"Distich" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lord Lyttelton's distich about 'Love can hope when reason would despair;' there are Aaron Hill's famous lines on 'modest ease in beauty,' which, though it 'means no mischief, does it all.' There are Sir William Jones's 'To an Infant Newly Born;' Wolcot's 'To Sleep;' Luttrell's ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... 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 ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... 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), ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... The beautiful Distich upon Ajax in the foregoing Lines, puts me in mind of a Description in Homer's Odyssey, which none of the Criticks have taken notice of. [3] It is where Sisyphus is represented lifting his Stone up the Hill, which is no sooner carried to the top of it, but ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... 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
... the poetical dedication of his "Sea-piece" to Voltaire it seems that this extemporaneous reproof, if it must be extemporaneous (for what few will now affirm Voltaire to have deserved any reproof), was something longer than a distich, and something more gentle than the distich ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... 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. Thus an excellent correction has been ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... reason to suppose that this bird, in those countries where it was first celebrated, had really some natural fondness for the rose; or perhaps for some insect which took shelter in it. In Sir W. Jones' translation of the Persian fable, of "The Gardener and Nightingale" we meet with the following distich. ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... much fatigued, 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 a bath full ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... 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
... 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 years later, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... or "Mixture of the two Seasons"—autumn and winter. The storm is expected to blow three days from the Azyab (south-east) or from the Shirs (south-west). The qualities of the several winds are described in the following distich:— ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... is never used alone, but only in connection with the Hexameter. The two arranged alternately form the so-called Elegiac Distich. Thus:— ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... his backe against a poste & clave his hed in sonder. Mistress Mannocke did knowe ye man, for his mother was her nurse. Grave judicium Dei in irrisorem patris sui." These little scraps of Latin, sometimes running into a distich, are frequent signs of a certain classical proclivity of the writer. Any one who should infer, from the good man's arbitrary mode of spelling many words, that he was an illiterate person, would be grievously mistaken, in his ignorance of the universal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... and who, at an entertainment given by some young men of rank, had been dignified with the appellation of "The Arch Poet." Leo used occasionally to send him some dishes from his table; and he was expected to pay for each dish with a Latin distich. One day, as he was attending Leo at dinner, and was ill of the gout, he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... distich which I have been forced to expand into these nine lines is evidently spurious, but is found in all the commented MSS. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... 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. Nothing ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... —like cutler's poetry; Knives were formerly inscribed, by means of aqua fortis, with short sentences in distich.] ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... many undoubtedly Shakespeare's; some I have said probably 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
... comestibles, From 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 ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... suppose that "Leonine verses" were 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
... verse in which the vast epics of Vyasa and Valmiki are composed is called the Sloka, which is thus described by Schlegel in his Indische Bibliothek, p. 36: "The oldest, most simple, and most generally adopted measure is the Sloka; a distich of two sixteen syllable-lines, divided at the eighth syllable." According to our prosodial marks, the following is ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... Rowley, with admirable promptitude, and, immediately closing his eyes, as if from habit, repeated the following distich with more celerity ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of 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 invasion ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... 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
... 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 ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... in the midst of his pea-and-thimble process, no sooner heard the last word of the distich, than he turned an alarmed look in the direction of where I stood; then, glancing around, and perceiving the constable, he slipped forthwith his pellet and thimbles into his pocket, and, lifting up his table, he cried to the people about him, "Make way!" and with a motion of his head ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... 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 'sic vos non ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... 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 and many failures. It ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... we take, not the Looe River (which doesn't count), but an ancient earthwork, known as the Devil's Hedge, which stretches across country from Looe up to Lerryn. Who built this earthwork, or when he did it, or for what purpose, no one can tell; but the Looe folk will quote you the following distich,— ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Florence," but it is now quite bare, though, fortunately, the tarsie are well preserved. He goes on to say that "on each compartment of the panelling was the portrait of some famous author and an appropriate distich," which leads one to suppose either that his information was inaccurate or that he was referring to the similar small study on the lower floor, in which Timoteto ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... fire 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
