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Updated: June 25, 2025
There were the orange wenches to quiz plaguey sharp of tongue the hussies are, too and there were the vizards of the pit, whose little black masks did invite inquiry, and there were the beauties of the town and the toasts of the Court, all fair mark for our quizzing-glasses. Play, indeed! S'bud, we had something better to do than to listen to alexandrines or weigh the merits of hexameters!
His English hexameters are among the curiosities of literature, but his contributions to the history of his country, especially his allusions to events and characters in and about his own time, are not without their use.
War tempts him to prolixity, to classical allusion, even to hexameters of astonishingly loose joints. Every stroke of his hero's sword-arm seems to him of weight. No doubt it was, once; but not in a chronicle of this sort, where the Cypriote gests must take a lowly place among others fair and foul of this King-errant. Let me put Milo on the shelf for a little, and abridge.
Of all men who have written so little verse during as long a life in our time, Kingsley is probably the best poet. The Saint's Tragedy is a little "viewy" and fluent. But in Andromeda he has written the very best English hexameters ever produced, and perhaps the only ones in which that alien or rebel takes on at least the semblance of a loyal subject to the English tongue.
For instance, there is a school which has at this moment one of the first scholars in Europe for head-master, a school which has turned out some of the most remarkable men of the rising generation. The master sees at a glance if a boy be clever, and takes pains with him accordingly. He is not a mere teacher of hexameters and sapphics. His learning embraces all literature, ancient and modern.
No grand conceptions have been nourished in her by a literature of her own with high lights couched in the Grand-Manner; no olden Homer has sung to her, with magnificent roll of hexameters to set the wings of her soul into magnificent motion.
The Silvae, consisting as they do of comparatively short pieces, display the excellences of Statius to greater advantage. Of the thirty- two poems, six are in lyric metres, the rest being all written in the smooth graceful hexameters of which the author of the Thebaid was so accomplished a master. The subjects, for the most part of a familiar nature, are very various.
He essayed the most varied tasks, sang the great deeds of Marius and his own petty achievements in endless hexameters, beat Demosthenes off the field with his speeches, and Plato with his philosophic dialogues; and time alone was wanting for him to vanquish also Thucydides. He was in fact so thoroughly a dabbler, that it was pretty much a matter of indifference to what work he applied his hand.
"I have read a translation in Latin hexameters so well done that I fancied I was reading Virgil." "Is that truly so?" "I would never lie to you." "Then I make a vow to learn Latin." "That is worthy of you, but it is of me that you must learn the language. I will go to Portugal and live and die there, if you will give me your heart. "My heart! I have only one, and that is given already.
The old Roman alliteration, the want of due correspondence between the pauses of the verse and those of the sentence, and generally the older modes of expression and composition, are still frequently found in Lucretius' rhythms, and although he handles the verse more melodiously than Ennius, his hexameters move not, as those of the modern poetical school, with a lively grace like the rippling brook, but with a stately slowness like the stream of liquid gold.
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