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Lamenting the fact to a friend, the following epigram was the result: ‘B kills two patients while from home away— A clever fellow this same B , I wot; If absent thus his patients he can slay, How he must kill them when he’s on the spot!’ Perhaps one of the noted physicians of my boyhood was Mr. Stebbing. ‘He was once,’ writes Mr.
Hearing him discourse, you would have been well-nigh persuaded that you had a kind of complicity in the spots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into an epigram which made it instantly ludicrous. "I consider myself," exclaimed he, "personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's axis."
There is, too, an epigram of Callimachus on Cleombrotus of Ambracia, who, without any misfortune having befallen him, as he says, threw himself from a wall into the sea, after he had read a book of Plato's. I might do the same, though not so fully as he, who thinks it not worth any man's while to live. I pass over others.
The modern habit of pursuing, detecting and exposing what was ridiculous in simple people and the unkind and irreverent manner in which slips were made material for epigram were unbearable to me. This school of thought which the young group called "anticant" encouraged hard sayings and light doings, which would have profoundly shocked the most frivolous among us.
I do not think I can more fitly sum up the impression made by my father than by quoting the epigram of Martial on "Felix Antonius." To-day, my friend is seventy-five; He tells his tale with no regret; His brave old eyes are steadfast yet, His heart the lightest heart alive.
There is no doubt that my temperament has changed, and in a very short space of time. A month ago I was soured, cynical, I didn't brush my hair, and I slept too much. I talked a good deal about Life. Now I am blithe and optimistic. I use pomade, part in the middle, and sleep eight hours and no more. I have not made an epigram for days. It is all very queer.
He knew exactly what she would have replied if she had been a Frenchwoman; she would have said to him, triumphantly, overwhelmingly: 'Que voulez-vous? Elle adore sa mère! She was, however, only a Californian, unacquainted with the language of epigram, and her answer consisted simply of the words: 'I am sorry you have ideas that make you unhappy.
I can imagine you to conduct a lovers' quarrel with a politeness to read a lesson to well-bred damsels. Aha?" "Spare me the futility of the quarrel." "All's well?" "Clara," replied Sir Willoughby, in dramatic epigram, "is perfection." "I rejoice," the Rev. Doctor responded; taught thus to understand that the lovers' quarrel between his daughter and his host was at an end.
Once Rogers had said to the House colour-sergeant: "Phillips, form up your men facing right." Phillips looked round at them, thought for a second or two and then drawled: "Look here, you fellows, shove round there." And the subsequent sarcastic comment was quite lost on him. He was a good forward, but not too clever. He was proof against epigram.
What fascinated me about these analyses of character, however, was that though they were like the best literature, you felt that Cromer had never let himself be betrayed into an epigram, a telling stroke, or a melodramatic shadow in order to heighten the literary effect. The document was a real State Paper, and not a piece of imitation Tacitus or Saint Simon.
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