fertility of our language as a poetic instrument; he is
master of his materials. No doubt there is some repetition, some
iteration, which becomes slightly wearisome, of his favourite rhymes,
indicating, what has been observed independently of reference to this
particular writer, that the resources of the English language for
terminal assonance, under the stringent conditions required by the
modern rules of versification, are inevitably limited and show signs
of exhaustion.

In a Note on Poetry appended to his latest volume of verses,[35] Mr.
John Davidson has classed rhyme as a kind of disease of poetry. Rhyme,
he says, is probably more than seven hundred years old--in Europe, he
must mean, for it is far older in Asia, whence it originally came--and
since the days of the troubadours and Minnesingers it has corrupted,
in his opinion, the ear of the world. At best it is, he thinks, a
decadent mode, imposing shackles on free poetic expression; and
though in these fetters great poets have done magnificent work, in
their finest rhymed verse he finds a feeling of effort. They have
always been obliged to throw in something that need not have been
said, some words inserted under compulsion, to bring the rhyme about.
Mr. Davidson declares that the true glory of free untrammelled poetry
shines out in the rhythmic periods of blank verse. That there may be
some truth, or at least some convenience, in this theory of the poetic
art, the modern poet may not be concerned to deny; for, as we have
already said, rhymes will not withstand incessant and familiar usage;
they become commonplaces, and the rhymer wanders away from the natural
direction of his thought in search of fresh ones. The most devout
admirers of Browning must admit that his verse is often distorted in
this way--so that a fine stanza sometimes finishes with a jolt and
ends with a tag--and it must be allowed that this necessity of making
both ends meet is bad for the poetic conscience, a temptation to
indefensible laxities. Even Mr. Swinburne, the inventor of exquisite
harmonies, whose work is indisputably sincere, can be occasionally
observed to be diverging from the straight line of his impetuous
flight, hovering and making circuits that lead up skilfully to the
indispensable rhyme. More frequently, perhaps, there is a tendency to
interpose some metaphor, or rather far-fetched allusion, for the sake
of the clear, full, recurrent intonation of echoing words that can
only