there in millions, ready for the doctors to bring them in band-boxes at night, when children want a new little brother or sister.

Which must be a mistake, for this one reason that, there being no atmosphere round the moon (though a certain gentleman, who is no fool, says there is on the other side, and that he has been round at the back of it to see, and found that the moon was just the shape of a Bath bun, and so wet that the man in the moon went about on Midsummer-day in Macintosh and Cording's boots, spearing eels and sneezing); that therefore, I say, there being no atmosphere, there can be no evaporation; and, therefore, the dew-point can never fall below 17.5 above zero of Fahrenheit; and, therefore, it cannot be cold enough there about four o'clock in the morning to condense the babies' mesenteric apophthegms into their left ventricles; and, therefore, they can never catch the hooping-cough; and if

they do not have hooping-cough, they cannot be babies at all; and, therefore, there are no babies in the moon. Q. E. D.

Which may seem a roundabout reason; and so, perhaps, it is: but you will have heard worse ones in your time, and from better men than you are.

But one thing is certain; that, when the good old doctor got his book written, he felt considerably relieved all over; and the foul flood-water in his brains ran down, and cleared to a fine coffee colour, such as fish like to rise in; and very fine, clean, fresh-run fish did begin to rise in his brains; and he caught two or three of them (which is exceedingly fine sport, for brain rivers), and anatomized them carefully, and kept what he learnt to himself; and became ever after a sadder and a wiser man; which is a very good thing to become, my dear little boy, even though one has to pay a heavy price for the blessing. To be continued.

Is not this a jolly title for a book?

"Of Anagrams: A Monograph treating of their History from the earliest ages to the present time; with an Introduction, containing numerous specimens of Macaronic Poetry, Punning Mottoes, Rhopalic, Shaped, Equivocal, Lyon, and Echo Verses, Alliteration, Acrostics, Lipograms, Chronograms, Logograms, Palindromes, Bouts Rimés. By H. B. Wheatley. Printed for the Author by Stephen Austin, Hertford; and sold by Williams & Norgate, Henrietta Street; J. R. Smith, Soho Square; T. & W. Boone, New Bond Street; London, 1862."

through as you lie on the sofa after dinner, with the decanters and nuts handy; but with this in its favour besides that, being really a learned little book in its way, it is worth keeping for reference. For not only is it in itself a brief history of those oddities of literature which its title-page enumerates, with picked samples of each; but it contains a list of works, to the number of about sixty, in which whoever wants to know all that is to be known about Anagrams, Anagrammatists, and the principles of Anagrammatism, will find the materials amassed. You may turn up your nose as you like, my solemn friend, at the thought of having such a subject thrust upon you; but, when Mr. Wheatley tells you that among those who have interested themselves in anagrams, and made them too, have been Plato, Calvin, Rabelais, Camden, and

others to whom you could not hold a candle, the best thing you can do is to turn your nose down again. Or did you ever try to make an anagram yourself? It is so nice; you have no idea! Positively, when Xerxes offered the reward-I forget how much it was-to the man who should invent a new pleasure, if anybody had stepped forward and said, "I have it, O king," and then and there put the king up to the making of anagrams, he would have been sure of the prize. It would have been exactly the amusement for Xerxes.

But, before we speak of anagrams, let us dispose of those other intellectual curiosities which Mr. Wheatley has associated with them, and which, though some of them are akin to the anagram, or even involve it, have yet distinct

names.

I. MACARONIC POETRY. Everybody, of course, knows what it is; or, at least, everybody who has ever tasted the Italian dish from which the name is supposed to be derived. But stay! May there not exist some wretched persons who have not tasted macaroni? Is it not right that we should remember that all knowledge is relative, and that, though we may be safe as regards macaroni, it might go hard even with ourselves if a higher standard were proposed, and the gentleman who writes. those letters on Dinners in the Times were to move for a return of the number of those among us to whom caviare, for example, after the lapse of two centuries and a half, is still the mystery that it was in Shakespeare's time? In these circumstances, we may condescend to explain that Macaronic Poetry is poetry

in which Latin or Greek words are mixed with vernacular words adjusted more or less to the Latin or Greek syntax. There are tons of such in the various European literatures; and, without troubling Mr. Wheatley, here is an English specimen :

"Patres Conscripti took a boat and went to Philippi;

Boatum upsettum est magno cum grandine venti;

Omnes drownderunt qui swim away non potuerunt;

Trumpeter unus erat qui coatum scarlet habebat,

Et magnum periwig tied about with the tail of a dead pig.'

