"Distich" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gout could make two hundred verses in a night, would have but five* plain words upon his tomb. And this serious per- son, though no minor wit, left the poetry of his epitaph unto others; either unwilling to commend himself, or to be judged by a distich, and perhaps considering how unhappy great poets have been in versifying their own epitaphs; wherein Petrarch, Dante, and Ariosto, have so unhappily failed, that if their tombs should outlast their works, posterity would find so little ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... formerly lay on Eridge Green, near Frant, is said to have been the first mortar made in England;[6] only the chamber was cast, while the tube consisted of bars strongly hooped together. Although the local distich says that ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... to have got more by this distich than Mr. Dryden did by all his works. There would be no end of enumerating the several imaginary perfections and unaccountable artifices by which this tribe of men ensnare the minds of the vulgar and gain crowds of admirers. I have ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... provoking, Just when you thought that I was only joking, Or idly fingering the poet's laurel, To find my story threatens to be moral! But as for morals, though in verse we scout them, In life we somehow can't get on without them; So if I don't insert a moral distich Once in a while, I can't be realistic;— And in this tale, I solemnly aver, My one wish is to tell things as they were! But not all things; time flies, and art is long, And I must hurry onward with my song.) How Elfinhart ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... be others fairer than she.' Quoth I to myself, This is another proof positive.' Then I said to him, And how couldst thou fall in love with one thou hast never seen?' He replied Know that I was sitting one day at the window, when lo! there passed by a man, singing the following distich, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... are with which it must be combined, in order to produce its own effects to any pleasureable purpose. Double and tri-syllable rhymes, indeed, form a lower species of wit, and, attended to exclusively for their own sake, may become a source of momentary amusement; as in poor Smart's distich to the Welsh Squire who had promised him ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... hanging without quilting them all with cotton." So saying he gave him a bundle of tree-wool he had by him, and pursued, "O Habib, when thou shalt have raised the curtain thou wilt discover a door with two leaves also of red gold, whereupon couplets are inscribed, and as regards the first distich an thou master the meaning of the names and the talismans, thou shalt be saved from all terrors and horrors, and if thou fail to comprehend them thou shalt perish in that Hoard. But after opening the door ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the latter dies soon after, while the geomancer retires to a cave in the mountains, where every morning and evening two small loaves are thrown in to him by an unknown hand, and during the rest of his life he never ceased to repeat this distich: ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... 'twas Joe Punchard," cries Cludde, "a fellow that near killed a friend o' mine," and he breaks into the old School distich— ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... Roman writers,—then the eighteenth century deluged us with ill-natured witty epigrams of the like brief form. It was not until comparatively modern times that our Western world fully recognized the value of the distich, triplet or quatrain for the expression of beautiful thoughts, rather than for the expression of ill-natured ones. But now that the recognition has come, it has been discovered that nothing is harder than to write a beautiful poem of two ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... caution, and a soldier's motto should urge to daring. So we'll none of that. What do you say to the distich in honor of your great ancestor, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... The art of arranging words in that measure, so that the lines may flow smoothly, that the accents may fall correctly, that the rhymes may strike the ear strongly, and that there may be a pause at the end of every distich, is an art as mechanical as that of mending a kettle or shoeing a horse, and may be learned by any human being who has sense enough to learn anything. But, like other mechanical arts, it was gradually improved by means of many experiments ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Wade, in grateful commemoration of its benefits, placed a stone seat on the top of a hill, where the weary traveler may repose, after the labour of his ascent, and on which is judiciously inscribed, Rest, and be thankful. It has, also, the following sublime distich: ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... from Goethe, and used the elegiac form in a number of poems. In December, 1795, Goethe suggested that they amuse themselves by making epigrams, in the style of Martial's 'Xenia', upon the various journals against which they had a grudge, devoting a distich to each. His plan was that each should make a large number; then they would compare, select the best and publish them in the second volume of the 'Almanac'. Schiller was captivated by the idea, and 'Xenia' now became the order of the day. It was soon ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... These are the nine wise authors who did this. Laogar, King of Ireland, Corcc, and