as James Russell Lowell says, "Homer, like Dante and Shakespeare, like all who really command language, seems fond of playing with assonances.' The early Teutonic tongues used alliteration; end-rhyme came to them later, partly under mediæval Latin influences, partly because of its natural pleasureableness. The general order of development of end-rhyme was Latin > Provençal > French, though German introduced it in the ninth century and Icelandic in the tenth. In Spanish, assonance was the indigenous and satisfactory rhyme-art. Alliteration, assonance, and end-rhyme enjoyably emphasize stressed ideas; the two latter are better able to bind verses into/ idea-groups or stanzas. The more highly inflected a language, the more readily it develops end-rhyme, and vice versa. The great exception afforded by Greek and Latin of the classical period is explained by their delicate, and now imperfectly understood, sense of quantity. As a matter of fact, Italian, which is really a new Latin, is almost pre-eminent, among modern languages, in the fluency of its rhymes, while medieval Latin itself— as examples will presently show is perhaps the most facile of all tongues, ancient or modern, in the effective beauty of its late-developed end-rhymes. Provençal assonance became end-rhyme by the easiest of steps ; while in the fullest of medieval literatures (1100-1400), the English, we can see how alliteration, with the development of study of continental languages, and with the increase of the vocabulary, yielded little by little to end-rhyme. The strength inherent in alliteration approved it to crude early tongues; endrhyme came with the time when verse was a matter not of exclamation but of elaborated thought. Meanwhile the chants and even the sermons of the church, with their sing-song and parallelism, were a powerful aid in the development of the new word-music. In this new music the time-beater was also an effective thoughttransmitter. Poe stated the case thus: "Lines being once introduced, the necessity of distinctly defining these lines to the ear (as yet written verse does not exist) would lead to a scrutiny of their capabilities at their terminations; and now would spring up the idea of equality in sound between the final syllables — in other words, of rhyme." Still earlier, Mitford's investigations had led him to the conclusions that end-rhyme "is so important that, though without analogy in music, wholly unrelated to melody, and only in its office of time-beater connected with measure, scarcely can any verse in our language stand without it, excepting the epic, which indeed `often dispenses with it most advantageously." Again: “Rhyme is an ornament not of a quiet and unobtrusive character, but, on the contrary, so forcing itself upon the ear's notice, — generally, indeed, under good management, agreeably that, with some of very gross and untutored perception, it stands instead, almost, of all other grace." It is difficult to understand how a writer on the "harmony of language" could say that rhyme was "without analogy in music, wholly unrelated to melody, and only in its office of time-beater connected with measure." In fact, the development of endrhyme in modern times was a direct result of the development of music, the ear demanding more strikingly agreeable linguistic effects. But to Mitford, in whom survived some of the Elizabethan contempt for rhyme, it was only a sort of higher drumbeat. Just what he got out of Shakespeare's sonnets or Spenser's Faerie Queene I do not know. Still, however, he perceived that the line-division by rhyme was related to a larger thing: "Among rhymes a verse is not the highest denomination of poetical measure; it is but a part of a larger measure, to which rhyme in a great degree gives form and proportion, and alone gives boundary"; and he affably admitted that rhyme was "the common crutch and stilt of poetry in all the languages of modern Europe." He evidently believed that without rhyme, save in the epic, there could be no modern verse. Others have agreed with him in the view that unrhymed verse in French " can be verse only in name and written form, having nothing essential to distinguish it from the merest prose.' The development of end-rhyme in Latin forms a doubly interesting theme; for though late in appearing it was early in its influence upon the entire body of medieval European poetry. When classical quantity ruled, end-rhyme was not needed, or was possibly cacophonous, like excessive alliteration to-day. Non-rhyming Latin poets apparently had to avoid frequent rhyme because of the natural tendency of inflectional terminations to run into rhyme. Trench says that end-rhyme was so inherent in Latin as continually to reappear, "being no doubt with difficulty avoided by those writers whose stricter sense of beauty taught them not to catch at ornaments which were not properly theirs." Yet even in classical Latin poetry rhyme was probably regarded as a permissible occasional ornament, or mnemonic device, or pleasantry; Latin charms jingle; and Plautus often, and Virgil