II. PUNNING MOTTOES. These are mottoes, whether for heraldic or other purposes, involving a play upon words. Mr. Wheatley gives but a few specimens, selected for their likeness to anagrams. Perhaps the best in his list are-"Fight on, quoth Fitton," the motto of the Fitton family; "Antiqui mores" ("Ancient customs," or "The ancient Morrices," as you like), the motto of Morrice of Belshanger, Kent; "Set on," the motto of the Scottish Setons; "Ver non semper viret" ("Spring does not always flourish;" or "Vernon flourishes always"), the motto of the Vernons; and "Fare, fac" ("Speak, Do"), the motto of the Fairfaxes. "Patior ut potiar" ("I suf fer that I may possess ") is another family-motto that occurs to us, in which the pun lies within the motto itself, and not in the relation of the motto to the name of the family using it; and there is something of a pun, though more of wise epigram, in a motto which we always think of as the very best in the Heralds' Records, and which, if mottoes were transferable, we should certainly borrow-viz. that of the old family of the Keiths, Earls Marischal of Scotland; "Aiunt; Quid aiunt? Aiant," or "They say: What say they? Let them say."

III. RHOPALIO VERSES. Goodness gracious! what are they? Not know what Rhopalic Verses are? Why, "every schoolboy knows that," as clever writers say when they bring in some bit of learning they have just got hold of themselves, and will forget in a day or two. Rhopalic Verses are-But before I tell you what Mr. Wheatley tells me they are, let me put you up to two ways of avoiding the disgrace of being detected as ignorant of what you are expected to know. The best way of all, when it can be followed, is to say nothing at all, but look as wise as you But that was not Bob Silver's way when he received the note of invitation

can.

with the letters "R. S. V. P." in the corner, and was at his wits' end what they might mean. He went to a friend of his, tossed down the note, and said carelessly, "By the bye, it is very odd how few people know so simple a thing as the meaning of these four letters; I wouldn't be sure, Ned, that even you do." "Come," said his friend,

who saw his drift; "that's too bad." "Well but, for the fun of the thing, what do they mean?" "Mean? Why, of course, that, if you do not go, the party is to be put off!" "Well, I didn't think you could have guessed it," said Bob, quite satisfied.

But there is another way still, which may be sometimes put in practice. A learned lion at an evening party was appealed to by the ladies as to the meaning of a Greek inscription on a medal which had been puzzling all the gentlemen before he came in. "What is it; what is it?" said the ladies, pressing round him. He looked at it deliberately, and, making nothing of it, replied with great gravity: "Ladies, I am sorry; but this is something that it would not be proper for me to translate in your presence. Now Rhopalic Verses are quite as innocent things as was the inscription on that medal. Rhopalic Verses (from the Greek word Ropalon, a club or bludgeon)" are so formed," says Mr. Wheatley, "that "the first word is a monosyllable, the "second a dissyllable, and so on, each "succeeding word being longer than "the one preceding it." He gives six examples; among which are this Greek

one :

“Ω μάκαρ Ατρείδη μοιρηγένες ὀλβιόδαιμον.” and this Latin one :

"Dux turmas propius conjunxerat auxiliares." He gives no English instance; but, taking this line, humbly offered as a pattern, for want of a better,

"Goose, gather metrical monstrosities," any one who chooses may employ himself in searching for the instances of unconscious rhopalism in Shakespeare, Milton, or Wordsworth, arranging them in order, and drawing the important

inferences which they will doubtless suggest.

