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From Blackwood's Magazine.

EPIGRAMS.*

WE live, it is said, in a prosaic and realistic age. With all our modern science and modern refinements, our life is not so imaginative, so gay, so insouciant, as that of our grandmothers and grandfathers. Even conversation, we are told, has lost its brilliancy. Women, who used to talk so charmingly, vibrate now between slang and science. Men are either too busy or too languid to exert themselves to talk at all, unless to constituencies or mechanics' institutes. The few who could talk well are suspected of keeping their talk to put into books. We all write and read instead of conversing. And even reading and writing have become occupations rather than amusements. The warmest and most imaginative lover never now pens a sonnet to Delia's eyebrow, or an impromptu upon Sacharissa's girdle. The modern representatives of those charmers would only vote him a "muff" for his pains. Vers de société are gone out of fashion altogether. Such poetry as we want (and we do not want a great deal) is done for us by regular practitioners-laureates, and so forth; we no more think of making our own verses than our own pills. Any man or woman who was to produce and offer to read in polite company a poetical effusion of their own or a friend's, such as would have charmed a whole circle in the days of Pope or of Fanny Burney, would be stared at upon reasonable suspicion of having escaped from a private lunatic asylum. Even if the offered verses should be warranted to contain the severest remarks upon a mutual friend, we of a modern audience should have strength of mind enough to resist the temptation. Perhaps society has grown more charitable and less scandalous; perhaps it is only less easily amused.

It could hardly have been comfortable, after all, to live in the age of epigrams and impromptus. It was all very well for the Delias and Sacharissas aforesaid to have their charms celebrated by the wits and poets of the day; and though it is notoriously true that their admirers did not err on the side of reticence, female delicacy in those days was hardly startled by the warmth of the homage. A lady had no more objection to be compared to Venus than to the Graces. *"Epigrams, Ancient and Modern." By the Rev. J. Booth, B.A. Longman and Co.

Few, indeed, were they who needed the warning which Waller - most elegant of love's epigrammatists-puts into the mouth of his messenger, the Rose,—

"Tell her that's young,

And shuns to have her graces spyd,
That had she sprung

In deserts where no men abide,
She must have uncommended died.
Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desired,

And not blush so to be admired."

The days when such verses passed from hand to hand, and were read instead of Punch and Mr. Darwin, were indeed " a good time," as the American ladies call it, for the fair enchantresses who, strong in the charms of youth, had only to "come forth" to insure admiration; but it was quite a different case with poor Chloe, who was repairing the damages of years with a little innocent paint, or with Celia, who had just mounted a new wig of her very own hair, honestly bought and paid for. Human nature, we suppose, was human nature then; and it could never have been pleasant to have one's little personal peculiarities, or some untoward accident, or slight social sin, done into verse forthwith by a clever friend, and handed round the breakfast or tea-tables of your own particular circle for the amusement and gratification of other dear friends, clever or otherwise. It was a heavy penalty to pay for living in an Augustan age. In this present generation, if you find yourself the victim of a severe article in a popular review, you have yourself half solicited the exposure by being guilty of print in the first place; even if, in the honest discharge of your ordinary duties, you awake some morning to a temporary notoriety in a column of the Times, you can satisfy your feelings by stopping the paper; and in either case, you have the consolation of knowing that probably a majority of your personal friends will never read the abuse, and that most certainly nine-tenths of those who do read it will have forgotten it in a week. But the terse social epigram, of some four or eight lines, communicated first from friend to friend in a confidential whisper, and then handed about in manuscript long before it escaped into print, was remembered by the dullest dolt amongst a man's intimates, stuck to him all his life, and, in many instances, became his only memorial to posterity. Like Sintram's co-travellers, there was no escape from

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its dreadful companionship; if bad, it was the | gram of four lines would require a page of more readily remembered; if neat and well-preface to make its point fully intelligible to pointed, it was more generally admired and an ordinary reader. But certainly, as one more widely circulated. True, the author of the satire did not always put in the actual name; the victim of his verse figured commonly under some classical alias; but everybody knew—and none better than the unfortunate object — that Grumio meant Sir Harry, that Chremes stood for old Brown, and that Lady Bab was intended by Phryne. Even if there was nothing more personal than a row of asterisks in the original, there were always plenty of copies in circulation with the hiatus carefully filled in. Let no one suppose for a moment that the polish and the humor of such productions made the attack" more endurable. Few men, and perhaps fewer women, are of Falstaff's happy temperament, content to be the subject of wit in others. There is more sound than truth in the epigram which says,—

turns page after page of this "literature of
Society," one gets confirmed in the impres
sion that society was very ill-natured in those
days. The science of making one's self
beautiful forever," by the aid of paint and
other accessories, is still studied by some la-
dies, if we may trust law-reports and adver-
tisements, and, no doubt, sharp-sighted friends
detect this false coinage of beauty; but they
do not mercilessly nail it down on the social
counter, as in the case of poor Dorinda
(whose real name was doubtless perfectly
well known to her contemporaries) :-
Say, which enjoys the greater blisses—
John, who Dorinda's picture kisses,
Or Tom his friend, the favored elf,
Who kisses fair Dorinda's self?-
'Faith, 'tis not easy to divine,

While both are thus with raptures fainting,
To which the balance shall incline,

Since Tom and John both kiss a painting." There is a sequel, too, even less gallant, which calls itself "The Point Decided: "---

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"As in smooth oil the razor best is whet, So wit is by politeness sharpest set; Their want of edge from their offence is seen— Both pain us least when exquisitely keen." Nay, surely John's the happier of the twain, And both cut deepest too, and leave scars Because the picture cannot kiss again.' that are longest in healing. Johnson was quite right when he pronounced, on the other The rude wits of society delighted in attackhand, that "the vehicle of wit and delicacy "ing these adventitious charms- unconscious, only made the satire more stinging; com- probably, that in this as in many other things, pared with ordinary abuse, he said, "the the Greek epigrammatists had been long bedifference was between being bruised with a fore them. Here is one of the best amongst club, or wounded with a poisoned arrow." many-anonymous, so far as we know-which we miss in Mr. Booth's volume :—

One is surprised, however, on the whole, in looking over any collection of epigrams which were considered extremely good things in their day, to find how poor the majority of them are. They would read better, no doubt, to those who knew the parties. The spice of neighborly ill-nature, which gave them their chief zest originally, and made up for the poverty of the wit, is lost-happilyto the cool judgment of the modern reader. They are like the glass of champagne kept till it has lost its sparkle.

"Cosmelia's charms inspire my lays,

Who, fair in nature's scorn,
Blooms in the winter of her days,
Like Glastonbury thorn.

If e'er, to seize the tempting bliss,
Upon her lips you fall,

The plaistered fair returns the kiss,

Like Thisbe, through a wall." Modern gallantry keeps its eyes open, and its lips to itself, under suspicious circumstances; and perhaps not being so readily taken in by false colors, is not so bitter against those who

A nicely printed little book, recently pub-wear them. lished, containing a selection (for a collection it certainly is not, though so called in the dedication), will impress this fact upon most of its readers. Of course, such jeux d'esprit do not show to advantage when gathered together at random, as these seem to have been. They find their best place as illustrations of biography or political history; often, an epi

There are blockheads amongst fashionable physicians in our own days, and jealousies, it is to be feared, are not unknown in the profession; but they do not put their professional antagonism into the form of epigrams, as Dr. Wynter, Dr. Cheney, Dr. Hill, Dr. Lettsom, Dr. Radcliffe, and a host of others did (or their friends and enemies did for them) in

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