"Distich" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... St. Sophia he 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 History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... middle ages abounds with complaints of the lubricity, gluttony, and drunkenness of the monks, vices which are described as being their ruin, in the fallowing pithy distich: ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... 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
... or distich which I have been forced to expand into these nine lines is evidently spurious, but is found in all the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... 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
... 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 ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... Jove, but when, after he had begot the Centaurs from the cloud, he boasted of his imaginary success with Juno, Jupiter hurled him into Tartarus, where he was bound to a perpetually revolving wheel. "Volvitur Ixion: et se sequiturque fugitque." Ovid, "Metam.," iv, 460. Tibullus tells the tale in one distich, lib. I, iii: "Illic Junonem tentare Ixionis ausi Versantur celeri noxia membra ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... with opera-bouffe, To-morrow breakfasts with burlesque, And tights and tinsel, face to face, Encounters, pink and picturesque. Nor frown, if, in next week's review, His gropings after the artistic Should crop out into verse, and take The form of some SWINBURNIAN distich. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... 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 him a high ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... allow the title to be 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 that his verses would be sure to be extensively circulated in court ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... are flying 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, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... coincidence that he, with Donne and Lodge, should all have hit on the couplet as their form, obvious as its advantages are when it is once tried. For the rhyme points the satirical hits, while the comparatively brief space of each distich prevents that air of wandering which naturally accompanies satire in longer stanzas. At any rate after the work (in so many ways remarkable) of Donne, Hall, and Marston, there could hardly be any more doubt about the matter, though part of the method which ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... the first Lord Rokeby, called long Sir Thomas Robinson, on account of his height, and to distinguish him from Sir Thomas Robinson, first Lord Grantham. It was on his request for an epigram that Lord Chesterfield made the distich:— ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... was followed, nineteen times out of twenty, by twenty days of rain and wind. This statement being published in the Athenaeum, a cluster of correspondents averred that the belief is common among seamen, in all parts of the world, and among landsmen too. Some one quoted a distich: ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... audience 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.
... and rhythmical, equally free from the confused strains of unmoulded genius and from the servile pedantry of conventional rules. The verse of eight syllables is the source of all other metres, and the sloka or double distich is the stanza most frequently used. Though this poetry presents too often extravagance of ideas, incumbrance of episodes, and monstrosity of images, as a general rule it is endowed with simplicity of style, pure coloring, sublime ideas, rare figures, and chaste ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... reverence to 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 ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... France at the commencement of the 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 ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... served as 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
... later period, after he had lost his sight from a pistol-shot received at the combat of the Porte St. Antoine during the Fronde, and had quarrelled with the Duchess, he parodied his own distich,— ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... according to M. 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 Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... 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
... Austria acquired the seventeen provinces, and by the latter, Spain and America; all which centered in the person of Charles the Fifth, son of the above-mentioned Archduke Philip, the son of Maximilian. It was upon account of these two marriages, that the following Latin distich was made: ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... distich of the first stanza is quite too much in the flimsy strain of our ordinary street ballads: and, on the other hand, the second distich is too much in the other extreme. The expression is a little awkward, and the sentiment too serious. Stanza the second ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... 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
... and 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
... realms of poesy, somewhen in the eighteen-sixties, and the fruits are gathered together in this brochure under the title Songs, published at Chittagong, in India, which, in some bewildering way, reached a second edition in 1886. In the opening "distich" Mr. Dutt makes the claim to be the first Asiatic poet to write in English, and if that is true this insignificant work becomes the seed of which the full flower is the gifted Rabindra, son of Tagore, whose mellifluous but mystic utterances lie, I am told, ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... placed a stone seat on the top of a hill, where the weary traveler may repose, after the labour of his ascent, and on which is judiciously inscribed, Rest, and be thankful. It has, also, the following sublime distich: ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... 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 ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... strength 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
... The distich, however, appears to have been in use among the Polish Unitarians shortly after the death of Faustus Socinus, as respectfully expressive of the exact effect which they conceived that he had produced in the religious world. Mr. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... 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 had ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... to compose a Latin distich of the greatest beauty without knowing either the Latin language or prosody. We must examine the possibility and the impossibility, and afterwards see who is the man who says he is the author of the distich, for there are extraordinary people in the world. My brother, in ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt |
