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Here the satirist, leaving politics, applies his cudgel mainly to the prevailing taste for pantomime, a form of entertainment introduced it was said some thirty years previously by one Weaver, a country dancing master, and already lashed by Sir Richard Steele in his couplet: "Weaver, corrupter of the present age, Who first taught silent sins upon the stage."
Uncle Henry nodded his head in time to the rise and fall of her voice and now and then stopped his work to look at her with bright, eager, old eyes. He knew some of the places by heart evidently, for once in a while his voice would join the little girl's for a couplet or two.
"The Instalment" is among the pieces he did not admit into the number of his EXCUSABLE WRITINGS. Yet it contains a couplet which pretends to pant after the power of bestowing immortality: "Oh! how I long, enkindled by the theme, In deep eternity to launch thy name!" The bounty of the former reign seems to have been continued, possibly increased, in this.
They will steal into a cabinet so softly that a lady who is seated there, in a reverie, will not perceive them; they are so adroit that they will seize a paper on which she has sketched a couplet, will complete it, pass away, and she not know whence the poetical miracle has come.
Some had driven through the bush twenty and even thirty miles; but distance is thought nothing of here, especially when there is a chance of "meeting company." The ball was given in the Odd Fellows' Hall, a large square room. One end of it was partitioned off as a supper-room, and on the partition was sewn up in large letters this couplet from 'Childe Harold:
Dr. Warton, referring to Oglethorpe, says, "I had the pleasure of knowing him well;" and, in a note upon the couplet quoted from Pope, says, "Here are lines that will justly confer immortality on a man who well deserved so magnificent an eulogium. He was, at once, a great hero, and a great legislator. The vigor of his mind and body have seldom been equalled.
They took no chances with "enthusiasm," either in mood or metrical device. What could be said within the restraining limits of the couplet they said with admirable point, vigor and grace. But it was speech, not song. The Romantic Lyric The revolt came towards the middle of the century, first in the lyrics of Collins, then in Gray. The lark began to soar and sing once more in English skies.
For no man acquainted with human nature could think that a sententious couplet would undo all the mischief that five profligate acts had done. But it would have been wise in Congreve to have looked again at his own comedies before he used this argument.
That is a kind of aphorism such as Pope made in large quantities in the following age. It contains a thought, is catchy, quotable, easy to remember; and the Restoration writers delighted in it. Soon this mechanical closed couplet, in which the second line was often made first, almost excluded all other forms of poetry.
I helped her over the side of the box, and as we walked away she shouted back to the bereaved express train a consolatory couplet: "First the worst, second the same, Last the best of all the game!" That superb machinery of travel was silent, and the mechanics and officials, robbed of their passenger, eyed us with disfavor.
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