Acrostic (Greek ; , prefix, and , row, order, line), a once favorite form of literary legerdemain. In its simplest and most usual form it consists of a copy of verses whose initial letters taken in order spell a word, a proper name, or a sentence. The following specimen is by Charles Lamb:

Here the initial letters form the name Grace Joanna Williams. But many fantastic variations have been introduced. Sometimes the initials read upwards instead of downward; sometimes the final instead of the first letters, and sometimes both the final and the first letters, form an acrostic. The latter is known as a double acrostic, or, more technically, a telestich. An ingenious improvement requires that the double acrostic shall be formed of two words of the same letters, yet of opposite meanings, e.g.:

Here is a bit of monastic verse of curious ingenuity. Not only do the first and the final letters, but the middle initials also, form the word Iesus. In technical words, the lines are at once acrostic, mesostic, and telestic. Nor is that all. the observant reader will discern that in the centre of the verse is a cross formed of the word Jesus, or Iesus, read perpendicularly and horizontally:

Poe has devised a peculirarly complicated form in his

To translate the address, read the first letter of the first line in connection with the second letter of the second line, the third letter of the third line, the fourth of the fourth, and so on to the last line. The name Frances Sargent Osgood will then be formed.

Although acrostics are now relegated to the nursery, they were anciently looked upon with high reverence. A rude form of acrostic may even be found in the Scriptures,--e.g., in twelve of the psalms, hence called the abecedarian psalms,--the most notable being Psalm cxix. This is composed of twenty-two divisions or stanzas, corresponding to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Each stanza consists of eight couplets. The first line of each couplet in the first division begins with aleph, a, the first line of each couplet in the second division with beth, b, and so on to the end. This peculiarity is not retained in the translation, but is indicated by the initial letter prefixed to each division. The Greeks also cultivated the acrostic, as may be seen in the specimens that survive in the Greek Anthology, and so did their intellectual successors, the Latins. Cicero, in his "De Divinatione," tells us that "the verse of the Sibyls are distinguished by that arrangement which the Greeks call acrostic; where from the first letters of each verse in order words are formed which express some particular meaning; as is the case with some of Ennius's verses." In the year 326, Publius Porphyrius composed a poem, still extant, in praise of Constantine, the lines of which are acrostics. The erly French poets, from the time of Francis I. to that of Louis XIV., were fond of this trifling. But it was carried to its most wasteful and ridiculous excess by the Elizabethan poets. Sir John Davies has a series of no less than tweny-six poems under the general heading of "Hymns to Astræa," every one of which is an acrostic on the words Elisabetha Regina. Here is a single specimen:

After the Elizabethan age, acrostics soon sank into disrepute. Dryden scornfully bids the hero of his "Macflecknoe"

And Addison gives the acrostic a high place among his examples of false wit.

A fashion that is not quite extinct was introduced by the jewellers of the last century, who placed precious stones in such an order that the intials of their names formed the name of the recipient of the gift. Thus, the Princess of Wales, on her marriage, presented her groom with a ring set with the following gems:

Rachel, the French actress, when at the height of her popularity, received from her admirers a diadem with the following stones, whose name-initials not only spell her own name, but present the name-initials of her most famous characters:

One development of the acrostic that is specially vital and electric consists in reading the initial letters of the words of a sentence as a single word, or, conversely, in flashing in a single word the intials of a whole unuttered sentence. Thus, when the Italians outside of the Piedmontese states did not dare as yet openly to shout for Victor Emmanuel and Italian unity, they managed the thing neatly and thrillingly by the short cry of Viva Verdi! Why the popular composer had suddenly become so very popular that all Italy should in season and out of season be shouting his name did not at first appear, except to those who knew that Verdi, letter for letter, stood for Vittorio Emanuele Ré d'Italia. Now, this at least was an acrostic with a soul in it. Similarly the word Nihil was by the Anti-Bonapartists made to typify the Napoleon dynasty of kings in the following strangely prophetic acrostic:

Another acrostic whose augury was justified by future events, in a pleasanter manner, however, than was anticipated, is mentioned by Bacon. "The trivial prophecy," he says, "which I heard when I was a child, and Queen Elizabeth in the flower of her years, was,--

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