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correspond in many different respects, either in the fame or in different strophees. The most skilful investigators of this subject assure us, that the poets perpetually invented new measures, and reckon up one hundred and thirty-six kinds[1]. The explication of them we must leave to the assiduity of those who have reckoned them up.
This taste for the abstruse and complicated, could not fail of running them into allegories and enigmas of every kind: We often meet with princes and great warriors in the ancient chronicles, proposing riddles and affixing penalties on such as could not unravel them. In the first interview king Regner had with the beautiful shepherdess before mentioned, he tried by enigmas to discover whether her wit was answerable to her beauty. Another king, named Eric, rendered himself famous for being able to give immediate answers to thirty riddles, which Odin himself had
- ↑ Worm. App. Litt. Run. p. 165. rec. edit.
harsh consonants, the first effort of their bards to reduce it to harmony must have been by placing these consonants at such distances from each other, so intermixing them with vowels, and so artfully interweaving, repeating and dividing these several founds, as to produce an agreeable effect from their structure. T.
