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
lordship'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 classical 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
fashions; 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