Curiosities of Literature Volume I Part 40

There is in Latin a little prose work of Fulgentius, which the author divides into twenty-three chapters, according to the order of the twenty-three letters of the Latin alphabet. From A to O are still remaining. The first chapter is with out A; the second without B; the third without C; and so with the rest. There are five novels in prose of Lopes de Vega; the first without A, the second without E, the third without I, &c. Who will attempt to verify them?

The Orientalists are not without this literary folly. A Persian poet read to the celebrated Jami a gazel of his own composition, which Jami did not like: but the writer replied, it was notwithstanding a very curious sonnet, for the _letter Aliff_ was not to be found in any one of the words! Jami sarcastically replied, "You can do a better thing yet; take away _all the letters_ from every word you have written."

To these works may be added the _Ecloga de Calvis_, by Hugbald the monk.

All the words of this silly work begin with a C. It is printed in Dornavius. _Pugna Porcorum_; all the words beginning with a P, in the Nugae Venales. _Canum c.u.m cattis certamen_; the words beginning with a C: a performance of the same kind in the same work. Gregorio Leti presented a discourse to the Academy of the Humorists at Rome, throughout which he had purposely omitted the letter R, and he ent.i.tled it the exiled R. A friend having requested a copy, as a literary curiosity, for so he considered this idle performance, Leti, to show that this affair was not so difficult, replied by a copious answer of seven pages, in which he had observed the same severe ostracism against the letter R! Lord North, in the court of James, I., has written a set of Sonnets, each of which begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. The Earl of Rivers, in the reign of Edward IV., translated the Moral Proverbs of Christiana of Pisa, a poem of about two hundred lines, the greatest part of which he contrived to conclude with the letter E; an instance of his lords.h.i.+p's hard application, and the bad taste of an age which, Lord Orford observes, had witticisms and whims to struggle with, as well as ignorance.

It has been well observed of these minute triflers, that extreme exactness is the sublime of fools, whose labours may be well called, in the language of Dryden,

Pangs without birth, and fruitless industry.

And Martial says,

Turpe est difficiles habere nugas, Et stultus labor est ineptiarum.

Which we may translate,

'Tis a folly to sweat o'er a difficult trifle, And for silly devices invention to rifle.

I shall not dwell on the wits who composed verses in the forms of hearts, wings, altars, and true-love knots; or as Ben Jonson describes their grotesque shapes,

A pair of scissors and a comb in verse.

Tom Nash, who loved to push the ludicrous to its extreme, in his amusing invective against the cla.s.sical Gabriel Harvey, tells us that "he had writ verses in all kinds; in form of a pair of gloves, a pair of spectacles, and a pair of pot-hooks," &c. They are not less absurd, who expose to public ridicule the name of their mistress by employing it to form their acrostics. I have seen some of the latter where, _both sides_ and _crossways_, the name of the mistress or the patron has been sent down to posterity with eternal torture. When _one name_ is made out _four times_ in the same acrostic, the great difficulty must have been to have found words by which the letters forming the name should be forced to stand in their particular places. It might be incredible that so great a genius as Boccaccio could have lent himself to these literary fas.h.i.+ons; yet one of the most gigantic of acrostics may be seen in his works; it is a poem of fifty cantos! Ginguene has preserved a specimen in his Literary History of Italy, vol. iii. p.54. Puttenham, in "The Art of Poesie," p. 75, gives several odd specimens of poems in the forms of lozenges, rhomboids, pillars, &c. Puttenham has contrived to form a defence for describing and making such trifling devices. He has done more: he has erected two pillars himself to the honour of Queen Elizabeth; every pillar consists of a base of eight syllables, the shaft or middle of four, and the capital is equal with the base. The only difference between the two pillars consists in this; in the one "ye must read upwards," and in the other the reverse. These pillars, notwithstanding this fortunate device and variation, may be fixed as two columns in the porch of the vast temple of literary folly.

It was at this period, when _words_ or _verse_ were tortured into such fantastic forms, that the trees in gardens were twisted and sheared into obelisks and giants, peac.o.c.ks, or flower-pots. In a copy of verses, "To a hair of my mistress's eye-lash," the merit, next to the choice of the subject, must have been the arrangement, or the disarrangement, of the whole poem into the form of a heart. With a pair of wings many a sonnet fluttered, and a sacred hymn was expressed by the mystical triangle.

_Acrostics_ are formed from the initial letters of every verse; but a different conceit regulated _chronograms_, which were used to describe _dates_--the _numeral letters_, in whatever part of the word they stood, were distinguished from other letters by being written in capitals. In the following chronogram from Horace,

--_feriam sidera vertice_,

by a strange elevation of CAPITALS the _chronogrammatist_ compels even Horace to give the year of our Lord thus,

--feriaM siDera VertIce. MDVI.

