[1] Warton’s “Second Dissertation on the Introduction of Learning into England.”
[2] Lenglet du Fresnoy—Preface to his edition of the “Roman de la Rose.”
[3] Much curious matter will be found in the rare volume of Fauchet “Recueil de l’Origine de la Langue et Poesie Françoise Ryme et Romans plus les Noms et Summaire des Œuvres, de cxxvii. Poètes François, vivant avant l’an MCCC.;” liv. i. ch. vii., 1610, 4to.
[4] See “Two Inquiries respecting the Early Use of Rhyme,” by Sharon Turner, Esq.—Archæologia, vol. xiv. The subject further enlarged, “On the Origin and Progress of Rhyme in the Middle Ages.”—Hist. of England, iv. 386.
[5] The second book the Chinese children read is a collection conveyed in rhyming lines.—Davis on the Chinese.
RHYMING DICTIONARIES.
If our poets in rhyme dared to disclose one of the grand mysteries of their art, they would confess that, to find rhymes for their lines is a difficulty which, however overcome, after all has botched many a fine verse; the second line has often altered the original conception of the preceding one. The finest poems in the language, if critically examined, would show abundant evidence of this difficulty not overcome. This difficulty seems to have occurred to our earliest critics, for Gascoigne, in his “Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making Verse or Rhyme in English”—and Webbe, in his “Discourse,” repeats the precept—would initiate the young poet in the art of rhyme-finding: the simplicity of the critic equals the depth of his artifice.
“When you have one verse well settled and decently ordered, which you may dispose at your pleasure to end it with what word you will; then whatsoever the word is, you may speedily run over the other words which are answerable thereunto (for more readiness through all the letters alphabetically),[1] whereof you may choose that which will best fit the sense of your matter in that place; as, for example, if your last word end in book, you may straightway in your mind run them over thus—book, cook, crook, hook, look, nook, pook, &c. &c. Now it is twenty to one but always one of these shall jump with your former word and matter in good sense.”