LEONINE VERSES. THIS quaint style of composition, so justly decried as a specimen of ingenuity, seems to have derived its origin, not from bad taste, but naturally from the construction of the Latin language, in which, so far from any cleverness in the contrivance, the difficulty is to avoid jingle. The adjective and the substantive having most frequently the same termination in the same cases, and the places on which the cæsura falls in hexameter and pentameter verses favouring the position of the adjective in the middle, and the substantive at the end of the line, these circumstances render those measures more liable to this accident than any other. They are generally spoken of as monkish inventions, after the taste of the Latin language and the spirit of the Latin poetry had materially degenerated, and rhyme had begun to supplant the prosodial quantity of the Greek and Latin. This is a correct representation, if the Leonine verse be considered as a set form of composition. But the monks have the merit or demerit, not of originality, but of adoption and adaptation. Numerous examples are to be found in Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, and others of the ancients. You can hardly open their works without stumbling upon them. Take for instance Virgil, lib. vii. :— Ecce autem Inachiis sese referebat ab Argis. Ovid. Epist.: Pingit et exiguo Pergama tota mero. Traditur huic digitis charta notata meis. And eight more instances within the space of seventy-six lines, or at the rate of one in eight lines. Ovid was not likely to have felt much objection to what a highly cultivated ear must feel as a cacophony; but Virgil's judgment and pure taste must have been betrayed into it only from the difficulty of escape and had the Æneid received his finishing hand, he probably would, in most cases, have contrived to avoid it. Cicero, though considered as a divine orator, was not an excellent poet, though not so very bad a one as some persons have with little discrimination represented him. In the poems on his own times, quoted by Quinctilian, is the celebrated line, - O fortunatam natam me consule Romam ! There is extant an epitaph on Pope Benedict XII. who is said to have come into the popedom like a fox, to have reigned like a lion, and to have died like a dog. We must not be very particular about the Ne in Nero. Hic suus est Nero, laicis mors, vipera clero, The following furnishes a specimen of middleage satire against the hierarchy : Accipe, sume, cape, sunt verba placentia Papæ. That on Bede is well known: Continet hæc fossa Bedæ venerabilis ossa. The ingenuity of the following consists in its being an epitaph for four persons, in one line : Filius hic, pater hic, et avus, proavus jacet isthic. The following couplet, it is to be hoped, is not so well founded in its ascriptions to certain extensive classes of the human, as in those to the brute creation: Vulpes amat fraudem, lupus agnum, foemina laudem, The following, in addition to the profundity of the remark, will prevent us from slipping in our declensions: Destruit os oris quicquid lucratur os ossis. Sir Walter Scott quotes the following splendid specimen in his introduction to the Battle of Otter bourne: Regibus et legibus Scotici constantes, Vos clypeis et gladiis pro patria pugnantes, In cantu et historia, perpes est memoria ! This rhyming propensity, originating, as we have already observed, in the peculiar construction of the Latin language, is carried to the extravagance of quaint pathos in the following stanzas of Fair Helen, a Scottish ballad: O! Helen sweet, and maist complete, Thy captive cruelly? O! Helen brave! but this I crave, To this Leonine origin may probably be traced the rhyming propensity of many proverbs in prose; as,-Qualis vita finis ita.* An old lawyer of the middle ages gives the following satirical quatrain : Annis mille jam peractis Mel in ore, verba lactis, * Alliteration is a favourite mode of proverbial expression; as thus, Fraud and frost end foul. Our law language also is much infected with the itch of rhyming. Art and part is a translation of ope et consilio. EXPRESSIVE DESCRIPTIONS. THERE is no poet who abounds with these more than Virgil; and they are as highly wrought as frequent. No poet expresses in a more lively or picturesque manner, the nature of the action by the march of the verse. His dactyls and spondees were powerful instruments of description, "which we upon the adverse faction want." When he had any sudden action to describe, he always made use of dactyls, and of words selected with such care and skill, as to be, if not the echo, at least a symbol of the sense. The impotent blow aimed by Priam at Pyrrhus is well expressed by the inefficient labour of the verse: Conjecit. Telumque imbelle sine ictu The following description of a storm, in the first book, has caught the attention and received the praises of all critics : Ac venti, velut agmine facto, Qua data porta, ruunt, et terras turbine perflant. Una Eurusque Notusque ruunt creberque procellis |