The Greeks composed lipogrammatic works; works in which one letter of
the alphabet is omitted. A lipogrammatist is a letter-dropper. In this
manner Tryphiodorus wrote his Odyssey; he had not [Greek: alpha] in his
first book, nor [Greek: beta] in his second; and so on with the
subsequent letters one after another. This Odyssey was an imitation of
the lipogrammatic Iliad of Nestor. Among other works of this kind,
Athenæus mentions an ode by Pindar, in which he had purposely omitted
the letter S; so that this inept ingenuity appears to have been one of
those literary fashions which are sometimes encouraged even by those who
should first oppose such progresses into the realms of nonsense.
There is in Latin a little prose work of Fulgentius, which the author
divides into twenty-three chapters, according to the order of the
twenty-three letters of the Latin alphabet. From A to O are still
remaining. The first chapter is with out A; the second without B; the
third without C; and so with the rest. There are five novels in prose of
Lopes de Vega; the first without A, the second without E, the third
without I, &c. Who will attempt to verify them?
The Orientalists are not without this literary folly. A Persian poet
read to the celebrated Jami a gazel of his own composition, which Jami
did not like: but the writer replied, it was notwithstanding a very
curious sonnet, for the _letter Aliff_ was not to be found in any one of
the words! Jami sarcastically replied, "You can do a better thing yet;
take away _all the letters_ from every word you have written."
To these works may be added the _Ecloga de Calvis_, by Hugbald the monk.
All the words of this silly work begin with a C. It is printed in
Dornavius. _Pugna Porcorum_; all the words beginning with a P, in the
Nugæ Venales. _Canum cum cattis certamen_; the words beginning with a C:
a performance of the same kind in the same work. Gregorio Leti presented
a discourse to the Academy of the Humorists at Rome, throughout which he
had purposely omitted the letter R, and he entitled it the exiled R. A
friend having requested a copy, as a literary curiosity, for so he
considered this idle performance, Leti, to show that this affair was not
so difficult, replied by a copious answer of seven pages, in which he
had observed the same severe ostracism against the letter R! Lord
North, in the court of James, I., has written a set of Sonnets, each of
which begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. The Earl of
Rivers, in the reign of Edward IV., translated the Moral Proverbs of
Christiana of Pisa, a poem of about two hundred lines, the greatest part
of which he contrived to conclude with the letter E; an instance of his
lordship's hard application, and the bad taste of an age which, Lord
Orford observes, had witticisms and whims to struggle with, as well as
ignorance.
It has been well observed of these minute triflers, that extreme
exactness is the sublime of fools, whose labours may be well called, in
the language of Dryden,
Pangs without birth, and fruitless industry.
And Martial says,
Turpe est difficiles habere nugas,
Et stultus labor est ineptiarum.
Which we may translate,
'Tis a folly to sweat o'er a difficult trifle,
And for silly devices invention to rifle.
I shall not dwell on the wits who composed verses in the forms of
hearts, wings, altars, and true-love knots; or as Ben Jonson describes
their grotesque shapes,
A pair of scissors and a comb in verse.
Tom Nash, who loved to push the ludicrous to its extreme, in his amusing
invective against the classical Gabriel Harvey, tells us that "he had
writ verses in all kinds; in form of a pair of gloves, a pair of
spectacles, and a pair of pot-hooks," &c. They are not less absurd, who
expose to public ridicule the name of their mistress by employing it to
form their acrostics. I have seen some of the latter where, _both sides_
and _crossways_, the name of the mistress or the patron has been sent
down to posterity with eternal torture. When _one name_ is made out
_four times_ in the same acrostic, the great difficulty must have been
to have found words by which the letters forming the name should be
forced to stand in their particular places. It might be incredible that
so great a genius as Boccaccio could have lent himself to these literary
fashions; yet one of the most gigantic of acrostics may be seen in his
works; it is a poem of fifty cantos! Ginguené has preserved a specimen
in his Literary History of Italy, vol. iii. p.54. Puttenham, in "The Art
of Poesie," p. 75, gives several odd specimens of poems in the forms of
lozenges, rhomboids, pillars, &c. Puttenham has contrived to form a
defence for describing and making such trifling devices. He has done
more: he has erected two pillars himself to the honour of Queen
Elizabeth; every pillar consists of a base of eight syllables, the shaft
or middle of four, and the capital is equal with the base. The only
difference between the two pillars consists in this; in the one "ye must
read upwards," and in the other the reverse. These pillars,
notwithstanding this fortunate device and variation, may be fixed as two
columns in the porch of the vast temple of literary folly.
It was at this period, when _words_ or _verse_ were tortured into such
fantastic forms, that the trees in gardens were twisted and sheared into
obelisks and giants, peacocks, or flower-pots. In a copy of verses, "To
a hair of my mistress's eye-lash," the merit, next to the choice of the
subject, must have been the arrangement, or the disarrangement, of the
whole poem into the form of a heart. With a pair of wings many a sonnet
fluttered, and a sacred hymn was expressed by the mystical triangle.
_Acrostics_ are formed from the initial letters of every verse; but a
different conceit regulated _chronograms_, which were used to describe
_dates_--the _numeral letters_, in whatever part of the word they stood,
were distinguished from other letters by being written in capitals. In
the following chronogram from Horace,
--_feriam sidera vertice_,
by a strange elevation of CAPITALS the _chronogrammatist_ compels even
Horace to give the year of our Lord thus,
--feriaM siDera VertIce. MDVI.
The Acrostic and the Chronogram are both ingeniously described in the
mock epic of the Scribleriad.[82] The _initial letters_ of the
acrostics are thus alluded to in the literary wars:--
Firm and compact, in three fair columns wove,
O'er the smooth plain, the bold _acrostics_ move;
_High_ o'er the rest, the TOWERING LEADERS rise
With _limbs gigantic_, and _superior size_.[83]
But the looser character of the _chronograms_, and the disorder in which
they are found, are ingeniously sung thus:--
Not thus the _looser chronograms_ prepare
Careless their troops, undisciplined to war;
With _rank irregular, confused_ they stand,
The CHIEFTAINS MINGLING with the vulgar band.