an arrondissement of the department of the Creuse, in France, extending over 370 square miles, and comprehending four cantons and fifty-seven communes, with 32,439 inhabitants. The capital is a market-town of the same name, at the junction of the rivers Beron and Creuse.

BOUTS-RIMES, a popular term in the French poetry, signifying certain rhymes, disposed in order, and given to a poet, together with a subject, to be filled up with verses ending in the same words, and in the same order. The invention of the bouts-rimes is ascribed to one Ducot, a poet, in the year 1649. In fixing the bouts, it is usual to choose such as seem the remotest, and have the least connection. Some good authors fancy that these rhymes are of all others the easiest; that they assist the invention, and furnish new thoughts. Sarrasin has a poem on the defeat of the bouts-rimes. But the academy of Lanternists at Toulouse contributed towards keeping in countenance the bouts-rimes, by proposing annually a set of fourteen, to be filled up on the glories of the Grand Monarque, and by offering a medal as the reward of the victorious sonneteer. The following, filled up by Commire, is a specimen of these conceits: