RHYME, more correctly spelled rime, from Provencal word rim (its customary English spelling is due to a confusion with rhythm), a literary ornament or device consisting of an identity of sound in the terminal syllables of two or more words. In the art of versification it signifies the repetition of a sound at the end of two or more lines in a single composition. This artifice was practically unknown to the ancients, and, when it occurs, or seems to occur, in the works of classic Greek and Latin poets, it must be considered to be accidental. Conscious rhyme came later. The name given to lines with an intentional rhyme in the middle is Leonine verse, the invention being attributed to a probably apoc ryphal monk Leoninus or Leonius, who is supposed to be the author of a history of the Old Testament preserved in the Biblio theque Nationale of Paris. This "history" is composed in Latin verses, all of which rhyme in the centre. Recent criticism has been inclined to look upon the African church-Latin of the age of Tertullian as the starting-point of modern rhyme, and it is probable that the ingenuities of priests, invented to aid worship pers in hearing and singing long pieces of Latin verse in the ritual of the Catholic church produced the earliest conscious poems in rhyme. It is certain that by the 4th century a school of rhymed sacred poetry had come into existence, classical examples of which we still possess in the "Stabat Mater" and the "Dies Irae." In the course of the middle ages, alliteration, assonance and end rhyme held the field without a rival in vernacular poetry. After the 14th century, in the north of Europe, and indeed everywhere except in Spain, where assonance held a powerful position, end rhyme became universal and formed a distinctive indication of metrical construction. It was not until the invention of blank verse (q.v.) that rhyme found a modern rival. Certain forms of poetry are almost inconceivable without rhyme, though efforts have been made to compose even rhymeless sonnets. In the hey day of Elizabethan literature a serious attempt was made in Eng land to reject rhyme altogether, and to return to the quantitative measures of the ancients. The prime mover in this heresy was a pedantic grammarian of Cambridge, Gabriel Harvey 1630). For a short time he actually seduced no less melodious a poet than Edmund Spenser to abandon rhyme and adopt a sys tem of accented hexameters and trimeters. From 1576 to 1579
the genius of Spenser seems to have been obscured by this error of taste, but he shook it off completely when he composed The Shepherd's Calepdar. Thomas Campion, in a tract published in 1602, advocated the omission of rhyme from lyrical poetry. By dint of a prodigious effort, he produced some unrhymed odes, which were not without charm, but the best critics of the time, such as Daniel, repudiated the innovation.
In Germany a determined attack on rhyme was made early in the 17th century, particularly by a group of aesthetic critics in the Swiss universities. Lessing recalled the German poets to a sense of the beauty and value of rhyme, but the popularity of Klopstock and his imitators continued to exercise a great influence. Goethe and Schiller, without abandoning rhyme, permitted themselves a great liberty in the employment of unrhymed measures and in imitation of classic metres. This was carried to greater lengths by Platen and Heine, the rhymeless rhythm of the last of whom was imitated in English verse by Matthew Arnold and others. In France, on the other hand, the empire of rhyme has always been triumphant, and in French literature the idea of rhymeless verse could till recently scarcely be said to exist.
In Italian literature the excessive abundance and facility of rhyme has led to a rebellion against its use. It was the influence of German aesthetics which forced upon the notice of Leopardi the possibility of introducing rhymeless lyrical measures into Italian verse, an innovation which he carried out with remark able hardihood and success. The rhymeless odes of Carducci are also worthy of admiration. At the close of the 19th century, par ticularly in France, where the rules of rhyme had been most rigid, an effort was made to modify and minimize the restraints of rhyme. The laws of rhyme, like other artificial regulations, may be too severe, but there is no evidence that the natural beauty which pure rhyme introduces into poetry is losing its hold on the human ear or is in any real danger of being superseded by accent, assonance, or rhythm.
See J. B. Schutze, Versuch einer Theorie des Reimes nach lnhalt and Form (Magdeburg, 1802) ; J. Minor, Neuhochdeutsche Metrik (Stras bourg, 1893) ; J. B. Mayer, A Handbook of Modern English Metre (1903) ; Egerton Smith, The Principles of English Metre (Oxford, 1923) ; Henry Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime (1931).