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POETIC TRIFLES. 2$g
IMITATION OF DRY DEN.
Three colonels in three distant counties born, Sligo, Armagh, and Lincoln did adorn. The first in paucity of thought surpassed, The next in poverty, in both the last; The force of nature could no further go— To make the third she shaved the other two.
D. OConnell.
Of late years the cultivation of this species of poetic composition has greatly spread both in this country and in America; our magazines and reviews furnish an ever-increasing crop, and much of this fugitive verse is being collected, and deservedly so, in permanent form. A fashion has also sprung up amongst the minor poets of the day and literary amateurs, for verse construction upon the models of the old Provencal poets of France; and it speaks well for the spread of culture and taste amongst us, that so much interest is taken in a refined amusement of this kind. This new fashion is certainly not much more than a quarter of a century old in this country, and already quite an imposing anthology of this kind of verse has been formed, many of the specimens being extremely beautiful.* The restrictions as to the number of lines, the number and arrangement of rhymes, and recurrence of refrains imposed by these quaint models are even greater than in the sonnet, and therefore afford ample scope for the taste, judgment, and patience of the versifier. We
' " Ballades and Rondeaus, &c." Selected, wirh a chapter on the various forms, by Gleeson White. The Canterbury Poets. (Walter Scott, Lond. 1887.) |
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