... 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 ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... 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 ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the head large, and almost devoid of hair, except at the sides, and one dark lock in the centre of the massive forehead. Over the western door-way is a mosaic of the Virgin with the following leonine and loyal distich beneath it:— ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... possession of handkerchiefs—which were evidently regarded as effeminate inventions—is specially excused on the ground that they would be useful—among other things—"for wrapping round the manuscripts which brethren handle[154]." Of similar import is the distich at the end of a fine manuscript formerly in the ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... went down the slopes to the darkening vale I heard him crooning to himself in a high, quavering voice the single distich; then in a little his weariness took him again, and he plodded on with no thought ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... 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 good ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, July 2, 1892 • Various
... of Dort.—In the Biographie Universelle, art. GROTIUS, it is stated that the following singular distich against the Synod of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... and brevity in narration, unattainable in any language but the Greek, the following distich was quoted: ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... 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 fall from a ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the direful music and wild wayward rhythm and abrupt lyrics of the opening of 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 the language ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... poetry; opera; posy, anthology; disjecta membra poetae song [Lat.], ballad, lay; love song, drinking song, war song, sea song; lullaby; music &c 415; nursery rhymes. [Bad poetry] doggerel, Hudibrastic verse^, prose run mad; macaronics^; macaronic verse^, leonine verse; runes. canto, stanza, distich, verse, line, couplet, triplet, quatrain; strophe, antistrophe^. verse, rhyme, assonance, crambo^, meter, measure, foot, numbers, strain, rhythm; accentuation &c (voice) 580; dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapest &c; hexameter, pentameter; Alexandrine; anacrusis^, antispast^, blank verse, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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
... 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 Laudis"—the scars ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... character 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
... 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
... I sent to my friend Isaac Penington, by his son and servant, who returned home, though it was late, that evening, a short account of the business in the following distich:- ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... is a distich, in which another poet of beautiful talents has attempted to depreciate a name, to which, probably, few of his ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... the sexton, climbing out of his grave with surprising agility. He fixed his eyes on the cavalier, as though it were the aspect of recognition. He then hummed the following distich, a favourite troll amongst the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... that port, Sir, I expect your gazette, what the beaux esprits are saying, what they are doing, and what they are singing. Any sober intelligence from my sequestered life is all you have to expect from me. I have scarcely made a single distich since I saw you. When I meet with an old Scots air that has any facetious idea in its name, I have a peculiar pleasure in following out that idea ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... great Caesar, worthy Romans, Observe but this ridiculous commenter; The soul 'to my device was in this distich: Thus oft, the base and ravenous multitude Survive, to share the spoils of fortitude. Which in this body I have figured ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... magnitude of the offence. But one who effects a crime at another's behest comes coldly to the deed, a fact that convicts him of a far greater depravity. One could allege these and similar lines of argument against Martial's position, and could reverse the sense of his distich so that it read ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... Strange as it may seem, this distich is Spenser's own; and the other hexameters are ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... these warm effusions: his house became gradually neglected, and he died soon after of a broken heart. An Irish harper who was a cotemporary of Maguire, and like him, felt for the sufferings of his country, had this distich engraven ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... compensations for the immense acquisitions of the House of Hapsburgh in Italy. Thus that house was aggrandised by a war which was to itself most disastrous. But Austria has often found other means of extending her dominion than military triumphs, as is recorded in the celebrated distich of Mathias Corvinus: ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... and circumstance of the infernal orgies of those witches and warlocks. What Zolaesque realism there is! In the line, 'The grey hairs yet stack to the heft,' all the gruesomeness of murder is compressed into a distich. Yet the horrible details are controlled and unified in the powerful imagination of the poet. We believe Dr. Blacklock was right in thinking that this poem, though Burns had never written another syllable, would have made him a high reputation. Certainly it was not the work of a man ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... than even a bad style. It was said in one place that James had sent his brother as his messenger to heaven, and in another that James had furnished the wings with which his brother had soared to a higher region. There was a still more unfortunate distich, which at the time attracted little notice, but which, a few months later, was remembered and malignantly interpreted. "O King," said the poet, "cease to sigh for a son. Though nature may refuse your wish, the stars will find a ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the purpose. Hence, from the nature of his office, and the powers that were intrusted to him by the king, and probably too from the natural bent of his disposition, arose the popular dislike which vented itself in the well-known traditionary distich we ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... 