t is better to eat
flesh cooked in the cauldron or little fishes driven into the net;"
the intense solemnity and sorrow for self with which Golias discourses
in trochaic mono-rhymed _laisses_ of irregular length, _De suo
Infortunio_; the galloping dactylics of the "Apocalypse"; the
concentrated scandal against a venerated sex of the _De Conjuge non
Ducenda_, are jocund enough in themselves, if not invariably edifying.
But the good-for-nothing who wrote

"Fumus et mulier et stillicidia
Expellunt hominem a domo propria,"

was not merely cracking jokes, he was exercising himself, or his
countrymen, or at farthest his successors, in the use of the
vernacular tongues with the same lightness and brightness. When he
insinuated that

"Dulcis erit mihi status
Si prebenda muneratus,
Reditu vel alio,
Vivam, licet non habunde,
Saltem mihi detur unde
Studeam de proprio,"--

he was showing how things could be put slyly, how the stiffness and
awkwardness of native speech could be suppled and decorated, how the
innuendo, the turn of words, the _nuance_, could be imparted to
dog-Latin. And if to dog-Latin, why not to genuine French, or English,
or German?

[Sidenote: _The value of burlesque._]

And he was showing at the same time how to make verse flexible, how to
suit rhythm to meaning, how to give freedom, elasticity, swing. No
doubt this had in part been done by the great serious poetry to which
we shall come presently, and which he and his kind often directly
burlesqued. But in the very nature of things comic verse must supple
language to a degree impossible, or very seldom possible, to serious
poetry: and in any case the mere tricks with language which the
parodist has to play, familiarise him with the use of it. Even in
these days of multifarious writing, it is not absolutely uncommon to
find men of education and not devoid of talent who confess that they
have no notion how to put things, that they cannot express themselves.
We can see this tying of the tongue, this inability to use words, far
more reasonably prevalent in the infancy of the vernacular tongues;
as, for instance, in the constant presence of what the French call
_chevilles_, expletive phrases such as the "sikerly," and the "I will
not lie," the "verament," and the "everidel," which brought a whole
class of not undeserving work, the English verse romances of a later
time, into discredit. Latin, with its wide range of alr