Trifler and cruel one, is it but to enjoy the sense of your undiminished, unalterable power?
The learned Huet asserts that, like the rest of the world, he considered as a fiction the story of that indefatigabletrifler who is said to have enclosed the Iliad in a nutshell.
Not inferior to this ingenious trifler is Nicholas Franco, well known in Italian literature, who employed himself in writing two hundred and eighteen satiric sonnets, chiefly on the famous Peter Aretin.
Religion curbs indeed its wanton play, And brings the trifler under rigorous sway, But gives it usefulness unknown before, And purifying, makes it shine the more.
May he not also have wished, without moralising in a fashion which so cultivated a trifler would have scorned, to reveal the abyss towards which a society lost to all the finer passions of the spirit was hurrying?
Is it not possible that the gay elegant trifler may sometimes have scorned himself as he scorned his time?
Much of its merit will arise from the association of ideas; a trifler can only produce what is trifling, but an elegant mind may delight by some elegant allusion, and a satirical one by its causticity.
No other country could produce a tragic poet equal to Racine, a comic poet equal to Moliere, a trifler so agreeable as La Fontaine, a rhetorician so skilful as Bossuet.
On the other hand England, which, since the battle of Hastings, had been ruled generally by wise statesmen, always by brave soldiers, fell under the dominion of a trifler and a coward.
This, it may perhaps be again remarked, is the London roue and trifler of popular fancy!
