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The talk at dinner flowed on easily enough, Arthur conversing in the strain which of old Helen had been pleased to call "amiable," and which fretted her by being conventional and not wholly sincere. She liked the artist best when he spoke without restraint, even though she might not agree with his extravagances and often detected a trace of artificiality in his clever epigrams.
It was our interest to make a good peace, or convince our own people that it could not be obtained; we have not made a peace, and we have convinced the people of nothing but of the arrogance of the Foreign Secretary: and all this has taken place in the short space of a year, because a King's Bench barrister and a writer of epigrams, turned into Ministers of State, were determined to show country gentlemen that the late administration had no vigour.
"If Christ were again on earth," said Carlyle, of an earlier generation, "Mr. Frivolity only changes its form, but the epigrams of the early 'nineties were not Christlike, and Mr. Milnes would have been as much astray among them as the good, plain man. The epigrammatist still lingers, and sometimes dines; but his roses have faded, and the weariness of his audience is no longer a pose.
His works include Mirum in Modum, Microcosmus , and The Picture of a Happy Man . Wit's Bedlam , and many epigrams on his contemporaries which have some historical interest. Lawyer and poet, s. of a lawyer at Westbury, Wiltshire, was ed. at Winchester and Oxf., and became a barrister of the Middle Temple, 1595.
In the hands of his confessor he confidently believed was lodged the absolute power to confer on him unlimited license to commit any or every sin. He greatly dreaded pamphlets, satires, epigrams, and the opinion of posterity and yet his conduct was that of a man who scoffs at the world's judgment.
She goes to Operas, Plays, suppers, and Versailles; gives suppers twice a week; has everything new read to her; makes new songs and epigrams, ay, admirably, and remembers every one that has been made these four-score years. She corresponds with Voltaire, dictates charming letters to him, contradicts him, is no bigot to him or anybody, and laughs both at the clergy and the philosophers.
Like the brilliant Ovid, when he was banished to the frozen wilds of Tomi, Seneca vented his anguish in plaintive wailing and bitter verse. In his handful of epigrams he finds nothing too severe for the place of his exile. He cries
Dorian! ... Didn't you get my letter? I wrote to you this morning, and sent the note down by my own man." "Your letter? Oh, yes, I remember. I have not read it yet, Harry. I was afraid there might be something in it that I wouldn't like. You cut life to pieces with your epigrams." "You know nothing then?" "What do you mean?"
The arrogance of this lady was so notorious that it became the subject of one of those biting epigrams for which Henri IV had rendered himself famous; for it is on record that upon an occasion when he was a guest at the table of the finance minister, he drank her health, accompanied by the following impromptu:
Caracalla, of his own accord, pledged his word once more to keep his oath, and then Alexander assured him that he knew no more than Caesar who were the authors of the epigrams which he had picked up here and there; and, though the satire they contained was venomous in some cases, still he, the sovereign of the world, stood so high that he could laugh them to scorn, as Socrates had laughed when Aristophanes placed him on the stage.
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