Daire, three kings; Patrick, Benin, Benignus (Benin), and Carnech, three Saints; Ros, Dubthach, and Fergus, three historians, as the old distich— ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... elicited by the friction of wood is termed by them earthly fire, and its use is prescribed for cooking and other domestic purposes. When once the new fire had thus been drawn from the sun, all the people were free to rekindle their domestic hearths; and, as a Chinese distich has it— ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... of the King and Shagpat exalted, and allow not the thing that happeneth let fly from thee the shaft of speech, but remain a slackened bow till the strength of my betrothed is testified, fearing nought, for fear is that which defeateth men, and 'tis declared in a distich,— ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... heart which makes pure food." Then, with his constant desire for charity, he prohibited all spiteful gossip in the conversation in the refectory. In those times of religious struggle, the clerics ferociously blackened each other's characters. Augustin caused to have written on the walls a distich, which ran thus: ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... possible to compose a Latin distich of the greatest beauty without knowing either the Latin language or prosody. We must examine the possibility and the impossibility, and afterwards see who is the man who says he is the author of the distich, for there ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... distich, in which another poet of beautiful talents has attempted to depreciate a name, to which, probably, few of his readers are ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... Macbeth. The tone is quite familiar;—there is no poetic description of night, no elaborate information conveyed by one speaker to another of what both had immediately before their senses—(such as the first distich in Addison's Cato, which is a translation into poetry of "Past four o'clock and a dark morning!");—and yet nothing bordering on the comic on the one hand, nor any striving of the intellect on the other. It is precisely ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... his friends, who found the heat unsupportable, and whom he therefore made Governor of Ghazni, Babar, when he was firm in the saddle, sent the distich, of which the following ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... the elegiac distich the caesura is always penthemimeral. In the iambic trimeter (consisting of three dipodia or pairs of feet), both in Greek and Latin, the most usual caesura is the penthemimeral; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... issue, 3 died young—the youngest was slain at Newport battle, June 20, 1600. Her grandchildren, in the second generation, were 114; in the third, 228, and in the fourth, 9; so that she could almost say the same as the distich doth of one of the Dalburg family of Basil: 'Rise up, daughter and go to thy daughter, for thy daughter's ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... to have borne this martyrdom with great coolness, for on his way back to prison, he composed a Latin distich on the letters S L, which he interpreted "Stigmata ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... bishops to cense him. It was on this occasion that he changed the meeting-place of Convocation from St. Paul's to Westminster, that it might be near his own house. Skelton, the poet, who hated Wolsey, thereupon wrote the following distich:— ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... small village of Antimano the valley becomes much narrower. The river is bordered with Lata, a fine gramineous plant with distich leaves, which sometimes reaches the height of thirty feet.* (* G. saccharoides.) Every hut is surrounded with enormous trees of persea,* (* Laurus persea (alligator pear).) at the foot of which the aristolochiae, paullinia, and other creepers vegetate. The neighbouring mountains, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... somewhat similar maxim of State policy as applied to England in the following distich, the principle of which was, however, flagrantly violated by that fervent Catholic, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... with this trite distich you made hexameters tame; it gushed from that great young heart with a sweet infantine ardour, that even virtue can only pour when young, and youth when virtuous; and, at the words I have emphasised by the poor ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... diverted. If conversation offered any thing that could be improved, he committed it to paper; if a thought, or perhaps an expression more happy than was common, rose to his mind, he was careful to write it; an independent distich was preserved for an opportunity of insertion, and some little fragments have been found containing lines, or parts of lines, to be wrought upon at some other time." By a like habitual and vigilant attention, the preacher will find scarce any thing but may be made to minister to his great ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... also buried here, including the founder of the church, and under a monumental effigy in one of the transepts lies the wonderful old Countess of Desmond, who having danced in her youth with Richard III. lived through the Tudor dynasty "to the age of a hundred and ten," and, as the old distich tells us, "died by a ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the sonder-cloud, or system of small roundish clouds in the upper regions of the atmosphere, commonly moves in a different current of air from that which is blowing at