30 chapter 1
mostly by its couplets, to connect the phases of England’s history to one an-
other: “Thus Smithfield flames, as equal victims mix, / Both martyred Luther-
ans and Catholics. / Now sacrificed is Anna Boleyn’s life, / That Seymour may
become the tyrant’s wife” (78) to the broader imperial history “[a]gainst the
convoys of Columbian Spain, / The British projects terminate in vain; / But in
a brighter expedition, foil / Her native efforts on Gibraltar’s soil” (195), and
connect the student to the bounded whole. But the connective tissue of the
poem’s meter doesn’t lodge itself into the student’s memory like a flowering
plant—it is a weed, and it is an obstinate one. The verse form itself, then, em-
blematizes the history’s inevitable forward movement, and the rhyme’s chime
at the end reminds the reader that it all, eventually, holds together. But the
thread of rhyme is also the threat of rhyme; if rhyme is holding together the
ample and venerable garb of prose narration, where the real history lies, then
we also must take pains to not notice it, to have it work on us rather than have
us work on it. The phases of England’s history and its progression must appear
seamless just as the student citizen must be seamlessly absorbed into the larger
nation—lest the nation’s continuity and purpose perish together. The mea-
sured verses in which Raymond delivers his history should help the student
remember with little regard for his or her will. He ends his Chronicle with the
hope that it will succeed in being “felt, own’d, and understood”:
Thus in our record we have nearly ran
Through half the era of the Christian span;
Attested kings and kingdoms in their range—
Dearth, in the proudest—in the happiest, change;
Have watched their rise, the progress, and the wane—
The “Imperial,” trodden—and th’ ”Eternal” vain:Vain for that cause which still shall overthrow
Systems to come, as those already low;
Till it be felt, and own’d and understood,
The “Social Contract” is the Common Good. (270)And so, too, is the kind of metrical contract that Raymond imagines, binding
together his history in rhyme in the text of the long metrical history, while his
more extensive prose notes populate the bottom of the manuscript.
And perhaps this insidious, spontaneous, obstinate metrical form might
need an even more powerful method of securing its place in the student’s
mind. Perhaps, as Rossendale writes in his 1846 History of the Kings and
Queens of England in Verse: from King Egbert to Queen Victoria, the student
might need “a kind of walking-stick for the memory; and if sung, (which may
easily be managed) a musical one!”^28 Rossendale describes his history as a se-
ries of invasions—from “Julius Caesar’s invasion, down to the period of the