IV. SHAPED VERSES. These are pieces of verse, ingeniously constructed, by due arrangements of short and long lines, so as to exhibit, when written or printed, the shapes of certain physical objects, such as bottles, eggs, hats, crinolines, coffee-pots, tea-pots, candlesticks, vases, altars, saddles, axes, and birds flying. In prose, of course, where the printer can help by means of large letters and spacing, there is no great difficulty in such shaping-though even here there is room for art; as may be seen in epitaphs and dedications, where sometimes a line of a single word will follow with amazing effect a line extending from margin to margin, or in Mr. Wheatley's own pretty wine-glass on his title-page, which neither you nor I could have blown. But to shape a wine-glass in verse, in real rhyming lines-think of that! Or, still more wonderful, a comb or a pair of scissors in verse; both of which feats Dryden speaks of as performed by masters of the art. I confess I should particularly like to see a comb in verse; but, as it is, for the most accessible specimens of shaped verses, I must refer to George Herbert's hymns, where there is nothing nearly so remarkable in this admirable style of poetry.

V. EQUIVOCAL VERSES. These are verses so arranged as to give totally different meanings, according as they are read in the ordinary way or in another way known to the initiated. For example, read these lines first in measure as they stand and then in alternate pairs:

"I hold for the sound faith

What England's Church allows;
What Rome's Confession saith
My conscience disavows;
Where the King is head

The flock can take no shame;
The flock is sore misled

That holds the Pope supreme." What a comfort it must be for oppressed countries to have this mode of expressing their sentiments and eluding the police! In a free country like Britain Equivocal Verses need not be one of the institutions of literature; but let us not

measure the needs of other nations by ours. And, what straightforward metre is to Equivocal Verse, public meetings and open talk are to conspiracies; so let us not be too hard even on conspiracies.

VI. LYON VERSES (so called, it is said, as having first been practised by Sidonius Apollinaris, a Gallic bishop and poet of the fifth century, born at Lyons) are verses the words of which are the same whether read backwards or forwards. Mr. Wheatley's only English specimen is this epitaph from a church in Cornwall:

"Shall we all die?

We shall die all. All die shall we;

Die all we shall."

If this is the usual style of Cornish thought, we should say that the Cornish people are not by any means a people that it would be safe to contradict.

VII. LEONINE VERSES. Though Mr. Wheatley does not mention these in his title-page, he treats of them in the text of his work. They are not to be confounded with the Lyon verses. Strictly speaking, Leonine verses are Latin hexameters and pentameters in which rhymes occur. There are many such lines in the classic poets, and particularly in Ovid, notwithstanding our tradition that the Latin poets avoided rhymes as systematically as we seek them. But the device became habitual in the middle ages, when the instinct towards rhyme asserted itself even in the ecclesiastical Latin; and Leoninus, a monk of the twelfth century, is said to have given an impulse to it. Numberless specimens remain; such

as

"En rex Edvardus, debacchans ut Leopardus." Less properly Leonine verses, but still included under that name, are those Latin rhymed verses, not in the classic hexameter or pentameter at all, of which the "Stabat Mater" and others of the hymns of the Roman Catholic Church are fine specimens. But one of the most plaintive examples I know of Leonine verse in this laxer sense is a scrap of not very classical, but very intelligible Latin, attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots, in prison. For any sake, don't read it with

our vile English pronunciation, but as she herself would have read it :"O Domine Deus, speravi in te; O care mi Jesu, nunc libera me; E durâ catenâ, e miserâ pœnâ O libera me :

Languendo, gemendo, genuque flectendo,! Adoro, imploro, ut liberes me." Mr. Wheatley recognises as Leonine verses those English verses in which one of the beats within the line proper is also a rhyme; but I suspect this is an improper extension of the term. If not, Campbell's well-known line, the first of these two, will suffice as an instance :

"To the fame of your name

When the storm has ceased to blow." Is not the sound of the first of these lines like the flapping backwards and forwards of a flag? And this suggests that the question of Leonine Verses is really a part of the great question of Rhyme in general. The philosophy of Rhyme is not yet fully worked out.

VIII. ALLITERATION, which also connects itself with the philosophy of Rhyme, and is, in fact, within due limits, an art or an instinct of high validity and significance, need not detain us here.

