There is also an enigma contained in a distich written by a lady of the times, which preserves the real pronunciation of the name of this extraordinary man.
Every one of his brisk, nervous couplets carries a sting; every distich is a sound box on the ear.
A succession of rhymed pentameter couplets, with the sense complete in each couplet, was set forth as the proper vehicle for poetry; and this unenjambed distich fettered English verse for three-quarters of a century.
The great danger that attends the use of the distich is monotony; but Dryden avoided this.
Marinist quaintness still clings here and there, and he has temporarily deserted the classical distich for a quatrain stanza; but here, for the first time, we taste the Dryden of the Satires and the Fables.
It gave rise to a taunting distich similar to the one at Arlesey.
In a corner of the picture is written the distich ascribed to Sir Thomas More which we have already met with above the central portal of the German Guildhall.
The tale from which that last luckless distich is taken, "The Elder Brother," is full of pathos and about equally full of false notes.
And there is nothing more unpleasant for les âmes bien nées, as the famous distich has it, than to find fault in after life with that with which you have fallen in love at fifteen or sixteen.
Do you know that he made this distich against the Jesuits?
This sounded so dignified and gracious that Alexander ventured to repeat a distich which he had heard at the public baths, whither he had first directed his steps.
The following distichrecords the death of Antonia Maura from her attendance on her sick husband:-- Itala me rapuit crudeli funere tellus, Dum foveo nimia sedulitate virum.
This distich is the first utterance of a piskey I have heard.
Three versions of the distich are before me; that cited by Dr.
Sir Charles Williams's distich on the Queen of Hungary.
The elegiac distich consists of an hexameter followed by a so-called pentameter, that is, a line made up of six dactyls or spondees, with the omission of the last half of the third and of the sixth feet.
There was also a distich directed by some poet of that age to Ben Johnson, Pray tell me, Ben, where does the mystery lurk?
There was something congenial to the Roman spirit in the pithydistich or tetrastich which formed so considerable an element in the "elegant extracts" of Alexandria.
On the same sheet follows this instance or application: Whether it is possible to compose a Latin distich of the greatest beauty without knowing either the Latin language or prosody.
When we found ourselves alone in our room, he poured out his heart, and exclaimed that it was a pity he could not publish in Padua the distich and my answer.
Savage, however, remarked that he began a little to relax his dignity when he wrote a distich for "his Highness's dog.
The first distichof this epitaph contains a kind of information which few would want, that the man for whom the tomb was erected DIED.
In this distich is another line of which Pope was not the author.
Coleridge also translated from Schiller the well-known distich describing and exemplifying the elegiac verse of Ovid: "In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column; In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.
The first 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 above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "distich" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