the earth's surface. It forms the mackerel sky alluded to in the following distich:— ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... taught an eagle to come at his call, and stoop down to him in its flight; and that, as he passed among the people assembled at the Olympic games, he showed them his golden thigh; besides many other strange and miraculous seeming practices, on which Timon the Phliasian wrote the distich,— ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... of Spenser, whose enchanting sweetness and boundless wealth of imagination have been now for three hundred years a joy to every lover of poetry. Something, too, he learned from Waller and from Sandys, both of whom, but especially the former, had been of service in giving smoothness to the iambic distich, in which all of Pope's best poems are written. Dryden, however, whom when a little boy he saw at Will's coffee-house—'Virgilium tantum vidi' records the memorable day—was the poet whose influence he felt most powerfully. Like Gray several ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Swift, by citing the cases of Eve, the daughters of Lot, Delilah, Herodias, Clytemnestra, and Progne. The way in which women were regarded as at once a blessing and a curse is well illustrated also in a distich of Sedulius: "A woman alone has been responsible for opening the gates of death; a woman alone has been the cause of a ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... know that very clever distich concerning the great fleas and the little fleas which tells us that no animal is too humble to have its parasite. Even Major Tifto had his inferior friend. This was a certain Captain Green,—for the friend ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... correspondent H.G.T.'s article on pixies (Vol. ii., p. 475.), allow me to say that I have read the distich which he quotes in a tale to the following effect:—In one of the southern counties of England—(all the pixey tales which I have heard or read have their seat laid in the south of England)—there lived a lass who was courted and wed by a man who, after marriage, ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... of Homer in a nutshell, which Pliny says that Cicero once saw, it is pretended might have been a fact, however to some it may appear impossible. AElian notices an artist who wrote a distich in letters of gold, which he enclosed in the rind of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... shadows of the clouds, careless alike of sunshine or of storm, each in the windowless palace of rest." There was no window in the grave when more illustrious and original skeptics talked about it. Modern infidelity has many expressions on the future after death which sound like the old Roman distich, "I was not, and became; I was, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... softness and emphatical Muse maimed; that there is a general defection from his genuine harmony. Those I must tell, I have in this translation rather sought his spirit than numbers; yet the music of verse not neglected neither, since the English ear better heareth the distich, and findeth that sweetness and air which the Latin affecteth and (questionless) attaineth in sapphics or iambic measures."[419] Dryden frequently complains of the difficulty of translation into English metre, especially when the poet to be translated is Virgil. The use of rhyme ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... Alva, but the demon of intolerance, although its fangs were drawn, still survived, and had taken possession of both parties in the Reformed Church. For it was the Remonstrants who had possession of the churches at Rotterdam, and the printer's distich is valuable as pointing out that the name of Orange was beginning to identify itself with the Contra-Remonstrant faction. At this time, on the other hand, the gabble that Barneveld had been bought by Spanish gold, and was about to sell his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of Dort.—In the Biographie Universelle, art. GROTIUS, it is stated that the following singular distich against the Synod of Dort was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... Some years ago, at the commencement of the great Church revival, the Christmas decorations in churches were very elaborate, but they are now, as a rule, much quieter, and the only admissible evergreens are contained in the following distich— ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... hath overthrown him from the very roots. The supersedeas was carried to him by Sir George Coppin, who, at the presenting of it, received it with dejection and tears. Tremor et successio non cadunt in fortem et constantem. I send you a distich ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... direction a picture was placed in the Lateran palace in which Lothair was represented as kneeling before the throned Pope to receive the imperial crown, while underneath as inscribed the following distich:— ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... nineteen times out of twenty, by twenty days of rain and wind. This statement being published in the Athenaeum, a cluster of correspondents averred that the belief is common among seamen, in all parts of the world, and among landsmen too. Some one quoted a distich: ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... urged to the utmost, at last obliged to interfere, when the multitude, carrying folly to the extremest bounds, was going to try to resuscitate the dead? In short, do we not remember the amusing distich, affixed at the time to the gate of the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... 