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"I know not why it is, but of all these great, ces fameux, Madame de Sevigne seems to me the nearest, in point of time. Her visit appears to have happened only yesterday. I never enter her room but I seem to see her moving about, talking, laughing, speaking in epigrams. She mentions the inn, you know, in her letters. She gives the details of her journey in full."
We occasionally find her name in the epigrams of the day, and it appears in a satire, Dialogue between Death and the Pope, sick of a Fever, in which he called upon Giulia to save him, whereupon Death replied that his mistress had borne him three or four children.
These lines and they are not the whole of the poem are enough to illustrate the difference between the Greek method and the English, the latter rich and profuse, following the flow of an opulent fancy, the former reticent and restrained, leaving the reader's imagination room and need to play its part. There are materials for half-a-dozen epigrams in Ben Jonson's poem.
But just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising or lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweller an excusable love of one's art, not all mere vanity, I like to think" all this with the most pleasant smile and manner.
It was said publicly that they were strangers, and that they despised their country; that they ate maccaroni instead of garbanzos; and people spread about innumerable other epigrams and satires against them, regardless of the government police, and even without fear of the inquisitors.
Winifred Glamorys, however, was reputed to have a tongue that matched her eye; paralleling with whimsies and epigrams its freakish fires and witcheries, and, assuredly, flitting in her white gown through the dark balmy garden, she seemed the very spirit of moonlight, the subtle incarnation of night and roses.
There are those who build their fame on epigrams or epitaphs, and others who devote their lives to writing the Lord's Prayer in little. Some poets compose and sing their own verses. Which character would they have us think most highly of the poet or the musician? The Great is One.
Lucien took up the paper, and could not help laughing at Vernou's extremely clever skit. "They will capitulate soon," said Hector Merlin. Lucien merrily assisted at the manufacture of epigrams and jokes at the end of the paper; and the associates smoked and chatted over the day's adventures, over the foibles of some among their number, or some new bit of personal gossip.
The contemporary Greek epigrammatists whose work is preserved in the Palatine Anthology, from Nicarchus and Lucilius to Strato, all show the same heaviness of handling and the same tiresome insistence on making a point, which prevent Martial's epigrams from being placed in the first rank.
He could boast of having spared scarcely one of the empty word-pickers with whom the epigrams against Caesar and his mother had originated. Teachers and pupils, even the domestic officials, had been overtaken by the insulted sovereign's vengeance. Nothing was left but the stones of that great institution, which had indeed long outlived its fame.
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