sometimes, rhymes. Trench, in the introduction to his Sacred Latin Poetry, cites from Ennius' Andromache: "Haec omnia vidi inflammari, Jovis aram sanguine turpari;' from Ovid: 1 "Quem mare carpentem substrictaque crura gerentem;" (For many years a stock illustration of rhyme in classical from Martial: "Sic leve flavorum valeat genus Usipiorum;" from Claudian: “Flora cruentarum praetenditur umbra jubarum;” from Horace: "Multa recedentes adimunt. Ne forte seniles and from Virgil: "Limus ut hic durescit, et haec ut cera liquescit;" 1 "Toutefois si Ouide en a usé, je croy que c'est par rencontre, plus tost que par loy ou subiection d'aucun genre de vers, ou reigle versificatoire." CLAUDE FAUCHET: Recvil de l'Origine de la Langve et Poésie Françoise, Ryme et Romans. Paris, 1581. He also refers to Æneid, I, 319, 320; III, 656, 657; IV, 256, 257; V, 383, 386; VIII, 620, 621. To these we may add the second line of Horace's famous "Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, Lectorem delectando pariterque monendo," in which the assonantal-rhyme delectando: monendo must have been intentional, whatever we may think about lectorem: delectando. In only one of the lines having internal rhyme — “Limus ut hic durescit, et haec ut cera liquescit" - do quantity-stress and rhyme-stress coincide. How, for instance, shall we preserve both of them in reading "Flora cruentarum praetenditur umbra jubarum," or the jocose later line "Est avis in dextrâ melior quam quattuor extra"? Dingeldein, in his excellent and comprehensive monograph on the subject,1 gives many examples of sporadic end-rhyme in Greek and Latin poets. So does Norden, who also notes the early appearance of that parallelism considered in a previous chapter, and, like the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French and English critics of poetry, makes something of the Greek homoioteleuton as a kind of early end-rhyme, even in prose.2 Poe called "an effective species of ancient rhyming" such lines as "Parturiunt montes et nascitur ridiculus mus." He also thought that the terminal system must have caused the Latins to give a greater emphasis than ours to final syllables; and that Horace did not scan his own verse as the classical prosodists claim. His melodious "true scansion" of Horace's Integer vitae may be found in his well-known paper on "The Rationale of Verse." 1 Otto Dingeldein: Der Reim bei den Griechen und Romern. Leipzig, 1892. 2 Thus Cicero: "Volvendi sunt libri Catonis: intelliges nihil illius lineamentis, nisi eorum pigmentorum, quae inventa nondum erant, florem et colorem defuisse"; Pliny the Younger: "Illam veram et meram Graeciam"; and Plautus: "Amor et melle et felle est fecundissimus." Trench, who was the pioneer in the investigation of the history of Latin mediæval religious poetry, says that Latin verse gradually substituted accent for quantity, and then employed rhyme, within the verse and at its end, as a means of marking rhythm, and as a resource for producing melody. There was no absolutely necessary connection between accent and rhyme; we have in our own blank verse accent without rhyme, while the monkish poets wrote rhymed hexameters, pentameters, and Sapphics, i. e., in quantity and feet, without accent. Meanwhile the Greek homoioteleuton, the Latin similiter desinens, the "finissant de mesme" of Fauchet - "quelque fois plaisante et receuë en prose oration," more and more affected all kinds of composition, especially the religious prose of the early church, e. g., Augustine's sermons, from which Trench cites: lingua clamat, cor amat; in Novo [Testamento] patent, quae in Vetere latent; praecedat spes, ut sequatur res; quis est enim fides, nisi credere quod non vides; hoc agamus bene, ut illud habeamus plene; ibi [in coelis] nullus oritur, quia nullus moritur. In favor of the theory that rhyme is a thing of indigenous origin, Trench speaks in no doubtful voice. Man craves, and deeply delights in, the rhythmic and periodic, for instance, in the sound of waves on the beach or of men on the march. The Latin language has one word for the solemn and the recurring. "Rhyme can as little be considered the exclusive discovery of any one people as of any single age. It is rather, like poetry, like music, like dramatic representation, the natural result of a deep craving of the human mind; as it is the well-nigh inevitable adjunct of a poetry not quantitative, being almost certain to make a home for itself therein. In this universality of rhyme . . peculiar neither to the rudeness of our early and barbarous age, nor to the over-refined ingenuity of a late and artificial one, but running through whole literatures from their beginning to their end, we find its best defence. It lies deep in our human nature, and satisfies an universal need. . . We encounter it everywhere in the Welsh and the Irish of the west; the Sanskrit, the Arabic, the Persian, and the Chinese of the east; and the Gothic and the Scandinavian of the north. It is "no formal discovery," "but in all, the well-nigh instinctive result of that craving after |