352. of the same volume W. W. T. (quoting from D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature a passage which supplies the hexameter completing the distich, and attributes the verses to Sidonius Apollinaris) asks where may be found a legend which represents the two lines to have formed part of a dialogue between the fiend, under the form of a mule, and a monk, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... first stanza is quite too much in the flimsy strain of our ordinary street ballads: and, on the other hand, the second distich is too much in the other extreme. The expression is a little awkward, and the sentiment too serious. Stanza the second I am well pleased with; and I think it conveys a fine idea of that amiable part of the sex—the agreeables; or what in our Scotch ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... indeed, Master Ned," said the doctor. "Let us make a distich of it," added he, with a chuckle; "for, of a verity, some of the K. C.'s of our times are but dunces. ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... in which they were—but whither seemed yet all undecided. The cart halted at last at a miserable-looking hut, which the signpost announced to be an inn that afforded good accommodation to travellers; to which announcement was annexed the following epigrammatic distich: ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not, therefore, without the most cogent reasons that we assert our opinion, that the distich of Pope, "Worth makes the man," or the title appended by Colley Cibber to one of his dramas, "Love makes the man," ought henceforth to yield, in point of truth, to the irrefragable principle which we here solemnly advance, "that it is the tailor ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... the principal citizens among his disciples; and one of these, of the name of Precordius, ceded to him his house, on the site of which was built the first Christian place of worship known in Rouen. Hence, in the following distich, Ordericus Vitalis, entirely passing over Nicaise, places St. Mello at the head of the ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... the latter, Spain and America; all which centered in the person of Charles the Fifth, son of the above-mentioned Archduke Philip, the son of Maximilian. It was upon account of these two marriages, that the following Latin distich was made: ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... with a very small amount of research, and quote no less than the words of God himself: Ego autem dico vobis: diligite inimicos vestros. If you speak of evil thoughts, turn to the Gospel: De corde exeunt cogitationes malae. If of the fickleness of friends, there is Cato, who will give you his distich: ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Mr. Macklin in the character of Shylock. According to the custom of the time, Pope was seated among the critics in the pit. He was so much struck and transported with admiration, that in the middle of the play, he started up, and repeated that distich. ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... locks betraying him from afar, who was fain to display the promptness of his poetical powers; and, even while the elder artist was speaking, he had run Alexander's satirical remarks into the mold of rhythm. Not to save his life could he have suppressed the hastily conceived distich, or have let slip such a justifiable claim to applause. So, without heeding Melissa's remonstrance, he flung his sky-blue mantle about him in fresh folds, and declaimed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the public weal, the ungrateful dogs see that we are above them; a single envious breast is sufficient to give us to the hangman. We have agreed that we are in danger; we have agreed to make an honourable retreat; we cannot do so without money. You know the vulgar distich among our set. ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by another hand. Critically speaking too, not one of all the one hundred and fifty-four is of the conventional and elaborate fourteen-liner sort, with complicated rhymes; but each is a lyrical gem of three four-line stanzas closed by a distich. Milton's eighteen are all of the more artificial Petrarchian sort; which Wordsworth has diligently made his model in more than four hundred instances of very various degrees ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Church at Stratford; where a Monument, decent enough for the Time, is erected to him, and plac'd against the Wall. He is represented under an Arch in a sitting Posture, a Cushion spread before him, with a Pen in his Right Hand, and his Left rested on a Scrowl of Paper. The Latin Distich, which is placed under the Cushion, has been given us by Mr. Pope, or his Graver, ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... very merry fellow, the fiddle of the society, who called him 'Mad Trimble.' M. Stokes of 1531 wrote this distich on him:— ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 30. Saturday, May 25, 1850 • Various
