A traveller, upon reading the inscription affixed to the gates of Bandon, (a town in Ireland originally peopled by English Protestants,)

Jew, Turk or Atheist enter here;
But let no Papist dare appear,—

wrote the following smart reply underneath:

He who wrote this wrote it well;

The same is written on the gates of hell.

At one of Burns' convivial dinners he was requested to say grace; whereupon he gave the following impromptu:Lord, we do thee humbly thank

For that we little merit.

Now Jean may take the flesh away,
And Will bring in the spirit.

Refractory Rhyming.

WHEN Canning was challenged to find a rhyme for Julianna, he immediately wrote,

Walking in the shady grove

With my Julianna,

For lozenges I gave my love
Ipecacuanha.

Ipecacuanha lozenges, though a myth when the stanza was written, are now commonly sold by apothecaries.

Three or four wits, while dining together, discussed the difficulty of finding rhymes for certain names. General Morris challenged any of the party to find a happy rhyme for his name; and the challenge was instantly taken up by John Brougham, whose facility at extempore rhyming is proverbial:

All hail to thee, thou gifted son!

The warrior-poet Morris!
'Tis seldom that we see in one

A Cæsar and a Horace.

Some years ago a French speculator found himself ruined by a sudden collapse in the stock-market. He resolved to commit suicide, but, as he was a connoisseur in monumental literature, he decided first to compose his own epitaph. The first line-a very fine one-terminated with the word triomphe. To this, search as he might, he could find no rhyme, and he could not bring himself to sacrifice his beloved line. Time passed, finding him still in search of his rhyme, assisted by a number of benevolent friends, but all in vain. One day a promising speculation presented itself: he seized the opportunity and regained his fortune.

The rhyme so zealously sought has at length been found, and the epitaph completed. Here it is:

Attendre que de soi la vétusté triomphe,

C'est absurde! Je vais au devant de la mort.
Mourir a plus d'attraits quand on est jeune encore:
A quoi bon devenir un vieillard monogomphe?

Monogomphe; a brilliant Hellenism signifying "who has but a single tooth."

To get a rhyme in English for the word month was quite a matter of interest with curious people years ago, and somebody made it out or forced it by making a quatrain, in which a lisping little girl is described as saying:—

-I can get a rhyme for a month.

I can thay it now, I thed it wunth!

Another plan was to twist the numeral one into an ordinal. For instance:

Search through the works of Thackeray-you'll find a rhyme to month; He tells us of Phil Fogarty, of the fighting onety-oneth!

A parallel lisp is as follows:

"You can't," says Tom to lisping Bill,

"Find any rhyme for month."

"A great mithtake," was Bill's reply;
"I'll find a rhyme at onth."

And

Among our numerous English rhymes,
They say there's none to month;

I tried and failed a hundred times,
But succeeded the hundred and onth.

But these are hardly fair. The rhyme is good, but the English is bad. Christina Rosetti has done better in the admirable book of nursery rhymes which she has published under the title of Sing-Song:

How many weeks in a month?

Four, as the swift moon runn'th

In both of these instances, however, the rhymes are evasions of the real issue. The problem is not to make a word by compounding two, or distorting one, but to find a word ready-made, in our unabridged dictionaries that will rhyme properly to month. We believe there is none. Nor is there a fair rhyme to the word silver, nor to spirit, nor to chimney. Horace Smith, one of the authors of the Rejected Addresses, once attempted to make one for chimney on a bet, and he did it in this way:Standing on roof and by chimney

Are master and 'prentice with slim knee.

Another dissyllabic poser is liquid. Mr. C. A. Bristed attempts to meet it as follows:

After imbibing liquid,

A man in the South

Duly proceeds to stick quid
(Very likely a thick quid)
Into his mouth.

And "Mickey Rooney" contributes this:

Shure Quicquid is a thick wit,
If he can not rhyme to liquid,
A thing that any Mick wid
The greatest aise can do:

Just take the herb called chick-weed,
Which they often cure the sick wid,
That's a dacent rhyme for liquid,
And from a Mickey, too.

Some one having challenged a rhyme for carpet, the following "lines to a pretty barmaid" were elicited in response:

Sweet maid of the inn,

'Tis surely no sin

To toast such a beautiful bar pet;
Believe me, my dear,

Your feet would appear

At home on a nobleman's carpet.

Rhymes were thus found for window:

A cruel man a beetle caught,

And to the wall him pinned, oh!
Then said the beetle to the crowd,

"Though I'm stuck up I am not proud,"
And his soul went out of the window.

Bold Robin Hood, that archer good,

Shot down fat buck and thin doe;

Rough storms withstood in thick greenwood,
Nor care for door or window.

This for garden:—

Though Afric's lion be not here

In showman's stoutly barred den,

An "Irish Lion" you may see

At large in Winter Garden.

The difficulty with porringer has thus been overcome:

The second James a daughter had,

Too fine to lick a porringer;

He sought her out a noble lad,

And gave the Prince of Orange her.

And in this stanza:

When nations doubt our power to fight,
We smile at every foreign jeer;

And with untroubled appetite,

Still empty plate and porringer.

+

These for orange and lemon:·

I gave my darling child a lemon,

That lately grew its fragrant stem on;

And next, to give her pleasure more range

I offered her a juicy orange,

And nuts-she cracked them in the door-hinge.

And many an ill, grim,

And travel-worn pilgrim,

has traveled far out of his way before succeeding with widow:-
Who would not always as he's bid do,
Should never think to wed a widow.

The jury found that Pickwick did owe
Damages to Bardell's widow.

Pickwick loquitur:—

Since of this suit I now am rid, 0,

Ne'er again I'll lodge with a widow!

Among the stubborn proper names are Tipperary and Timbuctoo. The most successful effort to match the latter was an impromptu by a gentleman who had accompanied a lady home from church one Sunday evening, and who found her hymn-book is his pocket next morning. He returned it with these lines:

:

My dear and much respected Jenny,
You must have thought me quite a ninny
For carrying off your hymn-book to
My house. Had you thoughts visionary,
And did you dream some missionary
Had flown with it to Timbuctoo?

Another attempt runs thus:

I went a hunting on the plains,

The plains of Timbuctoo;

I shot one buck for all my pains,

And he was a slim buck too.

An unattainable rhyme might be sought for Euxine, had not Byron said

Euxine,

The dirtiest little sea that mortal ever pukes in.