ptivity with rhyming. Indeed,
there can be no better pastime for a lonely man than the mechanical
exercise of verse. Such intricate forms as Charles had been used to from
childhood, the ballade with its scanty rhymes; the rondel, with the
recurrence first of the whole, then of half the burthen, in thirteen
verses, seem to have been invented for the prison and the sick-bed. The
common Scots saying, on the sight of anything operose and finical, "he
must have had little to do that made that!" might be put as epigraph on
all the song-books of old France. Making such sorts of verse belongs to
the same class of pleasures as guessing acrostics or "burying proverbs."
It is almost purely formal, almost purely verbal. It must be done gently
and gingerly. It keeps the mind occupied a long time, and never so
intently as to be distressing; for anything like strain is against the
very nature of the craft. Sometimes things go easily, the refrains fall
into their place as if of their own accord, and it becomes something of
the nature of an intellectual tennis; you must make your poem as the
rhymes will go, just as you must strike your ball as your adversary
played it. So that these forms are suitable rather for those who wish to
make verses than for those who wish to express opinions. Sometimes, on
the other hand, difficulties arise: rival verses come into a man's head,
and fugitive words elude his memory. Then it is that he enjoys at the
same time the deliberate pleasures of a connoisseur comparing wines, and
the ardour of the chase. He may have been sitting all day long in prison
with folded hands; but when he goes to bed the retrospect will seem
animated and eventful.

Besides confirming himself as an habitual maker of verses, Charles
acquired some new opinions during his captivity. He was perpetually
reminded of the change that had befallen him. He found the climate of
England cold and "prejudicial to the human frame"; he had a great
contempt for English fruit and English beer; even the coal fires were
unpleasing in his eyes.[29] He was rooted up from among his friends and
customs and the places that had known him. And so in this strange land
he began to learn the love of his own. Sad people all the world over are
like to be moved when the wind is in some particular quarter. So Burns
preferred when it was in the west, and blew to him from his mistress; so
the girl in the ballade, looking south to Yarrow, thought it might carry
a ki