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Updated: June 19, 2025
He wrote Answers to Brutus in relation to Cato, Exhortations to Philosophy, and the History of his own Life, which he continued, in thirteen books, down to the war of Cantabria. A book of his, written in hexameter verse, under the title of Sicily, was extant in the time of Suetonius, as was likewise a book of Epigrams.
But from Lucilius onwards, Satire, accurately so called, was always treated in hexameter verse. Nevertheless, Horace is unquestionably right in saying that it had more real affinity for prose than for poetry of any kind
The hexameter piece, "Elizabeth," in the third part of "Tales of a Wayside Inn," was one of these, and he liked my liking its rhythmical form, which I believed one of the measures best adapted to the English speech, and which he had used himself with so much pleasure and success.
And as it is not poets who follow laws, but precede them as trochee and iambic, alcaic and hexameter, are the inventions of grammarians following on the trail of genius so it behoves the Aristotle who would discover the laws of the rhythm of prose to study the masters of the art, masters by instinct and a faultless ear and the grace of God, and endeavour by patient induction to wrest from their sentences the secrets of their harmonies.
He likewise made some attempts at poetry. There is extant one book written by him in hexameter verse, of which both the subject and title is "Sicily." There is also a book of Epigrams, no larger than the last, which he composed almost entirely while he was in the bath.
It makes little difference to me whether or not an epic goes at a hexameter gallop through the ages, or whether it chooses to be a flood of muddy water, ripping out a channel from the mountains to the sea. It is merely a matter of how the great dynamic force shall express itself. I have seen trout streams that I thought were better lyrics than I or any of my fellows can ever hope to create.
The elegiac line is in the strictest sense a pendant to the hexameter; only rarely does it introduce a new element of thought, and perhaps never a new commencement in narration. It is for the most part an iteration, variation, enlargement, condensation or antithesis of the idea embodied in its predecessor.
Now, if the soupe au vin had been known in Troy, it is clear that in declining vinum merum upon that score, he would have added in the hexameter, 'But a soupe au vin, madam, I will degust, and gratefully. Not only would this have been but common civility a virtue no perfect commander is wanting in but not to have done it would have proved him a shallow and improvident person, unfit to be trusted with the conduct of a war; for men going into a battle need sustenance and all possible support, as is proved by this, that foolish generals, bringing hungry soldiers to blows with full ones, have been defeated, in all ages, by inferior numbers.
As to the form hexameter and other verses, made up of Latin words and Italian words with Latin endings its comic effect lies chiefly in the fact that these combinations sound like so many slips of the tongue, or like the effusions of an over- hasty Latin 'improvisatore. The German imitations do not give the smallest notion of this effect. Fall of the Humanists in the Sixteenth Century
ELEGY AND EPIGRAM. Until the beginning of the seventh century B.C., the epic was the only kind of poetry cultivated in Greece, with the exception of the early songs and hymns, and the hexameter the only metre used by the poets. This exclusive prevalence of epic poetry was doubtless connected with the political state of the country.
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