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Updated: May 1, 2025
These are the true reasons, not only for the rapid spread of Christianity in Europe, but also for the philosophic systems of the Platonists and Alexandrines which preceded it.
The voices of the actors were out of all reason, full, solemn, slow, formal: they rounded every syllable as though they were giving a lesson in elocution, and they seemed always to be scanning Alexandrines with tragic pauses. Their gestures were solemn and almost hieratic.
There are classical comedies in verse, too, wherein the knavish valets, rakish heroes, stolid old guardians, and smart, free-spoken serving-women, discourse in Alexandrines, as loud as the Horaces or the Cid.
Here too the higher language of conversation dislodged the archaic reminiscences which hitherto to a large extent prevailed in this domain, and as Latin prose submitted to the Attic rhythm, so Latin poetry submitted gradually to the strict or rather painful metrical laws of the Alexandrines; e. g. from the time of Catullus, it is no longer allowable at once to begin a verse and to close a sentence begun in the verse preceding with a monosyllabic word or a dissyllabic one not specially weighty.
We gather from a passage of Ovid that he wrote love poems, and from other sources that he translated Greek works on topography and meteorology, both strictly copied from the Alexandrines. Besides Varro, we hear of TICIDAS, of MEMMIUS the friend of Lucretius, of C. HELVIUS CINNA, and C. LICINIUS CALVUS, as writers of erotic poetry. The last two were also eminent in other branches.
Tatian and Hermes also looked upon Greek philosophy as an invention of the devil. Irenæus was more discriminating. He opposed the broad and lax charity of the Alexandrines, but he read the Greek philosophy, and when called to the bishopric of Lyons, he set himself to the study of the Gallic Druidism, believing that a special adaptation would be called for in that remote mission field.
That Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas was not well done, and that he wrote his verses before he understood to confer; and those of Fairfax were not good. That the translations of Homer and Virgil in long Alexandrines were but prose. That Sir John Harrington's Ariosto of all translations was the worst.
Amidst the spirited beauties of this passage, it is impossible not to consider some as particularly conspicuous. How strong and nervous the second and fourth lines! How happily expressive the two Alexandrines! What a luminous idea does the epithet "murky" present to us! How original and picturesque that of the "clotted tear!"
Picard's alexandrines, in 'Mediocre et Rampant', were converted into German prose, and the play was christened 'The Parasite'. In the case of the other, renamed 'The Nephew as Uncle', the original was in prose and Schiller merely made a free translation. These enterprises were little more than hackwork, which had its suitable reward of brief popularity.
We are all, perhaps, apt to think with Thackeray disrespectfully of the "old tragedies well-nigh dead, and full time too in which half a dozen characters appear and shout sonorous Alexandrines for half a dozen hours;" or we are disposed to agree with Mr.
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