... well preserved, sometimes even with admirable fidelity, as in "Lob der Gottheit" (Bl. i. 1), which is a version of passages from the introduction to the Gulistan. No attention whatever is paid to the form of the originals. For the selections from Sa'di the distich which had been used for the versions from the Greek anthology is the favorite form. Rhyme, which in Persian poetry is an indispensable requisite, is ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... deserves to be mentioned, the reptile Kenrick, who, after having repeatedly slandered Goldsmith while living, had the audacity to insult his memory when dead. The following distich is sufficient to show his malignancy, and to hold him up ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... sprang from the Etruscan Kings, not only graced poets by his bounty, but also by being a poet himself; and as JAMES VI., now King of Scotland, is not only a favourer of poets, but a poet; as my friend Master RICHARD BARNFELD hath in this distich ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... who by his maxims and conduct, seemed to tread under foot all respect for natural law and every duty of humanity. Amongst the framed engravings, with which I had decorated my alcove at Montmorency, was a portrait of this prince, and under it a distich, the last line of which ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Constantine, but which in a few hours had been stripped of the pomp of royalty. A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind; and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry: "The spider has wove his web in the Imperial palace; and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... therefore cannot be caught. As they have neither towns nor villages, they must be hunted like wild beasts, and can be fitly compared only to griffins, which beneficent Nature has banished to uninhabited regions." As a Persian distich, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... invented shortly afterwards by Pope Leo II. As in the days of Greece and Rome, the development of poetry was accompanied by a considerable activity in the fabrication of metres. This did not limit itself to a distich or alternate rhyme called "tailed" or "interlaced," but included the "horned," "crested," and "squared" verses—the last forming double acrostics. Sometimes half a dozen lines were made to rhyme together. This movement, pedantic as it was, showed an advance ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... a savage wolf, in pursuit of a beautiful girl, trying to pounce upon her as he wished to devour her. This was the burden of the distich: ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... put this distich in an elegy in which he narrated a nocturnal promenade between Rome and Tibur. Observe the word Scythiae instead of Scythicis, and especially, feriat, which is the true reading,—the printed texts say noceat. ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... and old town. In the old town is a hall, in which Mary Queen of Scots lodged whilst visiting the Buxton waters for her health, as a prisoner under charge of the Earl of Shrewsbury. A Latin distich, a farewell to Buxton, scratched on the window of one of the rooms, is attributed to the hand of that ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... in his farce of The Farmer, called Jemmy Jumps, but I cannot with all my diligence, discover that he takes his name from a love of jumping. Molly Maybush, indeed, gives us a hint of his fondness for that recreation in the following distich: ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... best of times, and depends more upon the abilities of others than his own for the appearance he makes in the world, and is rather to be looked at than admired and esteemed. Here," continued he, "I shall have an opportunity of introducing you to a character of another kind, here is my friend Dick Distich, a logger of Rhyme, a poet and a contemplative philosopher, he is recently married, but appears to ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... verse used are the elegiac distich (most frequent), scazons, and hendecasyllabics. In vi. 65 he apologizes for using the pure hexameter, which is found only four times. Other ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... a later period, after he had lost his sight from a pistol-shot received at the combat of the Porte St. Antoine during the Fronde, and had quarrelled with the Duchess, he parodied his own distich,— ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... firmness of fibre is excellently well exemplified in the woodcock and the partridge. The former flies most—the latter walks; the wing of the woodcock is always very tough,—of the partridge very tender hence the old doggerel distich,— ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... according to M. Edouard Fournier ('L'Esprit des Autres', sixth edition, 1881, p. 288), is simply the readjustment of an earlier quatrain, based upon a Latin distich in the 'Epigrammatum ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... off my heart. Now, you rascal, run up and carry to the fair Irene, the betrothed of her faithful Lysias—mark what I say—carry her at once this tablet and bracelet. But you will not say it right; I will write here above my distich: 'From the faithful Lysias to the fair Irene his future wife.' There—and now I think she will not send the thing back again, good girl that she is! Listen, rascal, if she keeps it you may swallow cakes to-day ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 107 The famous Virgil. There is a tale, reported by Donatus, that Vergil once anonymously wrote up on the palace gates a distich in praise of Augustus, which, when nobody was found to own it, was claimed by a certain versifier Bathyllus, whom Caesar duly rewarded, A few days later, however, Virgil again set in the same place a quatrain each line of which commenced ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... time they received an answer, vague, mysterious, and almost unintelligible, but which seemed to denote that the safety of the city was connected in some manner with Salamis, and with certain "wooden walls," to which the inspired distich of the response ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... themselves