crampness

Updated: May 3, 2025

Now just this copying of a fabricator is what we find in the Annals. This imitation is found not only in the first but also in the last part of the Annals. The close crampness of the whole of these instances raises a very strong suspicion that it cannot be the writing of Tacitus, but merely a servile imitation of his manner.

John Wilson Ross - Tacitus and Bracciolini : The Annals Forged in the XVth Century

His Latin verses might well have been spared. In the translation of Gray's Elegy there is a more than usual crampness; occasioned, perhaps, by his having rendered into hexameters the stanzas of four lines, to which the elegiac measure of the Romans would have been better suited. The Epistola Poetica Familiaris, addressed to his friend Mr. Bamfylde, has more freedom.

Henry Francis Cary - Lives of the English Poets: From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of: Johnson's Lives