From “Pen Sketches from the Papers of the Late Mortimer Collins.”

THERE are certain departments of literature in which excellence is attainable only by labor; and the epigram is among them. It requires a thought tersely expressed in perfection of words:—

	“Just as crushed carbon doth produce
	The diamond for Beauty’s use,
	Condense the wisdom of the years,
	And, lo! an epigram appears.”

Recently there have been published some good collections of epigrams, and there appears to exist an impression that this form of writing will again be in vogue. I doubt it. Life is not long enough? There is less thought in many a three-volume novel of the present day than in a single first-rate epigram which a man might write upon his thumb nail.

“Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons.”

This canon of literature is rather too much neglected by the easy writers of the day—gentlemen who perpetually bring to one’s remembrance Rogers’s epigram:—

	“You write with ease to show your breeding—
	Your easy writing is hard reading.”

Expect no epigrams from the man who earns his bread by the gray-goose quill. They don’t pay. A Greek tyrant in the old days would give a poet a dozen female slaves for a tetrastich; a prince or an archbishop in the Middle Ages would send him fat venison and abundant wine; but the patron of to-day (the publisher) would probably think sixpence a line generous payment. If we are to have any epigrams in this toiling and moiling age, this perturbed period of the steam wagon and the lightning wire, it must be from literati of leisure. Peers of the realm and country gentlemen, deans of cathedral chapters and fellows of colleges, are your natural epigrammatists—if only they have the genius. The epigram should be matured in a lofty library with windows looking to the sunset, shut in from all rude sounds of the outer world, with a plate of filberts and a glass of old Madeira or port to occupy the intervals of thought. It grows in the brain like the pearl within the oyster. To reach perfection, it demands silence and seclusion and time. These are conditions rarely attainable in the hot afternoon of the nineteenth century—for which reason I am not sanguine in anticipating the rise among us of a race of epigrammatists.

  What the Greeks meant by an epigram was simply an inscription, and its primary use was funereal. It gradually extended itself to other themes, but never became that “rapier-pointed” versicle which the name now implies. The function of the Greek epigram is fulfilled by the modern sonnet, a felicitous invention of Italy, which has been successfully acclimatized in England. What since the days of Martial has been called an epigram differs as widely from the Greek form as Mr. Tennyson’s idyls differ from those of Theocritus, or as a burlesque by Burnand from one by Aristophanes. It is, however, with the modern epigram that I am now concerned, and of this Martial is the undoubted master. Only a few of his epigrams contain that sting in the tail which now characterizes the hornet of poetry; but those few are perfect. Others of the fifteen hundred which he wrote are more like the vers de societe of Praed and Luttrel and Locker; they are lapidary verse, cameos cut and polished with infinite skill….

  When we come among the English writers of epigram, we find Martial frequently echoed. Sir John Harington follows the old Roman very closely. Here is an example:—

	“Fortune, men say, doth give too much to many;
	But yet she never gave enough to any.”

Sir John was a fertile writer, and produced one epigram that not likely to die:—

	“Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason?
	For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

Ben Jonson was another prolific disciple of Martial, from whom he borrowed his tremendous line upon Inigo Jones:—

“Thy forehead is too narrow for my brand.”

Some of the rare old dramatist’s songs have a fine aroma of epigram, as one stanza shall prove:—

	“Follow a shadow, it still flies you;
	Seem to fly it, it will pursue;
	So court a mistress, she denies you;
	Let her alone, she will court you.
	Say, are not women truly, then,
	Styled but the shadows of us men?”

Henry Parrott was another of these seventeenth-century men with a wealth of epigrammatic wit. Here we have him chaffing the Welsh:—

	“A Welshman and an Englishman disputed
	Which of their land maintain’d the greatest state;
	The Englishman the Welshman quite confuted;
	Yet would the Welshman naught his brags abate.
	‘Ten cooks (quoth he) in Wales one wedding sees’;
	‘True (quoth the other); each man toasts his cheese.’”

