tain that we have in many cases substituted the hard sound for the soft, and the contrary, though we cannot determine when the change took place. The recent introduction of the w, in the combination wh in several words, is remarkable. Whole, in the Saxon root, and the corresponding word in the cognate languages, were without the w, and whole and its derivatives were usually written without it in English, until the latter part of the sixteenth century.* So hot, which in Anglo-Saxon was spelt with h only, occasionally received a w at the same period. Whortleberry is an instance of the same sort. Whether the w was ever articulated in whole, wholesome or hot, we cannot determine, but it is difficult to account for its introduction on any other supposition. On the other hand, this semi-vowel has been rejected from the orthography of many words where it was once written and pronounced, and it is silent in pronunciation in many words where it is still written. Several Saxon words began with wl. These are all, I believe, obsolete, though we have derivatives of two of them in lukewarm, and loth, loathe and loathsome. These last words, as well as one or two others, retained the initial w until the fifteenth century, and it doubtless had some orthoepical force, though we cannot pronounce upon its precise character. It was unquestionably anciently articulated before 7, in such words as write, wrong, wrench, &c. What its precise force was cannot now be ascertained, but it appears to have had a distinct sound in such combinations, to near the end of the sixteenth century and even later, if the authority of Mul *Whole may possibly be from the Anglo-Saxon walg; but the etymological analogies of the sister-tongues are to the contrary; and as w never entered into the orthography of whole, until Anglo-Saxon was forgotten, the derivation from hal is more probable. caster and Gil is to be relied on. The former says in express terms, that w is a consonant in the word wrong, and Gil, whose phonography rejects all silent letters, retains the win wrath, wrathful, wretch and wretched. From these remarks it will be evident that our present subject is involved in great obscurity, but, nevertheless, it seems a safe conclusion, that the pronunciation of our language has been upon the whole considerably softened, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, has become more confused, within the last two or three centuries, and is less clear, distinct and sonorous than it was in earlier ages. I have endeavored to show, in a previous lecture, that the art of printing is exerting a restorative influence on English pronunciation. The study of Anglo-Saxon and Old-English grammar will be attended with like results. We may, therefore, hope that the further corruption of our orthoepy will be arrested, and that we may recover something of the fulness and distinctness of articulation, which appear to have characterized the ancient Anglican tongue. LECTURE XXIII. RHYME. AN important difference between the great classes of lánguages which we have considered in former lectures-those, namely, abounding in grammatical inflections, and those comparatively destitute of them-is the more ready adaptability of the inflected tongues to the conventional forms of poetical composition. In other words, they more easily accommodate themselves to those laws of arrangement, sequence, and recurrence of sound-of rhythm, metre and rhyme-by which verse addresses itself to the sensuous ear, and enables that organ, without reference to the subject, purport, or rhetorical character of a given writing, to determine whether it is poetry or prose. An obvious element in this facility of application to poetical use is the independence of the laws of position in syntax which belongs especially to inflected languages, for it is evidently much easier to give a prosodical form to a period, if we are unrestricted in the arrangement of the words which compose it, than if the parts of speech are bound to a certain inflexible order of succession. Metrical convenience has introduced inversion among the allow able licenses of English poetry, and some modern writers have indulged in it to a very questionable extent; but at all events its use is necessarily very limited, and it cannot be employed at all without some loss of perspicuity. A more important poetical advantage of a flectional grammar, is the abundance of consonances which necessarily characterizes it. Wherever there are uniform terminations for number, gender, case, conjugation and other grammatical accidents, where there are augmentative, diminutive and frequentative forms, there of course there must be a corresponding copiousness of rhymes. English, possessing few inflections, has no large classes of similar endings. On the contrary, it is rich in variety of terminations, and for that reason poor in consonances. The number of English words which have no rhyme in the language, and which, of course, cannot be placed at the end of a line, is very great. Of the words in Walker's Rhyming Dictionary, five or six thousand at least are without rhymes, and consequently can be employed at the end of a verse only by transposing the accent, coupling them with an imperfect consonance, or constructing an artificial rhyme out of two words. Of this class are very many important words well adapted for poetic use, such as warmth, month, wolf, gulf, sylph, music, breadth, width, depth, silver, honor, virtue, worship, circle, epic, earthborn, iron, citron, author, echo; others, like courage, hero, which rhyme only with words that cannot be used in serious poetry; others again which have but a single consonance, as babe astrolabe, length strength. Our poverty of rhyme is perhaps the greatest formal difficulty in English poetical composition. In the infancy of our literature, it was felt by Chaucer, who concludes the Complaint of Mars and Venus with this lamentation: And eke to me it is a great penaunce, To folow word by word the curiosite, Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce. The successors of Chaucer have felt the burden of the embarrassment, if they have not echoed the complaint. Walker's Rhyming Dictionary contains about thirty thousand words, including the different inflected forms of the same word. In this list, the number of different endings is not less than fourteen or fifteen thousand, and inasmuch as there are in the same list five or six thousand words or endings without rhyme, as I have already stated, there remain about nine thousand rhymed endings to twenty-five thousand words, so that the average number of words to an ending, or, which comes to the same thing, the number of rhymes to the words capable of rhyming, would be less than three. The Rhyming Dictionary indeed contains scarcely half the English words admissible in poetry, and of those that form its vocabulary, many are wholly un-English and unauthorized, but there is no reason to suppose that the proportions would be changed by extending the list. If we compare our own with some of the Romance languages, we shall find a surprising difference in the relative abundance and scarcity of rhymes. The Spanish poet Yriarte, in a note to his poem La Música, states the number of endings in that language at three thousand nine hundred only, among which are a large number that occur only in a single word. Now as the Spanish vocabulary is a copious one, we shall be safe in saying that there are probably more than thirty thousand Spanish words capable of being employed in poetry. The inflections are very numerous, and while our verb love admits of but seven |