RHYMES BY RULE.* THERE be certain subjects which will tempt

the writer to the end. It must be a good many years now since one Horatius Flaccus indited in good round verse a treatise about the "art of poetry," and that there is yet more to be said upon the comprehensive subject would appear from the effort before us, for which we are indebted to his latest successor in the field, Mr. Brewer, who is, however, contented to discourse to us in prose upon this weighty matter, in a book which is after all rather one of selection and quotation than of anything else; and in the following-out of it we are constantly confronted by an old question which has puzzled us very much over and over again,—what is " Ear" in matters of poetry and its attendant art of scansion P Mr. Brewer discourses a great deal upon the question, especially in dealing with blank verse, where, without rhyme to guide and assist, the difficulty of ascertaining what is correct, and what is not, often seems quite insoluble. We have known two good men and true, both sound scholars and both no mean rhymers themselves, discuss to exhaustion, and without conclusion, the true pro- nunciation of the well-known lines in Hamlet : - " Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsdd in death."

• Orthomotry ; a Treatise on the Art of Ver.leation and the Technicalities of Poetry. With a Now and Complete Rhyme(' By R, r. Brower, B.A., .author of ",A Manual of English Prosody." EhLoenronar:VW. Deacon and Co. 1893. That " hearsed" here must be pronounced as " hears6d," was clear and agreed upon. But " canonized"? "Canonized," according to the common rule, or "canonized," by special rule ? The second would be admittedly correct to the ear, and the first irregular. But correctly irregular ? or incorrectly irregular ? According to the one, it was a barbarism ; according to the other, a sweet and powerful irregularity, the swing of "canonized," in that connection, having a peculiar and stately beauty of its own, which need not jar upon a true oar at all. The same pleader at the same time admitted that, in the only other instance (in King John) where the word occurs,-

" And thou shalt be canonized, Cardinal," "canonized," and "canonized" alone, must be the true em- phasis. To no ear could " canonise " read correctly there, without utter stumbling. Who can say which was right, save and except a committee upon Ear and Emphasis, which would establish nothing P And, after all, the perpetual discussion has a charm of its own, and we do not wonder that every new Hamlet first thinks of a new reading. We wish one of them would try a favourite fancy of the present writer's, and, re- membering how traditional has become the familiar monotone of the Prince to his father,— "Wherein we saw thee quietly inurned," —with its solemn roll of the last two solemn words, would simply think out the emphasis of the line himself,—the " emphasis-word," if we may use the phrase, for there generally is one if we look for it. After all, "quietly inurned " is merely a graceful and pathetic expression. Throughout Hamlet ocular evidence is perpetually appealed to as the one justification of the ghostly theme of the play :- " As I stand here, I saw him."

"But for the sensible and true avouch Of mine own eyes," &c.

Would not a startled and strong leaning upon the third word- " Wherein we saw thee quietly inurned,"- with no emphasis but only accent on the later words, give a novel force and reality to the old familiar language P We commend the idea to our next Hamlet—probably Mr. Alexander—as passer par la, has become more and more the recognised plea to the succession. Mr. Irving seems almost the first of the tragedians, who, having once made the part of Hamlet his own, is content to let the perturbed spirit rest as far as he is concerned, and to trust mainly to other characters for the mellowing of his strange magnetic power.

We apologise to Mr. Brewer for such a digression from his book, into which, however, his book led us. For in his dis- cussion of perfect and imperfect lines, he comments upon Shakespeare's indifference to the popular law against " weak " endings to a line, in the sense of personal or relative pro- nouns or auxiliary verbs. True enough that Shakespeare displays such indifference often enough. But Mr. Brewer selects this curious instance from The Tempest :- " If by your art, my dearest father, you have Put the wild waves in this roar, allay them."

