Many estimable but badly-informed people think that poetry or verse (unluckily these terms are synonymous to them) is either a divine outburst of feeling, expressing itself almost spontaneously in rhyme, or, sad to say, a mere vehicle to hide the poverty of ideas, and eke out a repetition of fancies intolerable in prose. The multitude are slow to realise law in any shape, and in art no less than nature look upon most results as the effect of what a critic has termed “the glorious gospel of haphazard.” To these poetry suggests no art in itself, only a more or less musical jingle of pretty sounds, gay or plaintive feelings, while the whole is unreal and fantastic. But to avoid further preface, let us take a specimen of the aforementioned forms, choosing a dainty little epigrammatic verse known as the _Triolet_, to start with. This form, complete always in eight short lines, is peculiarly a product of the old French school of verse, and is in itself, to some extent, an epitome of all the rest. Almost new in English poetry, the first examples dating from a volume of poems published in 1873 by Mr. Bridges, it has yet won many friends, although, so far as diligent search by the present writer has been able to trace them, a selection of the best would fill but a few pages of this paper. Flexible only in the rhythm and length of its lines, which are generally about six feet (syllabic feet, of course) in length, it is stern, and forbids tampering in all other respects, allowing but two rhyme-sounds for the whole of the lines. The lines themselves are repeated in a certain unalterable order; the first two serve again for the seventh and eighth, while the fourth is also a repetition of the first; no syllable even, in the best examples, is changed in these lines. But on each fresh appearance the words should, if possible, convey a fresh phase of the idea, the emphasis alone serving to mark the distinction. On studying the examples given, it will be found that the crux lies in the treatment of the fifth and sixth lines, while the way the third is connected with the fourth, and the neatness with which the final couplet is repeated to form a necessary part of the whole, and not a mere repeat to fill up the prescribed form, is almost as difficult. The following example is a very perfect one; it comes in a sequence of triolets by Mr. Austin Dobson, entitled “Rose Leaves.” The first version ran:— “I intended an ode, And it turned into triolets. It began _à la mode_: I intended an ode; But Rose crossed the road With a bunch of fresh violets; I intended an ode, And it turned into triolets.”