to English ways, and only so were finally incorporated into the great family of English words{51}. Thus of Greek words we have the following: 'pyramis' and 'pyramides', forms often employed by Shakespeare, became 'pyramid' and 'pyramids'; 'dosis' (Bacon) 'dose'; 'distichon' (Holland) 'distich'; 'hemistichion' (North) 'hemistich'; 'apogaeon' (Fairfax) and 'apogeum' (Browne) 'apogee'; 'sumphonia' (Lodge) 'symphony'; 'prototypon' (Jackson) 'prototype'; 'synonymon' (Jeremy Taylor) or 'synonymum' (Hacket), and 'synonyma' (Milton, prose), became ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... verse more attracted the Roman amateurs than the Epigram. There was something congenial to the Roman spirit in the pithy distich or tetrastich which formed so considerable an element in the "elegant extracts" of Alexandria. The term epigram has altered its meaning with the lapse of ages. In Greek it signified merely an inscription commemorative of some work ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... is wrought by want of thought,'" quoting the old distich. "But," he added, shaking off the momentary feeling of sadness produced by reflection, as if he were ashamed of it, "if we don't look 'smart,' as our friend Seth says, we won't get a shot all day; and ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... Slater, and Fortnum and Mason; Billiard, ecarte, and chess tables; Water in vast marble basin; Luminous books (not voluminous) To read under beech-trees cacuminous; One friend, who is fond of a distich, And doesn't get too syllogistic; A valet, who knows the complete art Of service—a maiden, his sweetheart: Give me these, in some rural pavilion, And I'll envy no Rothschild ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... brother of the first Lord Rokeby, called long Sir Thomas Robinson, on account of his height, and to distinguish him from Sir Thomas Robinson, first Lord Grantham. It was on his request for an epigram that Lord Chesterfield made the distich:— ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... equal division of wealth. The enormous interest manifested in Socialism during recent years and the steady growth of the Socialist vote throughout the world bear witness to the fact that the views expressed in the satirical distich of the poet's fancy and the blood-curdling cartoon of the artist's invention are no longer the potent appeals ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... this school that we may mention was Callinus, an Ephesian of the latter part of the eighth century B.C., to whom the invention of the elegiac distich, the characteristic form of the Ionian poetry, is attributed. Among the few fragments from this poet is the following fine war elegy, occasioned, probably, by a Persian ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... GORST says, but gives you the swing and the spirit of the distich. Rather hard on CURZON that my popularity should spoil his speech, but a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, July 2, 1892 • Various
... men and women, have a very bad name in Eastern tales, the former for treachery and the latter for unchastity. A Persian distich says: ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... he was thought "fami non famae scribere." 'Returning into England, he was robb'd by the rebels of what little he had; and dying for grief in great want, anno 1598, was honourably buried nigh Chaucer in Westminster, where this distich concludeth his epitaph ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... who prefaced these lines with, "Ingenii, hoc distochon" [Some ingenious person wrote this distich]. Milton wrongly believed More to be the author ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... and, in the same manner as certain critics have sneered at Livy—no, it was Tacitus—for commencing his work with a bad hexameter, so many a reader will now-a-days condemn a whole book, because it is somewhere found guilty of harbouring a distich. But poetry, friend World, means far other than rhyme; its etymology would yield "creation," or "fabrication," of sense as well as sound, and of melody for the eye as well as melody for the ear. So did [epoiese] Milton; and so did not—— Well, I myself, if you will. Yet, in fact, there are ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and well-nigh famished. One of the company observed, in the way of pleasantry, "You must also repeat something." The dervish answered, "I am not, like the others, overstocked with learning and wit, nor am I much read in books; and you must be satisfied with my reciting one distich." One and all eagerly cried, "Let us hear it." He said, "Hungry as I am, I sit by a table spread with food, like a bachelor at the entrance of ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... note, of the three saints to whom the chapel was dedicated, that St Christopher was the patron of mariners and one of the 'sea-saints,' St Blaze the special patron of wool-combers; while St Anne particularly presides over riches. An old distich runs: ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... you heap upon me be worth a thousand Egypts, and each of these Egypts had a thousand Niles, all those favors would be despised. I shall be contented with little so long as I am far from you. Away from you, I shall recite this distich, which is worth more than a necklace of fine pearls: 'When a man is wronged on the soil of his tribe, there is nothing left him but to leave it; you, who have so wickedly injured me, before long shall feel the power of the kindly divinity, for he is your ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous |
