of his friends, and without the smallest intention of seeing them in print. The best of his effusions have preserved a certain freshness because of the neatness with which they are turned, but it can scarcely be said that they have any pretension to be called poetry. They were inspired by incidents in the private life of the day, and were largely addressed to a few friends of exalted rank, who were hardly less witty than the author himself, such as the duc de Nevers, the marquis de Lassay, the duchesse de Bouillon and the marquis de la Fare. In the collections of Chaulieu’s works, which were very often reprinted, side by side with his own pieces will be found petits vers de société indited by these great friends of his, and often quite as well turned as his own. To write such verses, indeed, was almost an accomplishment of good breeding. An enormous collection of them was brought together by Titon du Tillet (1676–1762), in his Parnasse françois, where those who are curious on the subject may observe to satiety how ingenious and artificial and trifling the vers de société of the French 18th century could be. The fashion for them followed upon the decline of an interest in rondeaux, ballades and villanelles, and Chaulieu himself had not a little to do with throwing those ingenuities out of fashion, his attack on Benserade, who went so far as to turn the whole of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into rondeaux. being, according to his editor of 1732, “the first work which displayed the delicacy of the Abbé de Chaulieu’s taste, and his talent for poetry.” Of the writers of vers de société in France, J. B. Rousseau had the most poetical faculty; he was, in fact, a poet, and he wrote a “Billet à Chaulieu” which is a gem of delicate and playful charm. But, as a rule, the efforts of the French versifiers dans les petits genres were not of considerable poetic value.
If in England the expression vers de société carries with it more literary dignity, this is mainly due to the genius of one man. Prior’s Poems on Several Occasions, collected in 1709, presents us with some of the earliest entirely characteristic specimens of vers de société, arid with some of the best. Here the poet consciously, and openly, resigns the pretension of high effort and an appeal to Parnassus. He is paying a visit at Burghley House, where the conversation turns on the merits and adventures of Mr Fleetwood Shepherd; Prior then and there throws off, in extremely graceful verse, a piece appropriate to the occasion. He addresses it, and he dates it (May 14, 1689); and this is a typical example of vers de société. It will be seen that Prior, who learned much from his residence in the heart of the French world of fashion between 1711 and 1715, treats very much the same subjects as Chaulieu and La Fare were treating, but he does so with more force of style and dignity of imagination. As the 18th century progressed, the example of Prior was often followed by English poets, without, however, any general recapture of his forcible grace. The vers de société tended to be merged in the epistle and in the epigram. Swift, however, when he was neither coarse nor frigid, sometimes achieved a genuine success, as in the admirable verses on his own death. The odes of Ambrose Philips (1671–1749) addressed by name to various private persons, and, most happily, to children, were not understood in his own age, but possess some of the most fortunate characteristics of pure vers de société. In his “Welcome from Greece,” a study in ottava rima, Gay produced a masterpiece in this delicate class, but most of his easy writings belong to a different category. Nothing of peculiar importance detains us until we reach Cowper, whose poems for particular occasions, such as those on “Mrs Throckmorton’s Bullfinch” and “The Distressed Travellers,” are models of the poetic use of actual circumstances treated with an agreeable levity, or an artful naivete. In a later age, Byron, who excelled in so many departments of poetry, was an occasional writer of brilliant vers de société, such as the epistle “Huzza, Hodgson,” but to find a direct successor to Prior it is necessary to pass Henry Luttrell (1765–1851) and W. R. Spencer (1769–1834), and to come down to W. M. Praed (q.v.). A certain character was given to English vers de société by Hood and Barham, but the former was too much addicted to a play upon words, the latter was too boisterous, to be considered as direct continuers of the tradition of Prior. That tradition, however, was revived by Frederick Locker, afterwards Locker-Lampson (1821–1895), whose London Lyrics, first printed in 1857 and constantly modified until 1893, is in some respects the typical modern example of pure vers de société. Locker was a simple, clear and easy writer; he successfully avoided the least appearance of that effort which is fatal to this kind of verse. His “Rotten Row,” with its reminiscences of the early sixties,
“But where is now the courtly troop
That once rode laughing by?
I miss the curls of Cantelupe,
The laugh of Lady Di,”—
touches of real portraiture—is a perfect example of vers de société. Since the days of Locker, those who have attempted to strike the lighter lyre in English have been very numerous. Almost immeasurably superior to the rest has been Mr Austin Dobson, who is, however, something more than a writer of vers de societé.
Collections of vers de societé of much excellence have been published by J. K. Stephen (1859–92), Andrew Lang (b. 1844), A. D. Godley (b. 1856), Owen Seaman (b. 1861) and A. R. Ropes (“Adrian Ross”) (b. 1859). (E. G.)
VERSE (from Lat. versus, literally a line or furrow drawn by turning the plough, from vertere, and afterwards signifying an arrangement of syllables into feet), the name given to an assemblage of words so placed together as to produce a metrical effect. The art of making, and the science of analysing, such verses is known as Versification. According to Max Müller, there is an analogy between versus and the Sanskrit term, vritta, which is the name given by the ancient grammarians of India to the rule determining the value of the quantity in vedic poetry. In modern speech, verse is directly contrasted with prose, as being essentially the result of an attention to determined rules of form. In English we speak of “a verse” or “verses,” with reference to specific instances, or of “verse,” as the general science or art of metrical expression, with its regulations and phenomena. A verse, which is a series of rhythmical syllables, divided by pauses, is destined in script to occupy a single line, and was so understood by the ancients (the στίχος of the Greeks). The Alexandrian scholiast Hephaestion speaks distinctly of verses that ceased to be verses because they were too long; he stigmatizes a pentameter line of Callimachus as στίχον ύπέρμετρον. There is no danger, therefore, in our emphasizing this rule, and in saying that, even in Mr Swinburne’s most extended experiments the theory is that a verse fills but one line in a supposititious piece of writing.
It is essential that the verse so limited should be a complete form in itself. It is not, like a clause or a sentence in prose, unrecurrent and unlimited, but it presents us with a successive and a continuous cadence, confined within definite bounds. There has been a constant discussion as to what it is in which this succession and this continuity consist, and here we come at once to the principal difficulty which makes the analysis of the processes of the poets so difficult. To go back to the earliest European tradition, it is universally admitted that the ancient Greeks considered the art of verse as a branch of musk, and as such co-ordinated it with harmony and orchestral effect. This appears from definite statements preserved in the fragments of Aristoxenus of Tarentum, a grammarian who lived in the age of Alexander the Great, and whom we shall see to have been the first who laid down definite laws for prosody as a department of musical art (μονσική). It was found necessary, in order to compose a work of musical value, to work out a system of disciplined and linked movement. This system, or arrangement, was called rhythm, and this is common to all the arts of melody. Harmony, consisting in the reproduction of the sound of human voices or of musical instruments, and orchestrics, dealing with the movements of the human body, were expressed in metrical art by that arrangement of syllables which is known as rhythm. The science of metre is the teaching of those laws on which
