Here the drummer, exhausted with this last wonderful exertion, begins to find his pangs increase fast upon him; and what follows, for two and thirty lines, is all interrupted with different interjections of laughter and pain, till the last line, which consists entirely of such interjections.—Our readers may probably recollect the well-known line of THOMPSON.
“OH, SOPHONISBA, SOPHONISBA, OH!”
Which, by the way, is but a poor plagiarism from SHAKESPEARE:
“OH, DESDEMONA, DESDEMONA, OH!”
There is certainly in this line a very pretty change rung in the different ways of arranging the name and the interjection; but perhaps there may be greater merit, though of another kind, in the sudden change of passions which OTWAY has expressed in the dying interjection of PIERRE:
“We have deceiv’d the senate—ha! ha! oh!”
These modern instances, however, fall very short of the admirable use made of interjections by the ancients, especially the GREEKS, who did not scruple to put together whole lines of them.—Thus in the PHILOCTETES of SOPHOCLES, besides a great number of hemistics, we find a verse and a half:
“—————Παπαι,
Παπα, παπα, παπα, παπα, παπα παπαι.”
The harsh and intractable genius of our language will not permit us to give any adequate idea of the soft, sweet, and innocent sound of the original.—It may, however, be faithfully, though coarsely, translated
“———Alas!
Alack! alack! alack! alack! alack! alas!”