"And apt alliteration's artful aid "

is a well-known example on a small scale. But it is not of such natural and incidental bits of alliteration that Mr. Wheatley speaks; but of more stupendous exercises of the art of which there are examples in literature. Among the minor wonders of the world must certainly be reckoned those long poems composed entirely of words beginning with one letter, as A, C, or P; and other poems there are in which the writers have gone in this way through all the letters of the alphabet successively.

IX. LIPOGRAMS. These proceed on a trick almost exactly the opposite of that of protracted alliteration; for the essence of the Lipogram (from the Greek "Leipo," "I leave") consists not in favouring one letter above all the rest, but in rejecting some one letter and making it an outcast. The most gigantic lipograms on record are two Greek poems produced in those early centuries

of our era during which the world, or the greater part of it, seems to have been in a state of blue mould for want of work-the one a kind of Iliad in twenty-four books, each excluding absolutely the letter of the alphabet marking its own number; the other an Odyssey composed on the same noble principle. Minor lipograms are plentiful as mites. Disraeli tells a good story of one by a Persian poet. He had shown the poem, which was a short one, to a critic, who did not express himself very enthusiastically about it. "You will allow it to be at least curious," said the author, "for you will observe that the letter A does not once occur in it from beginning to end." To which the reply was, "Well, but don't you think the piece would be greatly improved if you were also to leave out all the other letters ?" But is the lipogram or any other great form of activity to be put down by a snarl like that?

X. ACROSTICS, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, are poems the initial letters of whose lines taken in succession form some proper name. Sir John Davies, the English philosophical poet, wrote twenty-six such acrostics in honour of Queen Elizabeth-the initial letters of the lines in each forming the words Elizabetha Regina; and similar acrostics may be found scattered through the works of other poets of that age. But there are many developments and varieties of the acrostic; and

one

minute variety, which Mr. Wheatley specifies, is worth mentioning, as having something vital and electric in it. It is that kind of acrostic which consists in reading the initial letters of the words of one sentence as a single word, or, conversely, in flashing in a single word the initials of a whole unuttered sentence. Thus, Mr. Wheatley tells us, when the Italians, out of the Piedmontese States, did not dare as yet openly to shout for Victor Emanuel and Italian unity, they managed the thing neatly and thrillingly by the street cry of Viva Verdi. Why the popular composer had suddenly become so very popular that all Italy should in season and out No. 37.-YOL. VII.

of season be shouting his name did not at first appear except to those who knew that Verdi, letter for word, stood for Vittore Emanuele Re D'Italia. Now this at least was an acrostic with a soul in it.

XI. ECHO VERSES. These are verses constructed so that the last syllable or syllables of each line, being given back as it were by an echo, form a reply to the line itself or a comment upon it. There is no great capability in this device; and, though Mr. Wheatley gives several examples of it, the best is that from a number of the Sunday Times in 1831, on the high charge made for tickets to hear Paganini at the Opera House"What are they who pay three guineas To hear a tune of Paganini's?"

Echo. "Pack o' ninnies."

But the best echo I have heard of for a long time is an echo exclusively the property of a certain newspaper writer, in one of whose articles it is introduced as follows:-"Shall we resist this in"tolerable oppression? Shall we pledge "ourselves to do so? Echo answers in "the affirmative."

XII. CHRONOGRAMS are hardly worth mentioning. They are merely inscriptions, of any length, in which, by putting a few letters in different characters from the rest, these are made to signify a date. Thus, on a medal of Gustavus Adolphus, the capital letters of the following inscription, "ChrIst Vs DuX; ergo trIVM'phVs," make together MDCXVVVII; which is a clumsy indication of the date 1627. Neater is the chronogram on Queen Elizabeth's death, "My Day Closed Is In Immortality;" the initials of which make MDCIII, or 1603, the date of the Queen's death.

XIII. BOUTS RIMÉS, or "Rhymed Ends." This ingenuity, in its simplest form, is well known as the parlour amusement of making verses to certain prescribed rhymes. But the world does not know, and perhaps never will know, how much of the total Art of Poetry, as practised even by good poets, consists of this very process, performed with incessant subtlety and under deep disguises. In the case of a true poet, indeed, we are rather to