Your laborious German wits will turn over a whole dictionary for one
of these ingenious devices. A man would think they were searching
after an apt classical term, but instead of that they are looking
out a word that has an L, an M, or a D in it. When, therefore, we
meet with any of these inscriptions, we are not so much to look in
them for the thought, as for the year of the Lord.
The bouts-rimes were the favourites of the French nation for a whole
age together, and that at a time when it abounded in wit and
learning. They were a list of words that rhyme to one another,
drawn up by another hand, and given to a poet, who was to make a
poem to the rhymes in the same order that they were placed upon the
list: the more uncommon the rhymes were, the more extraordinary was
the genius of the poet that could accommodate his verses to them. I
do not know any greater instance of the decay of wit and learning
among the French, which generally follows the declension of empire,
than the endeavouring to restore this foolish kind of wit. If the
reader will be at trouble to see examples of it, let him look into
the new Mercure Gallant, where the author every month gives a list
of rhymes to be filled up by the ingenious, in order to be
communicated to the public in the Mercure for the succeeding month.
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