THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS and DON QUIXOTE were
begun in prison. It was after they were become (to use the
words of one of them), "Oh, worst imprisonment - the dungeon
of themselves!" that Homer and Milton worked so hard and so
well for the profit of mankind. In the year 1415 Henry V.
had two distinguished prisoners, French Charles of Orleans
and Scottish James I., who whiled away the hours of their
captivity 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 Scotch 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.
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