only by the footing they have retained in lyric verse upon the loftiest occasions, but by a hundred examples out of the rhymed couplet, in the works of our greatest poets. Hear young Milton, practising his organic numbers. He is addressing his native language :

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Yet I had rather, if I were to chuse,

Thy service in some graver subject use,

Such as may make thee search thy coffers round,
Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound;

Such where the deep transported mind may soar
Above the wheeling poles, and at heaven's door
Look in, and see each blissful deity,

How he before the thunderous throne doth lie,
Listening to what the unshorn Apollo sings

To the touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings
Immortal nectar to her kingly sire:

Then passing through the spheres of watchful fire,
And misty regions of wide air next under,

And hills of snow, and lofts of piled thunder,

May tell at length how green-eyed Neptune raves,

In heaven's defiance mustering all his waves."

So, who would lose the melancholy sounds of the words morrow and sorrow, in Spenser's famous description of the miseries of a court-suitor?

"Full little knowest thou, that hast not tride,

What hell it is in suing long to bide;

To lose good dayes, that might be better spent ;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow;
To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peeres;
To have thy asking, yet waite manie years;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eate thy heart with comfortlesse despaires;
To fawne, to crouch, to waite, to ride, to runne,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."

I will here observe, by the way, how easy it was for these great poets to write in the smooth measure of the moderns, and how well they did it when they thought fit. Spenser wanted to make out a list of his court grievances (for they were his own), and he felt that a sort of energetic formality was the best shape in which to put it. It would be the better item'd in the memory. Shakspeare has written Iago's famous banter on good women, upon a similar principle. The smooth and reckoning formality of the versification answers to the moral idea intended to be conveyed: -

“Desdemona. O heavy ignorance!—thou praisest the worst best. But what praise could'st thou bestow on a deserving woman indeed! one, that in the authority of her merit, did justly put on the vouch of very malice itself?

Iago. She that was ever fair, and never proud,
Had tongue at will, and yet was never loud;
Never lack'd gold, and yet went never gay;
Fled from her wish, and yet said, 'Now I may ;'
She that, being anger'd, her revenge being nigh,
Bade her wrong stay, and her displeasure fly;
She, that in wisdom never was so frail,

"Des.

To take the cod's head for the salmon's tail;
She that would think, and ne'er disclose her mind;
See suitors following, and not look behind:

She was a wight-if ever such wight were-
To do what?

"Iago. To suckle fools, and chronicle small beer."

With very little allowance, this is the heroic style of versification, such as it prevailed in the last century. The concluding line might have been one of Pope's. It is in his best manner, both as to sound and wit. The satires of Hall, written in the time of Shakspeare, are full of this kind of music, and are the real originators of it as a thing continuous, and not the poems of Waller; though the smoother subjects of the latter, and the care he took to have no roughness at all, set the more immediate example to the writers who followed him.*

* It must have been a slip of the memory (wonderful was it for not slipping more!) which induced Sir Walter Scott (in his edition

To return to double rhymes. They are as old in our language as Chaucer, whose versification is as unlike the crabbed and unintentional stuff it is supposed to be, as possible, and has never had justice done it. The sweet and delicate gravity of its music is answerable to the sincerity of the writer's heart. Take a specimen out of his character of the "Good Priest," including some double rhymes :—

"Benigne he was, and wonder diligent,

And in adversitè ful patient:

And swich he was yproved often sithes; (often sithence, or since)

Full loth were him to cursen for his tithes ;

But rather would he given out of doubte,

Unto his poore* parishens aboute,

Of his offring, and eke of his substànce ;

He coulde, in litel thing, have suffisance.

of Dryden, vol. xi. p. 100) to class Hall and Donne together as inharmonious writers. Hall is the smoothest, as Donne is the ruggedest, of all our old satirists. See Warton's remarks upon him in the fifth volume of Chalmers's British Poets.

• The è, which is to be thus retained whenever the writer pleases, (and which is perhaps the origin of the gratuitous vowel prefixed to verbs and participles, as y-gazing, y-called, star-ypointing, that is to say, starrè-pointing) is the same as its counterpart still retained in French poetry, and rose doubtless from the same root. Thus poore is the French pauvre.

"He settè not his benefice to hire,

And let his sheep accombred in the mire,
And ran into London, unto Seint Poules,

To seeken him a chantarie for soules,
Or with a brotherhood to be withold;

But dwelt at home, and keptè wel his fold,
So that the wolf ne made it not miscarrie :
He was a shepherd, and no mercenarie."

There is one other custom of the old poets, or rather of Chaucer, (for I cannot call to mind any other who has made a principle of it as he has done, though in the poets before the Restoration, it is occasionally found among them in the course of their paragraphs), which appears to me very fit for revival; and that is, the closing a period or a paragraph with the first line of a couplet, and beginning the next with the second. There is but one instance of it (as to paragraph) in the volume before the reader. It is in the lines entitled Power and Gentleness, at page 172. Chaucer took the custom from the French poets, who have retained it to this day. It surely has a fine air, both of conclusion and resumption; as though it would, leave off when it thought proper, knowing how well it could re-commence.* * Chaucer has some fine examples

* The preservation, by the French poets, of a license so hostile

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