The following grant of William the Conqueror may be found in Stowe's _Chronicle_ and in Blount's _Ancient Tenures:_
TO THE HEYRS MALE OF THE HOPTON, LAWFULLY BEGOTTEN.
From me and from myne, to thee and to thyne, While the water runs, and the sun doth shine, For lack of heyrs to the king againe, I, William, King, the third year of my reign, Give to the Norman hunter, To me that art both line [A] and deare, The Hop and the Hoptoune, And all the bounds up and downe, Under the earth to hell, Above the earth to heaven, From me and from myne, To thee and to thyne; As good and as faire As ever they myne were. To witness that this is sooth,[B] I bite the white wax with my tooth, Before Judd, Marode and Margery, And my third son Henery, For one bow, and one broad arrow, When I come to hunt upon the Yarrow.
In President Lincoln's last inaugural address occurs the following instance of involuntary rhyme:—
"Fondly do we hope, Fervently do we pray, That this mighty scourge of war May speedily pass away; Yet, if it be God's will That it continue until—"
And here the rhyme ceases. Cicero's prose shows, in places, similar instances of involuntary rhyme.
No doubt this proverb originated from a passage in Suetonius, which says that "the name of Pompeia, the wife of Julius Cæsar, having been mixed up with an accusation against P. Clodius, her husband divorced her; not, as he said, because he believed the charge against her, but because he would have those belonging to him as free from suspicion as from crime."
On one occasion a letter arrived by post in London, directed to "Sromfridevi, Angleterre." No such person had ever been heard of; but, on a little consideration, and judging from the sound, it was obvious that the foreign writer of the letter meant Sir Humphrey Davy, and such proved to be the case. Some years since there was returned to the French Dead Letter Office a letter which had gone the round of every seaport in the Levant, and the ambiguity of whose superscription had baffled a legion of postmasters. It was addressed, "J. Dubois, Sultan Crete," and was intended for J. Dubois _Surle_ Tancrede, a quartermaster on board of the ship _Tancrede_. The name and address had been written just as they had sounded to the ear. A letter addressed as follows arrived safely at its destination:—