United States or Morocco ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Her room, when Odo entered it on taking leave of Alfieri, was crowded, as usual at that hour, with the hangers-on of the noble lady's lever: the abatino in lace ruffles, handing about his latest rhymed acrostic, the jeweller displaying a set of enamelled buckles newly imported from Paris, and the black-breeched doctor with white bands who concocted remedies for the Countess's vapours and megrims.
I am very thankful that I have an opportunity of conversing in quiet with philosophers and poets at Hinton. The following, written in a feminine hand on a half-sheet of note-paper, belongs to this time. It is endorsed by Reeve 'Lord Derby's acrostic on Gladstone; but it does not appear whether the attributing it to Lord Derby was on positive knowledge or on mere current gossip.
My short note was an acrostic, and taking the first word of each line and reading it down formed this sentence: "I write with soda." But this letter never reached its destination. The reb authorities soon got onto these dodges, and were very careful in their examination of all correspondence of prisoners, and everything that looked at all suspicious was destroyed.
In any case, it is significant that the book which began with the magnificent picture of Wisdom as a fair woman, and hung beside it the ugly likeness of Folly, should end with this charming portrait. It is an acrostic, and the fetters of alphabetic sequence are not favourable to progress or continuity of thought.
Dryden hints at this obsolete kind of wit in one of the following verses in his "Mac Flecknoe;" which an English reader cannot understand, who does not know that there are those little poems above mentioned in the shape of wings and altars: Choose for thy command Some peaceful province in acrostic land; There may'st thou wings display, and altars raise, And torture one poor word a thousand ways.
I had an acrostic once sent to me upon my own name, which I was not at all pleased with. I knew who it came from. An abominable puppy! These kind of things are very well at Christmas, when one is sitting round the fire; but quite out of place, in my opinion, when one is exploring about the country in summer. Miss Woodhouse must excuse me.
However woe-begone the young lover was, he does not seem to have been wholly lost to others of the sex, and at this same time he was able to indite an acrostic to another charmer, which, if incomplete, nevertheless proves that there was a "midland" beauty as well, the lady being presumptively some member of the family of Alexanders, who had a plantation near Mount Vernon.
In one of the grandest hymns of the Roman Catholic Church, composed by Tommaso di Celano at the beginning of the fourteenth century, there is an allusion to her, taken from the well-known acrostic in the last judgment scene in the eighth book of the Oracula Sibyllina "Dies iræ, dies illa, Solvet sæclum in favilla, Teste David cum Sibylla."
It's all keyed for you just as the final move in chess or the final discovery in an acrostic is keyed up to right from the start." And on this argument Mr. Fargus introduced Sabre to the great entertainment in "working back" when a game of Patience failed to come out or after a defeat in chess. You worked back to the immense satisfaction of finding the precise point at which you went wrong.
William Holden, long the oldest journalist in South Australia, who revelled in statistical returns and algebraical problems and earth measurements, but who also appreciated a good charade or double acrostic. I used to give some of the ingredients for his "Christmas Mince Pie," and wrote many riddles of various sorts.
Word Of The Day