PE COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY CHARLES F. RICHARDSON. THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. PREFACE THIS book is the best and the worst on its theme, for there is no other. Many volumes have been written on the principles and practice of the poetic art; but none, from Sidney's days to Saintsbury's, has been wholly devoted to the nature and history of English rhyme. The rhyming dictionaries, such as Walker's, Barnum's, or Loring's, have naturally contented themselves with vocabularies; while general treatises on poetics or poetic history have usually dismissed rhyme as a modern phonetic pleasure of uncertain origin. Furthermore, most writers on the subject, save Schipper and his followers, have ignored the relation, which ought to be obvious, between alliteration, assonance, and end-rhyme, as different forms of the same thing. The purpose of the present work is to try to trace the evolution of English rhyme, and to correlate it with physical laws, the growth of individual or communal song, and the history of the rhyme-art in other European tongues. Collateral attention has therefore been given to alliteration in the Teutonic languages, assonance in Spanish, and end-rhyme in Latin, Provençal, Italian, French, and German; but it was manifestly impossible, in a volume of small size, to present a polyglot or comparative history of a subject of such indefinite extent. Indeed, a full record of English rhyme alone would demand, for its presentation, a library almost as extensive as the works of the poets discussed. It has therefore been my attempt to give the leading principles of the discussion, leaving applications to be followed at the reader's pleasure. |