RHYME AND REASON.
To the Editor of the Comic Annual.
SIR,
In one of your Annuals you have given insertion to “A Plan for Writing Blank Verse in Rhyme;” but as I have seen no regular long poem constructed on its principles, I suppose the scheme did not take with the literary world. Under these circumstances I feel encouraged to bring forward a novelty of my own, and I can only regret that such poets as Chaucer and Cottle, Spenser and Hayley, Milton and Pratt, Pope and Pye, Byron and Batterbee, should have died before it was invented.
The great difficulty in verse is avowedly the rhyme. Dean Swift says somewhere in his letters, “that a rhyme is as hard to find with him as a guinea,”—and we all know that guineas are proverbially scarce among poets. The merest versifier that ever attempted a Valentine must have met with this Orson, some untameable savage syllable that refused to chime in with society. For instance, what poetical Foxhunter—a contributor to the Sporting Magazine—has not drawn all the covers of Beynard Ceynard, Deynard, Feynard, Geynard, Heynard, Keynard, Leynard, Meynard, Neynard, Peynard, Queynard, to find a rhyme for Reynard? The spirit of the times is decidedly against Tithe; and I know of no tithe more oppressive than that poetical one, in heroic measure, which requires that every tenth syllable shall pay a sound in kind. How often the Poet goes up a line, only to be stopped at the end by an impracticable rhyme, like a bull in a blind alley! I have an ingenious medical friend, who might have been an eminent poet by this time, but the first line he wrote ended in ipecacuanha, and with all his physical and mental power, he has never yet been able to find a rhyme for it.
The plan I propose aims to obviate this hardship. My system is, to take the bull by the horns; in short, to try at first what words will chime, before you go farther, and fare worse. To say nothing of other advantages, it will at least have one good effect,—and that is, to correct the erroneous notion of the would-be poets and poetesses of the present day, that the great end of poetry is rhyme. I beg leave to present a specimen of worse, which proves quite the reverse, and am, Sir,
Your most obedient servant,
JOHN DRYDEN GRUBB.
REFUSING TITHE.