Herrick, Waller, Prior, are especially noticeable for the vein of epigram which runs through their lyrics, like the purple streaks that lie deep in the snow-white marble of Sicily. What can surpass the delicious couplet in courtly Waller’s girdle song?—

	“Give me but what this ribbon bound;
	Take all the rest the sun goes round.”

The same peculiarity belongs to those fine gentlemen and facile poets, Suckling, Etherege, Sedley, Lovelace; masters, it seems to me, of the lyric epigram, though three out of four are not even named in Mr. Dodd’s portly and valuable volume, entitled “The Epigrammatists.” If Sir John Suckling’s piquant little chanson—

“Why so pale and wan, fond lover?”—

is not to be classed with the epigrams, I am at a loss how to define it. The light literature of two centuries ago had a choice flavor of its own, being the natural growth of a lively and careless society. The men who wore rapiers were gay intriguers, and their love songs sparkled like the Toledo steel they were always ready to draw.

	“Out upon it! I have loved
	Three whole days together,
	And am like to love three more—
	If it prove fine weather!”

sings Sir John Suckling; and the words bring before us a picture of the man, young, gallant, daring, ready with pen and purse and sword, the darling of St. James’s, the marvel of the Mall, the handsomest fellow that ever ate mulberries and drank iced champagne in Spring Gardens….

  It may surprise some readers to learn that two of the four celebrated psalmists, Sternhold and Hopkins, and Tate and Brady, were epigrammatists. From the lace-ruffle-wearing gallants of the court to these grave versifiers is a long step; it is the truth, however, that John Hopkins and Nahum Tate wrote epigrams, but they were very bad ones. Grave men write good epigrams occasionally: there are many dignified clergymen in l’eglise epigrammatique. The Rev. William Clarke, chancellor of Chichester a hundred years ago, produced one epigram which it would be hard to excel. On the tomb of a duke of Richmond in Chichester Cathedral was an inscription ending with these words:—

“Haec est domus ultima.”

This is the epigram:—

	“Did he who thus inscribed this wall
	Not read or not believe Saint Paul,
	Who says there is, where’er it stands,
	Another house not made with hands?
	Or may we gather from these words
	That House is not a House of Lords?”

  Passing onward, I might delay with Gray and Garrick, both epigrammatists, and the latter singularly fertile in the art. He is the best of all prologue writers, and a prologue must be epigrammatic. His epigrams on Johnson’s Dictionary and on Goldsmith’s oddity of character are pretty well known; let me quote instead of them the Rev. Richard Kendal on Barry and Garrick, who were playing “King Lear” at rival houses:—

	“The town has found out different ways
	To praise its different Lears;
	To Barry it gives loud huzzas,
	To Garrick only tears.
	“A king? Aye, every inch a king,
	Such Barry doth appear;
	But Garrick’s quite another thing—
	He’s every inch King Lear.”

    Epigrams sometimes produce permanent changes. The present Primate of all England signs himself “Archibald Cantuar,” but a hundred years ago “Cant” was the customary abbreviation. Horace Walpole caused the change. Thus wrote he of Archbishop Seeker:—

	“The bench has oft posed us, and set us a-scoffing,
	By signing Will London, John Sarum, John Roffen.
	But this head of the Church no expounder will want,
	For his grace signs his own proper name, Thomas Cant.”

Seeker got nicknamed Tom Cant throughout his diocese in consequence; and hence it happened that his successors took to “Cantuar.”…

  Another veteran epigrammatist, the last I shall name, died at the age of eighty a few months ago,—the Rev. Charles Townsend, rector of Kingston-by-Sea. This fine old parson was famed as a lover of his friends and a hater of women. I suppose some wicked witch had played him a trick—

“In his hot youth, when George the Third was king.”

He had been a great friend of Wordsworth and the other Lakers, on whom he bestowed this impromptu:—

	“They dwell at the Lakes; an appropriate quarter
	For poems diluted with plenty of water.”

Not long before his death some thieves broke into the rectory; whereupon he naturally consoled himself with an epigram:—

	“They came and prigg’d my stockings, my linen, and my store;
	But they couldn’t prig my sermons, for they were prigg’d before.”