Explore "On Reading the Bible" by Arthur Quiller-Couch on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
But I have a fourth reason, out of which I might make an apparent fifth by presenting it to you in two different ways. Those elders of you who have followed certain earlier lectures "On the Art of Writing" may remember that they set very little store upon metre as a dividing line between poetry and prose, and no store at all upon rhyme. I am tempted today to go farther, and to maintain that, the larger, the sublimer, your subject is, the more impertinent rhyme becomes to it: and that this impertinence increases in a sort of geometrical progression as you advance from monosyllabic to dissyllabic and on to trisyllabic rhyme. Let me put this by a series of examples.
We start with no rhyme at all: