He tried to make
epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them, you know, that I spilt the tea--and he made an
epigram about that!"
In those days conversation was still cultivated as an art; a neat repartee was more highly valued than the crackling of thorns under a pot; and the
epigram, not yet a mechanical appliance by which the dull may achieve a semblance of wit, gave sprightliness to the small talk of the urbane.
What flippant Frenchman was it who said in allusion to the well-known work of Zimmerman, that, "la solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude est une belle chose?" The
epigram cannot be gainsayed; but the necessity is a thing that does not exist.
And, when the whim changes, it is most easy and delightfully disconcerting to play with the respectable and cowardly bourgeois fetishes and to laugh and
epigram at the flitting god-ghosts and the debaucheries and follies of wisdom.
In the society in which she lived such plain statements produced the effect of the wittiest
epigram. Princess Myakaya could never see why it had that effect, but she knew it had, and took advantage of it.
Dryden's general quality and a large part of his achievement are happily summarized in Lowell's
epigram that he 'was the greatest poet who ever was or ever could be made wholly out of prose.' He can never again be a favorite with the general reading-public; but he will always remain one of the conspicuous figures in the history of English literature.
Before Anna Pavlovna and the others had time to smile their appreciation of the vicomte's
epigram, Pierre again broke into the conversation, and though Anna Pavlovna felt sure he would say something inappropriate, she was unable to stop him.
The
epigram, with its faint whiff of the eighties, meant nothing.
The machinery it has set up for the detection of crime is miserably ineffective--and yet only invent a moral
epigram, saying that it works well, and you blind everybody to its blunders from that moment.
He spends the whole day in settling whether Homer expressed himself correctly or not in such and such a line of the Iliad, whether Martial was indecent or not in such and such an
epigram, whether such and such lines of Virgil are to be understood in this way or in that; in short, all his talk is of the works of these poets, and those of Horace, Perseus, Juvenal, and Tibullus; for of the moderns in our own language he makes no great account; but with all his seeming indifference to Spanish poetry, just now his thoughts are absorbed in making a gloss on four lines that have been sent him from Salamanca, which I suspect are for some poetical tournament."
The "
Epigrams of Homer" are derived from the pseudo-Herodotean "Life of Homer", but many of them occur in other documents such as the "Contest of Homer and Hesiod", or are quoted by various ancient authors.
She had never heard of Tallyrand and did not understand
epigrams.