Alliteration is the frequent occurrence in a composition of words beginning with the same letter. In Old German, Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian poetry, alliteration took the place of rhyme. This kind of verse, in its strict form, required that in the two short lines forming a couplet, three words should begin with the same letter, two in the first line or hemistich, and one in the second; as in the following couplet of Anglo-Saxon poetry:
Firum foldan
Frea almihtig.—CÆDMON.
Alliterative poems continued to be written in English after it had assumed its modern form; the most remarkable example is Piers the Plowman, a poem of the 14th century, of which the following is a specimen, the two hemistichs being written in one line:
Mercy hight that maid, | a meek thing withal,
A full benign burd, | and buxom of speech.
Even after the introduction of rhyme, alliteration continued to be largely used as an embellishment of poetry. Shakespeare ridicules the excessive use of it by many poets of his time in Midsummer-Night's Dream (V. i. 147), where he makes Quince say in his prologue:
With blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broach'd his boiling bloody breast.
In Love's Labour's Lost (IV. ii. 57) he burlesques it again, making Holofernes 'something affect the letter, for it argues facility'; and Sidney, in his Astrophel and Stella, 15, thus addresses poets given to its use:
You that do Dictionaries' method bring,
Into your rimes, running in rattling rows.
Poets in all times have employed it for the sake of the point and emphasis it often gives a line. The satirist Churchill speaks of himself as one
Who often, but without success, had prayed
For apt alliteration's artful aid.
A fine example of its effect in poetry occurs in the well-known lines of Coleridge :
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free.
But the perfect ear of that consummate master of rhythm could tolerate only its occasional use. Shakespeare was himself a master of alliteration in its proper use, and as a poetical device it has survived to our own day, no poet having used it with finer effect than Tennyson, and none with more wearisome monotony than the latest of our greater poets, Mr Swinburne.
But alliteration is not confined to verse; the charm that lies in it exercises great influence on human speech generally, as may be seen in many current phrases and proverbs in all languages, as 'life and limb,' 'house and home,' 'kith and kin,' 'Land und Leute,' &c. It often constitutes part of the point and piquancy of witty writing. Among modern writers this application of alliteration is perhaps most felicitously exemplified by Sydney Smith, as, when in contrasting the conditions of a dignitary of the English Church and of a poor curate, he speaks of them as 'the Right Reverend Dives in the palace, and Lazarus-in-orders at the gate, doctored by dogs and comforted with crumbs.'
In the early part of the 17th century, the fashion of hunting after alliterations was carried to an absurd excess; even from the pulpit, the chosen people of God were addressed as 'the chickens of the church, the sparrows of the spirit, and the sweet swallows of salvation.'
See Professor Skeat's elaborate essay prefixed to vol. iii. of the reprint of Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript (1868), and Guest's English Rhythms (2d ed. by Skeat, 1882).