The ow're and the o' of the two last verses should be Anglicized. The Deity, at least, should be supposed to speak so as to be understood—although I am aware that a folio has been written to demonstrate broad Scotch, as the language of Adam and Eve in Paradise.

We

The increase, within a few years, of the magazine literature, is by no means to be regarded as indicating what some critics would suppose it to indicate — a downward tendency in American taste or in American letters. It is but a sign of the times, an indication of an era in which men are forced upon the curt, the condensed, the well-digested in place of the voluminous in a word, upon journalism in lieu of dissertation. need now the light artillery rather than the peace-makers of the intellect. I will not be sure that men at present think more profoundly than half a century ago, but beyond question they think with more rapidity, with more skill, with more tact, with more of method and less of excrescence in the thought. Besides all this, they have a vast increase in the thinking material; they have more facts, more to think about. For this reason, they are disposed to put the greatest amount of thought in the smallest compass and disperse it with the utmost attainable rapidity. Hence the journalism of the age; hence, in especial, magazines. Too many we cannot have, as a general proposition; but we demand that they have sufficient merit to render them noticeable in the beginning, and that they continue in existence sufficiently long to permit us a fair estimation of their value.

Jack Birkenhead, apud Bishop Sprat, says that "a great wit's great work is to refuse." The apothegm

must be swallowed cum grano salis. His greatest work is to originate no matter that shall require refusal.

Scott, in his " Presbyterian Eloquence," speaks of "that ancient fable, not much known," in which a trial of skill in singing being agreed upon between the cuckoo and the nightingale, the ass was chosen umpire. When each bird had done his best, the umpire declared that the nightingale sang extremely well, but that " for a good plain song give him the cuckoo.”

The judge with the long ears, in this case, is a fine type of the tribe of critics who insist upon what they call "quietude" as the supreme literary excellencegentlemen who rail at Tennyson and elevate Addison into apotheosis. By the way, the following passage from Sterne's Letter from France," should be adopted at once as a motto by the "Down-East Review": "As we rode along the valley, we saw a herd of asses on the top of one of the mountains. How they viewed and reviewed us!"

"

Of Berryer, somebody says he is the man in whose description is the greatest possible consumption of antithesis.' For description" read lectures," and the sentence would apply well to Hudson, the lecturer on Shakspeare. Antithesis is his end. - he has He does not employ it to enforce thought, but he gathers thought from all quarters with the sole view to its capacity for antithetical expression. His essays have thus only paragraphical effect; as wholes, they produce not the slightest impression.

no other.

No man living could say what it is Mr. Hudson proposes to demonstrate; and if the question were

propounded to Mr. H. himself, we can fancy how particularly embarrassed he would be for a reply. In the end, were he to answer honestly, he would say "Antithesis."

As for his reading, Julius Cæsar would have said of him that he sang ill, and undoubtedly he must have "gone to the dogs" for his experience in pronouncing the r as if his throat were bored like a riflebarrel.1

V.

[Text: Graham's Magazine, March, 1846.]

THE effect derivable from well-managed rhyme is very imperfectly understood. Conventionally "rhyme implies merely close similarity of sound at the ends of verse, and it is really curious to observe how long mankind have been content with their limitation of the idea. What, in rhyme, first and principally pleases, may be referred to the human sense or appreciation of equality

- the common element, as might be easily shown, of all the gratification we derive from music in its most extended sense very especially in its modifications of metre and rhythm. We see, for example, a crystal, and are immediately interested by the equality between the sides and angles of one of its faces but on bringing to view a second face, in all respects similar to our first, our pleasure seems to be squared — on bringing to view a third, it appears to be cubed, and so on: I have no doubt, indeed, that the delight experienced, if measurable, would be found to have exact mathematical

1" Nec illi (Demostheni) turpe videbatur vel, optimis relictis magistris, ad canes se conferre, et ab illis et literæ vim et naturam petere, illorumque in sonando, quod satis est, morem imitari.”— Ad Meker. de vet. Pron. Ling. Græcæ.

relations, such, or nearly such, as I suggest that is to say, as far as a certain point, beyond which there would be a decrease, in similar relations. Now here, as the ultimate result of analysis, we reach the sense of mere equality, or rather the human delight in this sense; and it was an instinct, rather than a clear comprehension of this delight as a principle, which, in the first instance, led the poet to attempt an increase of the effect arising from the mere similarity (that is to say equality) between two sounds - led him, I say, to attempt increasing this effect by making a secondary equalization, in placing the rhymes at equal distances that is, at the ends of lines of equal length. In this manner, rhyme and the termination of the line grew connected in men's thoughts grew into a conventionalism the principle being lost sight of altogether. And it was simply because Pindaric verses had, before this epoch, existed -i.e. verses of unequal length that rhymes were subsequently found at unequal distances. It was for this reason solely, I say for none more profoundrhyme had come to be regarded as of right appertaining to the end of verse and here we complain that the matter has finally rested.

But it is clear that there was much more to be considered. So far, the sense of equality alone, entered the effect; or, if this equality was slightly varied, it was varied only through an accident - the accident of the will be seen that the

existence of Pindaric metres. It rhymes were always anticipated. The eye, catching the end of a verse, whether long or short, expected, for the ear, a rhyme. The great element of unexpectedness was not dreamed of—that is to say, of novelty of originality. But," says Lord Bacon, (how justly!) "there is no exquisite beauty without some strange

66

ness in the proportions." Take of strangeness

of unexpectedness

originality- call it what we will real in loveliness is lost at once. the unknown the vague.

and all that is ethe

We lose we miss the uncomprehended, be

cause offered before we have time to examine and

comprehend. We lose, in short, all that assimilates the beauty of earth with what we dream of the beauty of Heaven.

Perfection of rhyme is attainable only in the combination of the two elements, Equality and Unexpectedness. But as evil cannot exist without good, so unexpectedness must arise from expectedness. We do not contend for mere arbitrariness of rhyme. In the first place, we must have equi-distant or regularly recurring rhymes, to form the basis, expectedness, out of which arises the element, unexpectedness, by the introduction of rhymes, not arbitrarily, but with an eye to the greatest amount of unexpectedness. We should not introduce them, for example, at such points that the entire line is a multiple of the syllables preceding the points. When, for instance, I write

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain,

I produce more, to be sure, but not remarkably more than the ordinary effect of rhymes regularly recurring at the end of lines; for the number of syllables in the whole verse is merely a multiple of the number of syllables preceding the rhyme introduced at the middle, and there is still left, therefore, a certain degree of expectedness. What there is of the element unexpectedness, is addressed, in fact, to the eye only for the ear divides the verse into two ordinary lines, thus

And the silken, sad, uncertain
Rustling of each purple curtain.