s human skill in particular departments may ascend progressively till
it reach its zenith and then gradually decline. Mankind acquires, but
loses also; its advance in one direction may mean retreat in another. And
as works such as these are indices to the development of refinement, and
to the co-operation of certain qualities and senses in man, these also
must have their time of rise and fall.

Now the form-and-colour picture presented by one of these fine initials
is, in another department, the sound-picture presented by Gaelic verse. A
little examination shows that, besides possessing the sounds we recognise,
and those which other Europeans nations have noticed, the ancient Irish
composers noted, identified and employed other and more subtle shades of
sound. Consider this question for a moment, for it has a physiological as
well as a literary interest. We all know what the term rhyme now means in
English: the sound-echo of vowels and consonants in two or more terminal
words.[3] It has many charms, but tends to become monotonous in long
poems; hence authors sometimes abandon it completely for blank verse, or,
using it, endeavour to evade the danger of monotony by alternating the
rhyme, carrying over the sense, or varying the length of line. Now this
comes of narrowing the conditions. There is no cause, save custom and
imperfect audition, why only the last vowel and consonant should be
echoed. The ear recognises the echo of the initial letter, or of initial
consonant and vowel, in concord or alliteration. Readers of Spanish dramas
and of Irish street ballads notice also the chime of the accented vowel,
the vowel-rhyme, or _assonante_, although the consonants differ. But the
ancient Irish, in addition to these, had also other varieties, such as the
correspondence between letters of the same class. This avoided the
monotony produced by a reiteration of exactly the same letter, whilst it
repeated the sound with a harmonious variation, and maintained a delicate
airy phantom-chime which must have been delightful to the educated ear.

In connection with this question of sound-echo I have a proposition to put
forward which may well seem startling. Of all the literary possessions of
the human race, the wide world over, nothing now seems to us so constant,
so universal, so eternal as rhyme. Now the fact is that rhyme was quite
unknown to all the dialects of Europe, with one exception, for some
centuries after the Christian era. T