large a share of the rural imagery and heathen mythology of Tibullus, which, being with respect to himself purely fictitious, impairs the reality of his assumed character of a lover. And it is true, that his elegies have the air of being the elegant exercises of an academic, rather than the effusions of a heart touched with a real passion. But there is something in the simplicity of pastoral life so sweetly accordant with the tender affections, that the incongruity of times and manners is easily pardoned, and genuine feelings are excited under feigned circumstances. I am persuaded that, without criticising too deeply, you will receive true pleasure from the perusal of these pieces, especially from that in which a picture is drawn of connubial love in a country retreat, (Elegy XIII.) with circumstances only a little varied from those which might really take place in such a situation among ourselves. It is the English farmer who speaks in the following

stanza:

With timely care I'll sow my little field,
And plant my orchard with its master's hand;
Nor blush to spread the hay, the hook to wield,
Or range my sheaves along the sunny land.

He

appears

afterwards under a more refined form, but still suitable enough to a ferme ornée:

What joy to wind along the cool retreat,
To stop and gaze on Delia as I go!

To mingle sweet discourse with kisses sweet,
And teach my lovely scholar all I know!

I could point out to you another "elegy of Delia" on the Tibullian model, written by one of your sex whom you love and honour; which, with equal tenderness, is more purely an English composition: but happily it has not yet the claim to be quoted among those pieces which are sanctioned by posthumous fame.

Farewell!

LETTER

LETTER IX.

HITHERTO, my dear Pupil, we have view ed English verse with the accompaniment The device of marking the

of rhyme. ends of lines with the recurrence of similar sounds, unknown to Greek and Latin poetry, was introduced in those periods when the Roman empire was overrun by the barbarous tribes of the North, and true taste gave way to puerility and caprice. The modern languages, in their gradual progress to refinement, retained an ornament which long use had rendered almost indispensable; and to this day, rhyme is commonly admitted in the verse of every European nation, and to some is regarded as absolutely essential. The meanness of its origin, and the difficulties to which it subjects a writer, have, however, produced various attempts for emancipating poetry

1

from what was considered as a degrading imposition; and these attempts have in no country been so well supported as in England. The dramatic writers led the way in the disuse of rhyme; undoubtedly, because they found that more was gained by such an omission in approximating dialogue to common speech, than was lost in disappointing the ear of an accustomed jingle. After the public had been taught to relish the noble passages of Shakespear and his cotemporary tragedians in unrhymed verse, it required no extraordinary courage to venture upon the same liberty in other compositions, where the elevation of the matter might divert the reader's attention from a degree of negligence in the form. At length, Milton wrote his Paradise Lost in blank verse, and its reputation was established. But it is only in one kind of measure, the heroic, that the absence of rhyme has obtained general toleration. In the shorter measures, and in those diversified by lines of different lengths, and complicated

complicated into stanzas, the practised ear has never been brought to acquiesce in the want of a gratification to which it has been accustomed. Indeed, some of these measures, as the elegiac, are entirely dependent on the rhyme.

There has been much discussion concerning the comparative merit of blank verse and rhymed couplets in the heroic measure, and it is not likely that different tastes will ever, by any process of reasoning, be brought to agree on this head. It may be useful, however, to give a brief statement of the case. I have already mentioned, that this measure is formed of ten syllables, alternately short and long, with the occasional irregularity of two long or two short successively. This produces a modulation so simple, and so little different from prose, that without some art in recitation, it is not easily distinguished to be verse. Moreover, as there is nothing to mark to the ear the tenth or terminating syllable but the rhyme; where that is omit

ted,