Notwithftaiiding the great authorities that oppofe the queftion of rhimc 

 as conflituting a part of the Hebrew poetry, what I have read on the fub- 

 jeft, with my own flender knowlege of the facred text, inclines me to 

 think this ancient parent of tongues and magna viater of language, who 

 has given birth to fo many fairer daughters, nurfed in her fruitful bofom 

 the very foul of rhime ; and that rhime formed a flrong feature in her 

 venerable face. The queflion then, as it effefts the prefent enquiry, ap- 

 pears to be this : not, fimply, whether rhime did, or did not enter, and 

 form a part of the Hebrew verfe? (for that is a matter of proof, not of 

 fpeculation.) But, whether rhime was an mnate quality in the parent 

 language? Thofe, we know, who are born with the mufic of poetry in 

 their fouls, " lifp in numbers". We require not the tuneful Ovid or the 

 melodious Pope to afliare us of the faft. Filled with the divine enthu- 

 Cafm, the infant poet labours, like the Delphic virgin, till his words break 

 into the harmony of numbers : and a judicious critic, who cannot be fuf- 

 pefted of partiality in this matter, has confirmed its truth in an elaborate 

 treatife on rhythmal compofition. So natural, fays he, is the rhime in all 

 languages, that infants of their own accord fall into it, by founding batto- 

 logically the fame words of a fong, and afterwards by varying them into 

 fmiilar correfponding founds*. This fure had been enough to convince 

 us, that rhime is coeval with language, and ancient as fpeech itfelf. If 

 fo, it cannot be a borrowed quality in poetry ; neither can it be of Euro- 

 pean Invention, or have been firfl: brought by the Barbarians of the north 

 into the more fouthern provinces. It is the objeft of thefe pages to fliew 

 that rhime has in no age or country been fuper-induced into any language 

 whatever, and leafl of all, into our own, that 



« Slides into verfe, and liitches in a rhime" 



It is the child of nature, not of adoption ; the fpontaneous language, 



fpeaking through the mouths of babes and fucklings, and as Voffius fays 



of the infant poet, confulting the " ornament as well as the fullnefs of 



Vol. IX. B numbers," 



* Vofs. ibid. 