Justly enough, he says that " have " and " put " must run without division or break. But why should he make two lines scan so very oddly, instead of two which would scan very well by another division ? The first line as it stands is halting enough, but the second,— " l'at tha wild waves in this raar, allay than" ! Can any one doubt the lines to run thus :— " if by your art, my dearest father, you [a slight and just emphasis]

Have pat tilt: wild waves in this roar, allay than "

That masterly irregularity increases in Shakespeare's plays as his life progresses and his work matures, is no doubt a just observation. The mighty rush of his line grows more regard- less of obstacles as hie mastery over its music increases, and Mr. Brewer holds that the blank verse of his latest plays is the result of "careful labour and ripened judgment" (the latter rather than the former, we suspect), " directed by an instinctive sense and faculty divine for beauty and melody." Carelessness in its stricter sense would appear rather the attribute of his later than his earlier work, when we find that Furnival dis- covered his proportion of "run-on" to " end-stopt " lines to be one in eighteen in Love's Labour's Lost, increasing to one in two in Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale ; while there is no "light ending" in The Two Gentlemen, and only one in the Midsummer-Night's Dream. They begin to appear plenti- fully in Macbeth, and amount to from five to seven per cent. in the later plays. But we are led away by the old fascination, the ceaseless delight in the " Curiosities of Shakespeare," amongst which, as a curious instance of the intense strength of monosyllables for purposes of scansion, we fail to find here recorded the fact that in one case Shakespeare has no less than five consecutive lines of them—fifty words, all the lines being regular, and "Heav'n "—just at the end, the only abbreviation. The lines are in King John in the scene between the King and Hubert. These lengthenings and shortenings of words are very beautiful in the poet's hands. Who but he could make such a musical irregularity as " With willing sport to the wild oce—an,"—in one of the earliest plays, by-the-bye P About that time-honoured puzzle, the Sonnet, Mr. Brewer finds occasion to be instructive and amusing. We take him to be rather of our own opinion, that it is really a very easy kind of thing to write up to a point by no means to be despised, rather than the immense feat which Mark Pattison and others have held it. We imagine Shakespeare to have poured out these wonderful sonnets of his with less of com- parative efforts than even the most apparently facile of his dramatic lines, even as he sang the exquisite lyrics, in which we cannot agree with Mr. Brewer that any even of his contemporaries quite equalled him. And as to the sonnet in its rival and more complex form, "The Petrarchan," it has always seemed to us more like an ingenious essay in rhyming than anything else, whose very rules are as great a help to it as the gradus to a big Greek exercise. Of course, a great poet may deck it forth with any amount of noble poetry, but its essence is the same. The following English version of Lope de Vega's " Sonnet on the Sonnet," by Mr. James G. Gibson, is both appropriate and new to us :— " To write a sonnet doth Julia press me— [Sic, but surely "my Julia," Mr. Brewer?]— I've never found me in such stress or pain ; A sonnet numbers fourteen lines, 'tie plain, And three are gone ere I can say, God bless me ! '

I thought that spinning lines would sore oppress me, Yet here I'm midway in the last quatrain! And if the foremost tercet I begin, The quatrains need not any more distress me.

To the first tercet I have got at last, And travel through it with such right goodwill That with this line I've finished it, 1 ween I'm in the second now, and see how fast The thirteenth line comes tripping from my quill ; Hurrah ! 'tis done ! Count if there be fourteen."

It would be difficult to follow out more whimsically, yet exactly, the precept, that the " subject-matter of the poem should con- sist of one idea, or one emotion elaborately wrought out throughout, and complete in itself. The principal idea should be stated in the first quatrain, and illustrated and elaborated in the second ; then follows a pause. In each of the two tercets it should be again treated differently, and brought to a close with a dignity fully equal to the opening note, combined with epigrammatic force." In his selected instances of the sonnet, Mr. Brewer is appropriate if not new, the Shakespearian "sessions of sweet silent thought," and the Miltonian " Massacre in Piedmont," taking their accus- tomed places with their accustomed appropriateness. The later selections are very inadequate.

