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Updated: June 13, 2025
I am sure the wooing of Fortune would prove quite as interesting a tale as the wooing of any flesh-and-blood maiden, though, by the way, it would read extremely similar; for Fortune is, indeed, as the ancients painted her, very like a woman not quite so unreasonable and inconsistent, but nearly so and the pursuit is much the same in one case as in the other. Ben Jonson's couplet
The molten tide of passion and decorative extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe three score years and ten ago, bore on its foaming crest Victor Hugo, prince of romanticists. Near by was Henri Heine, he left Heinrich across the Rhine, Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall, who sneered and wept in the same couplet. The star of classicism had seemingly set.
This was the fruit the private spirit brought, Occasioned by great zeal and little thought. While crowds unlearned, with rude devotion warm, About the sacred viands buzz and swarm. And this couplet of his, too, might be commended to the devotees: A thousand daily sects rise up and die; A thousand more the perished race supply. What does it matter what primeval man ate?
The device was a white eagle on an azure field, in memory of the bird of Jove, which bore away Ganymede, the flower of the Phrygian race. Beneath was engraved the following couplet: "Let none with hand profane my buckler wrong Unless he be himself as Hector strong." The damsel, alighting from her palfrey, made obeisance to the arms, bending herself to the ground.
Thus ran a couplet of the "Roman de Thèbes"; and of the hundred or more tales of chivalry in verse, which are recognized as classic, nearly all make mention of the verger.
The first couplet is general in character. It inculcates obedience to the precepts of the teacher, and gives as reason the assurance that thereby long life and peace will be secured. True to the Old Testament conception of revelation as a law, the teacher sets obedience in the forefront. He is sure that his teaching contains the sufficient guide for conduct, and coincides with the divine will.
If a Tennyson had lived in the time of Pope, he would doubtless have used the heroic couplet faithfully, and put into it just a small increase of melody, a slightly more graceful play of thought, a finer observation of natural things but he probably would not have strayed beyond the accepted forms of art.
The marquis sat still and watched the audience gather, while one of the good brethren led the congregation in singing "When I can read my title clear," which hymn was the usual voluntary at the opening of service. Then the old minister said, "Let us continue the worship of God by singing the hymn on page 554." He "lined" the hymn that is, he read each couplet before it was sung.
Very soon the riddle answered itself. He had come into view of the diminutive marble cavalier of the infantile cerebellum; recollecting a couplet from the pen of the disrespectful Satirist Peter, he thought of a fall: his head and his elbow responded simultaneously to the thought.
The couplet of Chrestien of Troyes about the Welsh: . . . Gallois sont tous, par nature, Plus fous que betes en pasture is well known, and expresses the genuine verdict of the Latin mind on the Celts.
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