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Nods and smiles and gesticulations, with across-Channel vocables, as it were Dover cliffs to Calais sands and back, pleasantly beguiled the way down to the Hotel du Paradis, under the Mausoleum heights, where Skepsey fumbled at his pocket for coin current; but the Frenchman, all shaken by a tornado of negation, clapped him on the shoulder, and sang him a quatrain.
An old quatrain gives us a list of some of the parts he played when in the towns of his enemies "He is a carpenter, he is a turner. My nursling is a bookman. He is selling wine and hides Where he sees a gathering."
Copies of the first edition have since been discovered and sold for enormous sums. The date is 1806. In a copy of The Looking Glass, another of Godwin's books, The King and Queen of Hearts is thus advertised, with a new quatrain, probably also from Lamb's pen: "Price 1s. Plain; or 15. 6ed. Coloured, The King and Queen of Hearts, With the Rogueries of the Knave who stole away the Queen's Pies.
From Bayonne I proceeded to Biarritz, where I had a conference with the Duke de La Union de Cuba, a warm Carlist partisan, to whom I had an introduction, and thence I went to St. Jean de Luz, a drowsy, quaint, world-forgotten nook. A petit Paris it was called in a vaunting quatrain by some minstrel of yore. But Brussels may be comforted. It is nothing of the kind, but something infinitely better.
The popular metre of the Caroline poets was the rhymed eight and six syllable quatrain: "Yet this inconstancy is such As thou too shalt adore; I could not love thee, Dear, so much Loved I not Honour more."
And now read aloud one of the best-known of Shakspere's sonnets, where he follows his favorite device of a threefold statement of his central thought, using a different image in each quatrain, and closing with a personal application of the idea: "That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
There should be some way of preserving it. A quatrain would be best. Short enough to be remembered, yet requiring attention and skill to compact everything into it. He had scored high with his quatrains in the Twenties. This would be a special one. Taind, his poetry mentor, would have to get a copy. "What are you mumbling about?"
She wondered who the Marquis of Montrose was who had lived in the seventeenth century and bequeathed this quatrain to posterity, but this didn't matter, and after reading the lines aloud several times she decided that they would serve her purpose admirably. If Mr. Bennett took them seriously, well enough; and if he didn't like them it made no difference as she would probably never meet him again.
An old quatrain gives us a list of some of the parts he played when in the towns of his enemies "He is a carpenter, he is a turner. My nursling is a bookman. He is selling wine and hides Where he sees a gathering."
Sainte-Aulaire, tired of the perpetual excitement at Sceaux, characterized this salon by a witty quatrain: Je suis las de l'esprit, il me met en courroux, Il me renverse la cervelle; Lambert, je viens chercher un asile chez vous, Entre La Motte et Fontenelle.
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