Iteration in Language. 437 



In a looser sense the word assonance is used for any resemblance 

 of sound, and might be applied to the phrases, so common in most 

 languages, which resemble the primitive skimble-skamble type — 

 such as " fair and square," " right and tight," " under and over." 



In this connection it might be noted how different in some re- 

 spects modem literar\- taste is from ancient — at least so far as prose 

 is concerned. In modern prose, at all events, the repetition of a 

 word or phrase, unless a decent distance separates it from its first 

 occurrence, is a thing carefully avoided, and we resort to all manner 

 of synonyms to avoid what seems to us an inelegance. It is a 

 curious instance of the negative pole in thought— the repulsion from 

 what we feel to be an attraction. We exalt the negative of a natural 

 impulse into a virtue of style — just as we exalt the represMon of 

 natural emotion into a virtue of social conduct. In more simple and 

 less conscious literary expression there is no such avoidance of repe- 

 tition. Homer repeats perpetually, and we find in a writer like 

 Lucretius a word like ratio occurring almost half a dozen times in as- 

 many lines, and that too in different shades of meaning. We probably 

 err from over-fastidiousness, and often reject the best word for some 

 inferior synonym for fear of repeating ourselves. 



3. Punning. — It may seem somewhat of a sacrilege to put this 

 under the Literary division of Iteration, but it is so closely allied to 

 the phenomena of Alliteration, Assonance, and Rhyme that it seems 

 best to classify it along with them. In Punning we have, along with 

 the resemblance of sound, the incongruity of meaning and the comic 

 association of incompatible ideas which add attractiveness to this 

 freak of language : " The parson told the sexton and the sexton tolled 

 the bell." All of us are to a certain extent susceptible to the funny 

 side of punning, but we all know how inexpressibly \vearisome is the 

 incorrigible punster and how easy it is for the habit of punning to 

 become a disease of language. That very fact illustrates how deep- 

 seated is this Iterative tendency in language, and illustrates also the 

 repulsion to the natural tendency which we have spoken of already. 



4. Rhyme. — Here the resemblance is in the end syllables of 

 words — confined generally to the last syllable, but often extended to 

 the syllable or syllables preceding the last. As a standing feature of 

 verse-construction rhyme is comparatively a modem expedient, but, 

 no doubt, in its beginning it goes very much farther back. We find a 

 very considerable number of rhymed couplets in Homer, as well as 

 lines where the first half ends with a word rhyming with the last 

 word of the second half, but probably these rhymes are accidental 

 or unconscious, and chiefly owing to the inflexional endings being- 

 .'jimilar. Still, we may suppose that the pleasing jingle of .Aich 

 lines caught gradually the ears of waiters, and when Latin poetry 

 ceased to follow the elaborate prosody it had borrowed from Greek 

 and relapsed under the influence of the barbarian invasions into the 

 accentual form of rhythm which was its more natural expression, the 

 fondness for all forms of assonance and alliteration which is so 

 characteristic of Latin poetr}', probably found its natural vent in Kie 

 gradual development of rhyme. This form of verse-ending became 



