Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

MEN AND BOOKS
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 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 hke 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
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