The poet in rhyme has therefore in his favour “twenty to one” of a chance that his second line may “jump” with his former one. We were not aware that the odds were so favourable, even when we look over the finished poetry of Pope, who has written so much, or of Gray, who has written so little. Boileau tells us he always chose a rhyme for his second line before he wrote out his first, that by this means he might secure the integrity of the sense; and this he called “the difficult art of rhyming.” These are mysteries which only confirm the hazard which rhymers incur; and, on the whole, though we do marvellously escape, the poet at every rhyming line still stands in peril.
This torture of rhyme-finding seems to have occasioned a general affliction among modern poets; and an unhappy substitute was early found in arranging collections of rhymes, and which subsequently led to a monstrous device. In Goujet’s “Bibliothèque Française,” vol. iii., will be found a catalogue of these rhyming dictionaries: the earliest of the French was published in 1572. Indeed, some of these French critics looked upon these rhyming dictionaries as part of the art of poetry, recommending pocket editions for those who in their walks were apt to poetise, as if finding a rhyme would prompt a thought.
Among these early attempts is an extravagant one by Paul Boyer. It is a kind of encyclopædia, in which all the names are arranged by their terminations, so that it furnishes a dictionary of rhymes.
The demand for rhymes seems to have continued; for in 1660, D’Ablancourt Fremont published a Dictionnaire, which was enlarged by Richelet in 1667. It seems we were not idle in threading rhymes in our own country, for Poole, in 1657, in his “Parnassus,” furnishes a collection of rhymes; and he has had his followers. But the perfect absurdity or curiosity of a rhyming lexicographer appears in one of Walker’s Dictionaries of the English Language. As he was a skilful philologist, he has contrived to make it useful for orthography and pronunciation. He advances it as on a plan “not hitherto attempted;” and his volume on the whole, as Moreri observes of Boyer’s, is a thing “plaisant à considérer.”
A dictionary of rhymes is as miserable a contrivance to assist a verse as counting the syllables by the finger is to regulate the measure; in the case of rhyme it is sense which should regulate the verse, and in that of metre it is the ear alone which can give it melody.
[1] Here is the first idea of “A Dictionary of Rhymes,” which has inspired so many unhappy bards.
THE ARTE OF ENGLISH POESIE.