Note 173 — Chapter VI

A great poetic license was introduced before long into the use of the asonante, as there had been, in antiquity, into the use of the Greek and Latin measures, until the sphere of the asonante became, as Clemencin well says, extremely wide. Thus, u and o were held to be asonante, as in Venus and Minos; i and e, as in Paris and males; a diphthong with a vowel, as gracia and alma, cuitas and burlas; and other similar varieties, which, in the times of Lope de Vega and Góngora, made the permitted combinations all but indefinite, and the composition of asonante verses indefinitely easy. Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Tom. III. pp. 271, 272, note.