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Updated: June 29, 2025
No parasitic rhymester of past or present days who feeds his starveling talent on the shreds and orts, "the fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics" of another man's board, ever uttered a more parrot-like note of plagiary. The very exactitude of the repetition is a strong argument against the theory which attributes it to Shakespeare.
The constant repetition of the same phrase with slight variations, especially in the closing lines of the ripresa of the Tuscan rispetto, gives an antique force and flavour to these ditties, like that which we appreciate in our own ballads, but which may easily, in the translation, degenerate into weakness and insipidity. The Tuscan rhymester, again, allows himself the utmost licence.
"If it please your majesty," interrupted a harsh voice, "I will ask a question or two of this rhymester. There is little time to spare. I crave pardon, sire, if my anxiety for your safety offends." "The loyalty," said the king, "of the Duke d'Aumale is too well proven to give offence." He sank into his chair, and the film came again over his eyes.
'He thought to dazzle us with that! growled angry voices. 'Down with the imbecile rhymester from the forum! Away with the idiot! Rotten apples, stinking eggs for the motley fool! Give us stones stones here! Junius rushed head over heels from the forum ... but, before he had got home, he was overtaken by the sound of peals of enthusiastic applause, cries and shouts of admiration.
"Go, wretch! resign thy Presidential chair, Disclose thy secret measures, foul or fair," was the gentle manner in which the young rhymester addressed the author of the hated embargo. The following orthographic puzzle went the rounds of the Federalist papers. By beginning at the central letter, the phrase "Embargo will ruin us" may be read in countless directions.
And when every rhymester has walked the plank, shall we still put up with our relations? No: as soon as the last poet has splashed over the side, to the sharks with our relations! The old barkey is lightening famously: who shall be next to go? The Sportsman of intolerable yarns: who slays twice over first, his game, and then the miserable being he button-holes for the tedious recital.
"But if I, who never before strung two rhymes together, can improvise so readily in the style of the present day, why should not a practical rhymester like yourself dash off at a sitting a volume or so in the same style; disguising completely the verbal elegances borrowed, adding to the delicacies of the rhyme by the frequent introduction of a line that will not scan, and towering yet more into the sublime by becoming yet more unintelligible?
A modern nursery rhymester to succeed would have to write of Little Lord Jack and Lady Jill ascending one of the many beautiful eminences belonging to the ancestral estates of their parents, bearing between them, on a silver rod, an exquisitely painted Sevres vase filled with ottar of roses. I take up my fourpenny-halfpenny magazine.
Froude can have read the compositions that he commends so largely, and so much beyond their merit. The following specimen, taken haphazard, will show how thoroughly Bunyan or the rhymester, whoever he may be, has overcome what Mr. Froude regards as an almost insuperable difficulty, and has managed to "spoil completely the faultless prose of the English translation":
Apropos of this, a joyous rhymester of the time made the following quatrain: "Certes ce fut un triste jeu Quand a Paris Dame Justice Pour avoir mangé trop d'épice Se mit le Palais tout en feu."
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