(SEE LEONINE VEnsEs.) When two successive lines rhyme, they form a couplet; three form a triplet. Often the lines rhyme alternately or at greater intervals, forming groups of four (quatrains) or more. A group of lines embracing all the varieties of meter and combinations of rhyme that occur in the piece, forms a section called a stare, sometimes a stanza, often, but improperly, a verse. In the days of acrostics (q.v.) and other conceits, it was the fashion to interlace rhymes in highly artificial systems; the most complex arrangements still cur rent in English are the sonnet (q.v.) and the SpeaserItn (q.v.) stanza. Tennyson has accustomed the English ear to a quatrain, in which, instead of alternate rhimes, the first line rhymes with the fourth, and the second with the third.
It is is mistake to suppose that rhitne is a mere ornament to versification. Besides being m itself a pleasing musical accord, it serves to mark the endings of the lines and other sections of the meter, and thus renders time rhythm (q.v.) more distinct and appre ciable than the accents alone can do. So much is this the case. that in French, in which the accents are but feeble, meter without rhyme is so undistingnishable from prose. flint blank verse has never obtained a footing, notwithstanding the war once waged by French scholars against rhymed versification. "The advantages of rhyme," says Guest (English rhythms), been felt so strongly, that no people have ever adopted an accentual rhythm without also adopting rhyme." The Greek and Latin meters of the classic period, depending upon tune or quantity, and not upon accent, were able to dispense with the accessory of rhyme; but, as has been well observed by Trench (Sacred Latin Parry, Introduction, 18(Y4), even - the prosodic poetry of Greece and Home was equally obliged to mark this (the division into sections or verses), though it did it in another way. Thus, had dactyls and spondees been allowed to be promiscuously used throughout the hexa meter (q.v.) line, no satisfying token would have reached the ear to indicate the eiose Of the verse; and if the hearer had once missed the termination of the line, it would have been almost impossible for him to recover it. But the fixed dactyl and spondee at the cud of the line answer the same purpose of strongly marking the close, as does the rhyme in the accentuated verse; and in other meters, in like manner, licenses permitted in the beginning of the line are excluded at its close, the motives for this greater strict ness being the mine." It is chiefly, perhaps, from failing to satisfy this necessary con dition, that modern unrhymed verse is found unsatisfactory, at least for popular poetry; and it may be doubted whether it is not owing to the classical prejudices of scholars that our common English blank verse got or maintained the hold it has.
The objection that rhyme was "the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and hum meter," Pests on ignorance of its real history. It cannot be considered as the exclusive invention of any particular people or age. It is something human, and universal as poetry or music—the result. of the instinctive craving for well-marked recur nmee nod accord. The oldest poems oZ the Chinese, Indians. Arabians, etc., are rhymed; so are those of the Irish and Welsh. In the few fragments of the earliest. Latin poetry that are extant, in which the meter was of an accentual, not quantitative kind, there is a manifest tendency to terminations of similar sound. This native tendency was overlaid for it time by the importation from Greece of the quantitative meters; yet even under the dominance of this exotic system, rhyming verses were not altogether unknown; Ovid especially shows a liking for them: Quot ecemm steltas, tot habet tua Roma puellas; and in the decline of classicality they become more common. At last, when learning began to decay under the irruptions of the northern nations, and a knowledge of the quantity of words—a thing in a great. measure arbitrary, and requiring to he learned—to be lost, the native and more natural property of accent gradually reappeared as the ruling principle of Latin rhythm, and along, with it the tendency to rhyme. It was in this new vehicle that the early Christian poets sought to convey their new ideas and aspirations. The rhymes were at first often rude, and not sustained throughout, as if lighted upon by chance. Distinct traces of the adoption of rhyme are to be seen as early as the hymns of Hilary (died 353), and the systt.n attained its greatest perfection in the 12th and 13th centuries. In refutation of the common opinion, that the Latin hymnologists of the middle ages borrowed the artof rhyme from the Teutonic nations, Dr. Guest brings the conclusive fact, that no poem exists written in a Teutonic dialect with final rhyme before Otfried's Era ngely, which was written in Frankish about 870. Alliteration had previously been the guiding principle of Teutonic rhythms; but after a struggle, which was ionFr protracted in England than on the continent, it was superseded by end-rhymes.—See Guest's History of English Rhythms (2 vols., Loud. 1838),, where the whole subject is learnedly and elaborately treated; Trench's Sacred Latin Poetry, Introduction (Lond. 1864); F. Wolf, Ueber die Lais Sequenzen, and Leiche (Reid. 1841).