by letter; and a question or statement is
sometimes thus made to supply its own answer. An
epitaph in Crumwallow churchyard, Cornwall, is
composed on this principle:

               Shall we all die?
               We shall die all;
                All die shall we;
                Die all we shall.

Mr. Wheatley might have mentioned, in
connexion with this branch of his subject, the
singular fact that the third line of Gray's Elegy
maybe transposed eighteen times without injury
to the sense, the metre, or the rhyme; as thus,
by way of specimen:

The weary ploughman plods his homeward way.
The ploughman, weary, plods his homeward way.
Weary, the ploughman plods his homeward way.
Homeward, the ploughman, weary, plods his way.
The homeward ploughman plods his weary way.

But this is a very poor triumph compared with
that of the subtle scholar who discovered that
the words contained in the following lines—

Lex, Rex, Grex, Res, Spes, Jus, Thus, Sal, Sol, bona
       Lux, Laus,
Mars, Mors, Sors, Lis, Vis, Styx, Pus, Nox, Frex, mala
       Crux, Fraus,

can be changed in their order 39,916,800 times,
while still retaining the two words in italics in
their original position, to preserve the measure
of the verse. In presence of such a fact (if it be
one), what can we do but exclaim, "Good
gracious!" and pass on?

Lipograms are a species of verse in which, to
quote the account given of them by De Quincey,
the writers, "through each several stanza in its
turn, gloried in dispensing with some one separate
consonant, some vowel, or some diphthong,
and thus achieving a triumph such as crowns
with laurel that pedestrian athlete who wins a
race by hopping on one leg, or wins it under the
inhuman condition of confining both legs within
a sack." Macaronic verses consist of a grotesque
union of Latin and English or some other modern
tongue, in which the vernacular words must have
Latin terminations, and agree, the one with the
other, in number and case; as in this specimen:

               Omne quot exit in um,
               Ceu winum, beerum, toastum, cheerum.

Still more amusing was Swift's freak of writing
English words with Latin spelling, of which,
we think, Mr. Wheatley should have taken
some notice. The following, for instance, has
the appearance of Latin, and yet is very good
English:

               Mollis abuti,
               Has an acuti;
               No lasso finis;
               Molli divinis.

Hestore the English spelling, and we get—

               Moll is a beauty,
               Has an acute eye;
               No lass so fine is;
               Molly divine is.

Bouts Rimés, or "rhymed ends"—a French
invention—make a capital game for those who
are gifted with a little fancy and literary
address. You are presented with a set of rhymes
—the skeleton of so many lines or stanzas—and
you have to supply verses of your own to fit
these words. This species of literary exercise
was at one time so popular in France that the
ladies imposed on their lovers the task of filling
up "rhymed ends" of their own supplying; and
we doubt not that many a pretty compliment
was thus asked for and had. The practice
originated in rather a singular way. A poetaster
named Dulot, who lived in the middle of the
seventeenth century, was one day grieving for
the loss of three hundred sonnets. His friends
expressed their surprise at the largeness of the
number (though it was nothing to what was
achieved by some of the Italian poets); where-upon,
Dulot told them that the sonnets he had
lost were only the ends waiting to be filled up.
He thus became the unintentional originator of
Bouts Rimés. It is said that in this way Campbell
wrote his poem, Lochiel; and Dryden in
some degree justified the habit by that wonderfully
ingenuous confession of his, that a rhyme
sometimes helped him to a thought. The practice
was for a long while kept alive in France
by the Academy of Lanternists at Toulouse
proposing each year a set of fourteen on the subject
of the Grand Monarque, and giving a medal to
the author of the best.

Echo verses are best described in the following
clever specimens:

I'd fain praise your poem—but tell me, how is it?
When I cry out "Exquisite!" Echo cries "Quiz it!"

During the rage for Paganini, a wit thus
expressed in the columns of a weekly newspaper
his contempt for the prevalent mania:

               What are they who pay three guineas
               To hear a tune of Paganini's?
                                               Echo- Pack o' ninnies!

To the same class must be referred that catch,
commencing with the words "Ah how, Sophia,"
which are frequently repeated, and made to bear
both the sound and the meaning, " Ah, house
a-fire!" and that other, in which a skit against
Hawkins's History of Music is conveyed in the
constant iteration, in connexion with Sir John's
name, of the words "Burney's History," which
take the sound of "Burn his History!" Echo
verses are generally comic and satirical; but
George Herbert has some of a religious
character, quoted by Mr. Wheatley; and Webster,
in his ghastly tragedy, the Duchess of Malfi,
introduces an Echo into an old churchyard, with
an effect at once fantastic and dreary.

Much amusement may be derived from
equivocal verses; that is to say, verses that contain
two precisely opposite meanings according to
the order in which you read them. They must
have been invented by some one with a genius
for malicious insinuation, and they have been
found very useful in the propagation of political
libels during troublous times. Thus, the following
lines, read straight down in the ordinary