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It may easily be supposed that this melancholy event did not pass without inciting the wits of the day to write a vast number of verses and bouts-rimes about the catastrophe by which one of the most beautiful women of the country was carried off. Readers who have a taste for that sort of literature are referred to the journals and memoirs of the times.
Be dumb, unbelievers! The collection is printed, published. Yes, on my faith, there are bouts-rimes on a buttered muffin, made by her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland; receipts to make them by Corydon the venerable, alias George Pitt; others very pretty, by Lord Palmerston; some by Lord Carlisle: many by Mrs.
Vesey. The Captain's fingers are loaded with cameos, his tongue runs over with virtù, and that both may contribute to the improvement of their own country, they have introduced bouts-rimes as a new discovery. They hold a Parnassus fair every Thursday, give out rhymes and themes, and all the flux of quality at Bath contend for the prizes.
It may easily be supposed that this melancholy event did not pass without inciting the wits of the day to write a vast number of verses and bouts-rimes about the catastrophe by which one of the most beautiful women of the country was carried off. Readers who have a taste for that sort of literature are referred to the journals and memoirs of the times.
A collection of wretched bouts-rimés and burlesque doggrel, written at Florence in a house which Mme. d'Albany could not enter, and in the company of women whom Mme. d'Albany could not receive, and among which is a sonnet in which Alfieri explains his condescension in joining in these poetical exercises of the demi-monde by an allusion to Hercules and Omphale, shows that Alfieri frequented in Florence other society besides that which crowded round his lady in Casa Gianfigliazzi.
"You will meet at my house men of wit and talent, Elleviou, Talma, the citoyen Vigée, who turns bouts-rimés with a marvellous aptitude. The citoyen François read us his 'Paméla' the other day, the piece rehearsing at the present moment at the Théâtre de la Nation. The style is elegant and chaste, as everything is that comes from the citoyen François' pen.
Then I made a little nursery of Borecole and Enfield market cabbage, grubbing in wet earth with leggings and gray coat on. Then I tidied up the coach-house to my own and Christine's admiration. Then encouraged by BOUTS-RIMES I wrote you a copy of verses; high time I think; I shall just save my tenth year of knowing my lady-love without inditing poetry or rhymes to her.
Miller herself, that have no fault but wanting metre; an Immorality promised to her without end or measure. In short, since folly, which never ripens to madness but in this hot climate, ran distracted, there never was anything so entertaining or so dull for you cannot read so long as I have been telling. The following lines are a fair sample of the bouts-rimes.
When I was tired of this specialized thinking, then the best relief, I found, was some quite trivial occupation playing poker, yelling in the chorus of some interminable song one of the men would sing, or coining South African Limericks or playing burlesque bouts-rimés with Fred Maxim, who was then my second in command.... Yet occasionally thought overtook me.
And then the affectations and conceits of that elegant circle, the sonnets and madrigals, the "bouts-rimes," the practical jokes, the logic-chopping and straw-splitting of those ultra-fine intellects, the romances where the personages of the day masqueraded under Greek or Roman or Oriental aliases, books written in a flowery language which the Cavalier did not understand, and full of allusions that were dark to him; while not to know and appreciate those master-works placed him outside the pale.
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