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_."
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 "Bibliotheque Francaise," 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 encyclopaedia, 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 a
considerer_."
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.