The chapter on "Poetic Trifles" introduces us pleasantly enough to the " Triolet " and the " Sestina," and the "Villanelle" and the " Ballade " and the " Rondelay," and to other such fanciful and poetic triflings, with instances of various kinds, of which one of the " Sestina," from Swin- burne, is by far the best, as it necessarily would be, as we doubt whether any such master of verbal music has ever yet arisen, and any singer with such a perfect ear. And the two little triolets which Mr. Brewer gives us are an effective contrast,—the first because, short as it is, it strikes us as such a real little piece of finished workmanship, the second because it does not. The first is Austin Dobson's :- " I intended an ode— But Rose crossed the road

And it turned out a sonnet, In her latest new bonnet.

It began O. /a mode— I intended an ode, I intended an ode, And it turned out a sonnet.'

The second is from "Love in Idleness" :— " Under the sun Said Solomon,

There's nothing now— And he said true. Poem or pun, Under the sun Under the sun, There's nothing now." The point of this last is as hidden from us as the proverbial 'needle.

We have no space to follow Mr. Brewer through the many sides of his disquisition, or the oddities of wit and humour which he recalls to us now and again from other sources. His quotation of Pope's well-known line reminds us of an inimitable joke of Shirley Brooks, who, when some very un- attractive actress appeared in a play called Camilla's Husband, simply wrote to a friend : " Oh dear! if this Camilla scours the plain, it must be when she washes her face." And his quotation of a capital and characteristic letter of W. S. Gilbert's suggests how much that author should really have been laid under contribution for a book like this. " I should like to suggest that any inventor, who is in need of a name for his invention, would confer a. boon on all rhymesters, and at the same time ensure himself many gratuitous advertisements, if he were to select a word that rhymes to one of the many words in common use that have very few rhymes, or none at all. A few more words rhyming to love are greatly wanted. Revenge and avenge have no rhyme but Penge and Stonehenge ; coif has no rhyme at all. Starve has no rhyme except (oh, irony!) carve. Scarf has no rhyme, though I fully expect to be told that laugh, calf, and half are admissible, which they certainly are not." And so forth. If we remember right, Mr. Gilbert claimed to be entitled to patent an instrument of the stylographic kind, under the name of the " Milver," to dispose of the most famous and obvious of these rhythmic difficulties. But what about "Ralph," which exercised Professor Skeate and the Press so much a short time ago ? What rhymes to it, and why P "Safe," still say we, not because it ought, but because it does, by right of modern habit,—in the end your only court of appeal. In such a matter the force of custom overrides us all.

The book before us ends with a Dictionary of Rhyme, which, perhaps, may be utilised by wandering poets of unsettled ideas in that direction. It professes a good deal, for it says that it is the "result of a new and comprehensive overhauling of our English vocabulary, with a view to the selection of nearly all words suitable for verse-writing at the end of the nineteenth eentury." Mr. Brewer, however, assumes that rhyme depends upon similiarity of sound only, thus dismissing with a blow the whole category of rhymes to the eye, which, according to another view, comprises some of the best verses in the world. Exercises in Mr. Brewer's dictionary would produce odd results by his own rules ; for a poet who introduced "bad" as a rhyme to " salad," and "yacht " as another to " idiot," would meet with critics of an =favouring kind; and how on earth does "bad" rhyme to "quad," as a matter of strict :sound only ? As for Mr. Anstey's difficulties with the "by-by," this nineteenth-century dictionary helps us not ; and we do not find a good. substitute at hand by finding that if we want a rhyme to the verb "to contract" (under the head of " act,"—we choose the word which happens to be opposite in the column), we may make it out of a catapbraot, which was "frequently employed in Feudal times." Nor can we see by what rule of sound " deface " can rhyme with "grass," or how Mr. Brewer finds the nearest rhyme to " scarce "—one of Mr. Gilbert's unmated words—in (who would have thought it ?) " an embrace." We should ourselves go to Scotland, and write a " mime " about it. But we part company with Mr. Brewer much entertained, and rather curious as to the effect of a possible Brewer poem in a pair of 'prentice hands.