THREE BLUE BEANS IN A BLADDER.
Dr. Bentley said of our celebrated Cambridge Professor, Joshua Barnes, that “he knew about as much Greek as an Athenian blacksmith,” but he was certainly no ordinary scholar, and few have excelled him in his tact at throwing of “trifles light as air” in that language, of which his following version of three blue beans in a bladder is a sample:
Τρεις κυαμοι ενι κυστιδι κυανεηφι.
Equal to this is the following spondaic on
THE THREE UNIVERSITY BEDELS,
By Kit Smart, who well deserved, though Dr. Johnson denied him, a place in his British Poets. He possessed great wit and sprightliness of conversation, which would readily flow off in extemporaneous verse, says Dyer, and the three university bedels all happening to be fat men, he thus immortalized them:
“Pinguia tergeminorum abdomina Bedellorum.”
(Three bedels sound, with paunches fat and round.)