Echo Verse.
Addison says, in No. 59 of the Spectator, “I find likewise in ancient times the conceit of making an Echo talk sensibly and give rational answers. If this could be excusable in any writer, it would be in Ovid, where he introduces the echo as a nymph, before she was worn away into nothing but a voice. (Met. iii. 379.) The learned Erasmus, though a man of wit and genius, has composed a dialogue upon this silly kind of device, and made use of an echo who seems to have been an extraordinary linguist, for she answers the person she talks with in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, according as she found the syllables which she was to repeat in any of those learned languages. Hudibras, in ridicule of this false kind of wit, has described Bruin bewailing the loss of his bear to a solitary echo, who is of great use to the poet in several distichs, as she does not only repeat after him, but helps out his verse and furnishes him with rhymes.”
Euripides in his Andromeda—a tragedy now lost—had a similar scene, which Aristophanes makes sport with in his Feast of Ceres. In the Greek Anthology (iii. 6) is an epigram of Leonidas, and in Book IV. are some lines by Guaradas, commencing—
α Αχὼ φίλα μοι συγκαταίνεσον τί. β τί;
(Echo! I love: advise me somewhat.—What?)
The French bards in the age of Marot were very fond of this conceit. Disraeli gives an ingenious specimen in his Curiosities of Literature. The lines here transcribed are by Joachim de Bellay:—
Qui est l’auteur de ces maux avenus?—Venus.
Qu’étois-je avant d’entrer en ce passage?—Sage.
Qu’est-ce qu’aimer et se plaindre souvent?—Vent.
Dis-moi quelle est celle pour qui j’endure?—Dure.
Sent-elle bien la douleur qui me point?—Point.
In The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth there is detailed a masque, which was enacted for her Majesty’s pleasure, in which a dialogue was held with Echo “devised, penned, and pronounced by Master Gascoigne, and that upon a very great sudden.”
Here are three of the verses:—
Well, Echo, tell me yet,
How might I come to see
This comely Queen of whom we talk?
Oh, were she now by thee!
By thee.
By me? oh, were that true,
How might I see her face?
How might I know her from the rest,
Or judge her by her grace?
Her grace.
Well, then, if so mine eyes
Be such as they have been,
Methinks I see among them all
This same should be the Queen.
The Queen.