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Distichous   Listen
adjective
Distichous, Distich  adj.  Disposed in two vertical rows; two-ranked.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Distichous" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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

... of 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

... patrimonies in treating those who will hear them talk; and if they are poor, neglect opportunities of improving their fortunes, for the pleasure of making others laugh? How slowly would he believe that there are men who would rather lose a legacy than the reputation of a distich; who think it less disgrace to want money than repartee; whom the vexation of having been foiled in a contest of raillery is sometimes sufficient to deprive of sleep; and who would esteem it a lighter evil to miss a profitable bargain by some accidental delay, than not to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... in 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 ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson

... master ever conceived anything more awful than the scene 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 ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... of stiff canvas; his legs were so slender that he 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, drawn features wear the ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... 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 Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston

... 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 Vambery, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... proceeded to the august, but desolate mansion of a hundred successors of the great 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... fashion set by the 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 or four lines. Only great masters have been truly ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn

... 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

... fine print of the elder Bobart, now extremely scarce, "D. Loggan del., M. Burghers, sculp." It is a quarto of the largest size. Beneath the head, which is dated 1675, is this distich: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various

... by others. The original 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, ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman

... any time; this, however, does not often happen, except a short time during incubation; they either appear in pairs or in families; but even this last appearance is as alarming to our grandmothers. The following distich shows what each forbodes:—'One sorrow, two mirth, three a wedding, four death.' This bird, indeed, appears to have taken the same place with us, as an omen of evil, that the owl had amongst the ancients. The nurse is often heard to ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... that 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 passing ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe

... 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

... sinner stood still a while, and then repeated this beautiful distich, no doubt by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, to warn all learned sinners against that demon of pride and vain-glory which too ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold

... 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. Let's see—how ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover

... 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 thing for ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, July 2, 1892 • Various

... 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

... 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 metres ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton

... which it never appeared again. This distich is the first utterance of a piskey I ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various

... 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 ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn

... 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 ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... seventh. Some 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 in finding similarities ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... number, who have celebrated its praises in every conceivable form of composition. There is, however, probably no one of them all who has done more for the wide extension of its fame among all the ranks and gradations of society than the unknown author of the humble distich, ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott

... Indeed, the whole episode of Lothair's coronation was treated as a papal triumph, and by Innocent's 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

... 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

... 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 have taken ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... study. "From his attention to poetry," says Johnson, "he was never 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 ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware

... necten, i.e. homo venit.' (For this remarkable form I can only suggest [Greek: enthein] or [Greek: hekein]: -en is probably the infinitive; ne might arise from en; and ct, through tt, from th.) Ymas is explained as nobis, not vobis. The construction of the distich is then given: 'Hail, sacred queen, whose son is the lover of men; through thee divine and heavenly glory ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen

... 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 ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... 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, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... 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

... tripod which 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 ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... disputed by any one. An indefatigable 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 ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... 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 causes trouble. ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos

... with little art composed, Is one good sentence in a distich closed. These points, that by Italians first were prized, Our ancient authors knew not, or despised; The vulgar, dazzled with their glaring light, To their false pleasures quickly they invite; But public ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... majority of the scribblers leave a name and nothing more: beyond that, some few of their productions are witty, some sententious, mostly gross. My thoughts, as I read over the rubbish, were happily expressed by the following distich ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... much 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 ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... hornpipe, Goldsmith, with great eagerness, insisted on matching his epigrammatic powers with Garrick's. It was determined that each should write the other's epitaph. Garrick immediately said his epitaph was finished, and spoke the following distich extempore: ...
— English Satires • Various

... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... 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 close it not with noise ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... government, 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 Cemetery ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago

... the rougher labors of the day were ended, and the housewife might rest herself with the more delicate tasks of spinning, knitting, or needlework, for it was in these, "the good old days" we all so plaintively lament, that the distich...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... 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

... 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, he declared that he learnt versification ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis

... 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

... 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 ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis

... the plurals of the following nouns: town, country, case, pin, needle, harp, pen, sex, rush, arch, marsh, monarch, blemish, distich, princess, gas, bias, stigma, wo, grotto, folio, punctilio, ally, duty, toy, money, entry, valley, volley, half, dwarf, strife, knife, roof, muff, staff, chief, sheaf, mouse, penny, ox, foot, erratum, axis, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... its mouth broader than the Rhine. The Guarapiche, at its junction with the Rio Areo, is more than twenty-five fathoms deep. Its banks are ornamented by a superb gramen, of which I made a drawing two years afterward on ascending the river Magdalena. The distich-leaved stalk of this gramen often reaches the height of fifteen or twenty feet.* (* Lata, or cana brava. It is a new genus, between aira and arundo. This colossal gramen looks like the donax of Italy. This, the arundinaria of the Mississippi, (ludolfia, Willd., miegia of ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... Coke, which 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 on the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... repeated it as we drove through, while my friends searched the verification of the saw. All was plain enough, except the "girl without a lover"; but when they learned that she was a stone girl on a pedestal too constricted for two figures they pronounced her part of the distich far-fetched. ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various

... the traditions of his craft which looks for all poetry to the Badawi,[FN436] adopted for metrical details the language of the Desert. The distich, which amongst Arabs is looked upon as one line, he named "Bayt," nighting- place, tent or house; and the hemistich Misra'ah, the one leaf of a folding door. To this "scenic" simile all the parts of the verse ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton



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