The Acrostic and the Chronogram are both ingeniously described in the mock epic of the Scribleriad.[82] The _initial letters_ of the acrostics are thus alluded to in the literary wars:--

Firm and compact, in three fair columns wove, O'er the smooth plain, the bold _acrostics_ move; _High_ o'er the rest, the TOWERING LEADERS rise With _limbs gigantic_, and _superior size_.[83]

But the looser character of the _chronograms_, and the disorder in which they are found, are ingeniously sung thus:--

Not thus the _looser chronograms_ prepare Careless their troops, undisciplined to war; With _rank irregular, confused_ they stand, The CHIEFTAINS MINGLING with the vulgar band.

He afterwards adds others of the illegitimate race of wit:--

To join these squadrons, o'er the champaign came A numerous race of no ign.o.ble name; _Riddle_ and _Rebus_, Riddle's dearest son, And _false Conundrum_ and _insidious Pun_.

_Fustian_, who scarcely deigns to tread the ground, And _Rondeau_, wheeling in repeated round.

On their fair standards, by the wind display'd, _Eggs_, _altars_, _wings_, _pipes_, _axes_, were pourtray'd.

I find the origin of _Bouts-rimes_, or "Rhyming Ends," in Goujet's Bib.

Fr. xvi. p. 181. One Dulot, a foolish poet, when sonnets were in demand, had a singular custom of preparing the rhymes of these poems to be filled up at his leisure. Having been robbed of his papers, he was regretting most the loss of three hundred sonnets: his friends were astonished that he had written so many which they had never heard. "They were _blank sonnets_," he replied; and explained the mystery by describing his _Bouts-rimes_. The idea appeared ridiculously amusing; and it soon became fas.h.i.+onable to collect the most difficult rhymes, and fill up the lines.

The _Charade_ is of recent birth, and I cannot discover the origin of this species of logogriphes. It was not known in France so late as in 1771; in the great Dictionnaire de Trevoux, the term appears only as the name of an Indian sect of a military character. Its mystical conceits have occasionally displayed singular felicity.

_Anagrams_ were another whimsical invention; with the _letters_ of any _name_ they contrived to make out some entire word, descriptive of the character of the person who bore the name. These anagrams, therefore, were either satirical or complimentary. When in fas.h.i.+on, lovers made use of them continually: I have read of one, whose mistress's name was Magdalen, for whom he composed, not only an epic under that name, but as a proof of his pa.s.sion, one day he sent her three dozen of anagrams all on her lovely name. Scioppius imagined himself fortunate that his adversary _Scaliger_ was perfectly _Sacrilege_ in all the oblique cases of the Latin language; on this principle Sir John _Wiat_ was made out, to his own satisfaction--_a wit_. They were not always correct when a great compliment was required; the poet _John Cleveland_ was strained hard to make _Heliconian dew_. This literary trifle has, however, in our own times produced several, equally ingenious and caustic.

Verses of grotesque shapes have sometimes been contrived to convey ingenious thoughts. Pannard, a modern French poet, has tortured his agreeable vein of poetry into such forms. He has made some of his Baccha.n.a.lian songs to take the figures of _bottles_, and others of _gla.s.ses_. These objects are perfectly drawn by the various measures of the verses which form the songs. He has also introduced an _echo_ in his verses which he contrives so as not to injure their sense. This was practised by the old French bards in the age of Marot, and this poetical whim is ridiculed by Butler in his Hudibras, Part I. Canto 3, Verse 190.

I give an example of these poetical echoes. The following ones are ingenious, lively, and satirical:--

Pour nous plaire, un pl_umet_

_Met_

Tout en usage:

Mais on trouve sou_vent_

_Vent_

Dans son langage.

On y voit des Com_mis_

_Mis_

Comme des Princes,

Apres etre ve_nus_

_Nuds_

De leurs Provinces.

The poetical whim of Cretin, a French poet, brought into fas.h.i.+on punning or equivocal rhymes. Maret thus addressed him in his own way:--

L'homme, sotart, et _non scavant_ Comme un rotisseur, _qui lave oye_, La faute d'autrui, _nonce avant_, Qu'il la cognoisse, ou _qu'il la voye_, &c.

In these lines of Du Bartas, this poet imagined that he imitated the harmonious notes of the lark: "the sound" is here, however, _not_ "an echo to the sense."

La gentille alouette, avec son tirelire, Tirelire, a lire, et tireliran, tire Vers la voute du ciel, puis son vol vers ce lieu, Vire et desire dire adieu Dieu, adieu Dieu.

The French have an ingenious kind of Nonsense Verses called _Amphigouries_. This word is composed of a Greek adverb signifying _about_, and of a substantive signifying _a circle_. The following is a specimen, elegant in the selection of words, and what the French called richly rhymed, but in fact they are fine verses without any meaning whatever. Pope's Stanzas, said to be written by a _person of quality_, to ridicule the tuneful nonsense of certain bards, and which Gilbert Wakefield mistook for a serious composition, and wrote two pages of Commentary to prove this song was disjointed, obscure, and absurd, is an excellent specimen of these _Amphigouries_.

AMPHIGOURIE.

Qu'il est heureux de se defendre Quand le coeur ne s'est pas rendu!

Mais qu'il est facheux de se rendre Quand le bonheur est suspendu!

Par un discours sans suite et tendre, Egarez un coeur eperdu; Souvent par un mal-entendu L'amant adroit se fait entendre.