‘Like two faire marble pillours they were seene, Which doe the temple of the Gods support, (2) Whom all the people decke with girlands greene, And honour in their festiuall resort; (4) Those same with stately grace, and princely port (5) She taught to tread, when she her selfe would grace, But with the wooddie Nymphes when she did play, (7) Or when the flying Libbard she did chace, She could them nimbly moue, and after fly apace.’ (II. iii. 28.) Here ‘play’ in l. 7 is rhymed to ‘support’, ‘resort’, ‘port’: ‘sport’ is the obvious correction. There are, in all, nine instances of this singularity in the _Faerie Queene_. I subjoin them all, citing the rhyme-words only: the number following each word shows the line that it ends:-- 1. day (2), dismay (4), way (5), chace (7) (II. ii. 7) 2. make (6), bold (8), told (9) (II. ii. 42) 3. support (2), resort (4), port (5), play (7) (II. iii. 28) 4. leaue (2), cleaue (4), bereaue (5), vpreare (7) (II. viii. 29) 5. spyde (6), law (8), draw (9) (III. vi. 40) 6. enclose (2), plaine (4), Maine (5), complaine (7) (III. vii. 34) 7. times (6), equipage (8), parentage (9) (IV. xi. 17) 8. place (2), aread (4), dread (5), read (7) (V. Proem 11) 9. desyre (2), entyre (4), yre (5), meed (7) (V. xi. 61) In every case the correction is obvious: ‘chace’ should be ‘pray’ (i.e. prey); ‘make’, ‘hold’; ‘play’, ‘sport’; ‘vpreare’, ‘vpheaue’; ‘spyde’, ‘saw’; ‘enclose’, ‘containe’; ‘times’, ‘age’; ‘place’, ‘stead’ (as in 1609); ‘meed’, ‘hyre’. The phenomenon may now be described in general terms: in these nine places Spenser substitutes for a rhyming word a metrically equivalent synonym which does not rhyme. Our analysis shows further that, the rhyme-scheme of the Spenserian stanza being _ababbcbcc_, this substitution occurs only in the first or last of the _b_-group, or in the first of the _c_-group. It seems as if, borne along on the swell of his metre and the easy flow of his imagination, two words identical in sense and metre but different in sound rose to the poet’s mind almost simultaneously; and the one which he meant to reject slipped nevertheless from his pen, having been (we infer) the first to occur. This explains why this phenomenon always occurs either in the first word of a rhyme-group, where the rhyme is still undetermined; or, if in the last, then only in the last of the _b_-group, where the ear has already been satisfied with as many as three rhymes; and why it never occurs in the _a_-group, where two rhymeless endings would at once have alarmed the ear. I have dwelt on this phenomenon at some length because it is, so far as I know, peculiar to Spenser.[2]