after Dr. THOMAS CAMPION, accomplished in music and verse, a composer of airs, and a poet of graceful fancy in masques, fluent and airy in his rhymes, seating himself in the critic's chair, renewed the exotic system. Notwithstanding his own felicity in the lighter measures of English verse, he denounces "the vulgar and inartificial custom of RIMING, which hath, I know, deterred many excellent wits from the exercise of English poetry." He calls it "the childish titillation of rime." We may regret that Dr. Campion, who composed in Latin verse, held his English in little esteem, since he scattered them whenever he was called on, and not always even printed them. The physician, for such was Campion, held too cheap his honors as a poet and a musician; however, he was known in his days as "SWEET MASTER CAMPION," and his title would not be disputed in ours. In dismissing his critical "Observations" he has prefixed a poem in what he calls "Licentiate Iambicks," which is our blank verse; it is a "A Discourse of English Poetrie; together with the Author's Judgment touching the Reformation of our English Verse," by William Webbe, graduate, 1586, 4to. "Observations on the Art of English Poesie, by Thomas Campion, wherein is demonstratively proved, and by example confirmed, that the English tongue will receive eight several kinds of numbers proper to itself, which are all in this Book set forth, and were never before this time by any man attempted, 1602." humorous address of an author to his little book consisting only of nearly five leaves: "Alas, poor book, I rue Thy rash selfe-love; go spread thy papery wings; Thy lightness cannot helpe, or hurt my fame.” The poet DANIEL replied by his "Defence of Rime," an elaborate and elegant piece of criticism, to which no reply was sent forth by the anti-rhymers. It has often been inquired how came the vernacular rhyme to be wholly substituted for the classical metres, since the invaders of the Roman empire everywhere adopted the language of Rome with their own, for in the progress of their dominion everywhere they found that cultivated language established. The victors submitted to the vanquished when the contest sorely turned on their genius. A natural circumstance will explain the occasion of this general rejection of the ancient metres. These artificial structures were operations too refined for the barbarian ear. Their bards, who probably could not read, had neither ability nor inclination to be initiated into an intricate system of metre, foreign to their ear, their tastes, and their habits, already in possession of supremacy in their own poetic art. Their modulation gave rhythm to their recitative, and their musical consonance in their terminable sounds aided their memory; these were all the arts they wanted; and for the rest they trusted to their own spontaneous emotions. Rhyme then triumphed, and the degenerate Latinists themselves, to court the new masters of the world, polluted their Latin metres with the rhymes too long erroneously degraded as mere "Gothic Barbarisms." Had the practice of the classical writers become a custom we should now be "committing long and short," and we should have missed the discovery of the new world of poetic melody, of which the Grecians and the Latins could never have imagined the existence. 41 ORIGIN OF RHYME. CONTENDING theories long divided the learned world. One party asserted that the use of Rhyme was introduced by the Saracenic conquerors of Spain and of Sicily, for they had ascertained that the Arabian poets rhymed; the other, who had traced Rhyme to a northern source among the Scandinavian bards, insisted that Rhyme had a Gothic origin; and as Rhyme was generally used among the monks in the eighth century, they imagined that in the decline of ancient literature the dexterous monks had borrowed the jingle for their church hymns, to win the ear of their Gothic lords: both parties alike concurred in condemning Rhyme as a puerile invention and a barbarous ornament, and of a comparatively modern invention. The opinions of the learned are transmitted, till by length of time they are accepted as facts; and in this state was Rhyme considered till our own days. Warton, in the course of his researches in the history of our poetry, was struck at the inaccuracy of one of these statements; for he had found that rhymed verse, both Latin and vernacular, had been practised much earlier than the period usually assigned. But Warton, though he thus far corrected the misstatements of his predecessors advanced no further. No one, indeed, as yet had pursued this intricate subject on the most direct principle of investigation; conjecture had freely supplied what prevalent opinion had already sanctioned, and we were long familiarised to the opprobrious epithet of "Monkish Rhymes." The subject was not only obscure, but apparently trivial; for Warton dismisses an incidental allusion to the origin of Rhyme by an apology for touching on it. "Enough," he exclaims in |