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 ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... like a 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, Pocahontas's husband, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... opposed my design, I took the pen, and wrote six sorts of hands used among the Arabians, and each specimen contained an extemporary distich or quatrain (a stanza of four lines) in praise of the sultan. When I had done, the officers took the roll, and ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... (There's anticlimax for you! Most 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 at last told what she wanted, And what the fairies said, please take ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... 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, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... go once more to the play-house, to see 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
... 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 ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... ballad, verse, distich, lyric, elegy, eclogue, idyl, madrigal, epic, ode, georgic, cid, rondeau, epilogue, epigram, elegiac, roundelay, dithyramb, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... prisoners for Wyat's business had been brought to utter any thing by which she could be endangered. Perhaps it was with immediate reference to this intelligence that she wrote with a diamond on her window the homely but expressive distich, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... it was resolved that Bottgher should be furnished with the means necessary for perfecting his invention. Having obtained a skilled workman from Delft, he began to TURN porcelain with great success. He now entirely abandoned alchemy for pottery, and inscribed over the door of his workshop this distich:- ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... Pyramids yonder had fallen 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 out on the Grand ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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, who was his rider. B. H. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... and attractive; but it has been, I am afraid, retouched, so that we cannot be quite sure that we have the original features. Fortunately Guido has placed a date on his work, MCCXXI., and also inscribed on it a distich, which shows that he felt, with some consciousness and self-complacency, his superiority to his ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... had to wear three pairs of stockings, which he was unable to draw on and off without help. His seat had to be raised to bring him to a level with common tables. In one of his papers in the Guardian he describes himself apparently as Dick Distich: "a lively little creature, with long legs and arms; a spider[7] is no ill emblem of him; he has been taken at a distance for a small windmill." His face, says Johnson, was "not displeasing," and the portraits are eminently characteristic. The thin, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... and 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
... flights, the only extraordinary thing the duchess did was to do nothing extraordinary, for I do not call it very mad that some pique happening between her and the Duchess of Bedford, the latter had this distich sent ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... S. Conway, May 5.-Madame de Mezi'eres. Sir Charles Williams's distich on the Queen of Hungary. Lord Bolingbroke's Works. Anecdote of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... so, and after a 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 ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... placed over the door; Fortune's wheel too, composed of six figures curiously disposed, and not unlike our man alphabet, two mounting, two sitting, and two tumbling, over against it: on the outside of the wheel this distich, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... 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 ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... eloquence: 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 device of capitals, two lovely, supple arms flew wide out like ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... people, and 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, quoted by ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... rhymester, he had, during the whole of the journey, overwhelmed with quatrains, sextains, and madrigals, first the king, and then La Valliere. The king was, on his side, in a similarly poetical mood, and had made a distich; while La Valliere, like all women who are in love, had composed two sonnets. As one may see, then, the day had not been a bad one for Apollo; and, therefore, as soon as he had returned to Paris, Saint-Aignan, who knew beforehand that his verses would be sure to be ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... likes, "to die again to-morrow."—W. B. Rhodes, Bombastes Furioso. This farce is a travesty of Orlando Furioso, and "Distaffina" is Angelica, beloved by Orlando, whom she flouted for Medoro, a young Moor. On this Orlando went mad, and hung up his armor on a tree, with this distich attached thereto: ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... should I spin words? I will not trace so ill-matched a contest step by step, sentence by sentence: let me rather hasten to relate the one peculiarity that arose out of this trite contest, where, under the names of Camille and Josephine, the two great sexes may be seen acting the whole world-wide distich,— ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... was dedicated, as Herodotus states, to Apollo by the allied Greeks as a tenth of the Persian spoils at Plataea, and which was placed near the altar at Delphi. On this monument, as we learn from Thucydides, Pausanias, regent of Sparta, inscribed an arrogant distich, in which he commemorates the victory in his own name as general in chief, hardly mentioning the allied forces who gained it. This epigram was subsequently erased by the Lacedaemonians, who substituted it for an inscription enumerating the various Hellenic states who had taken ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various |
