which is exactly the modern quatrain:
“The lovely hair, which Celia wears,
Is hers: who would have thought it?—
She swears ’tis hers, and true she swears;
For I know where she bought it.”
Plato is made to say of a statue: “Diodorus put to sleep this satyr, not carved it”; and Lucian is accredited with the mot that “it were easier to find white crows and winged tortoises than an orator of repute in Cappadocia.”
We come to an item, where Shakespear was unconsciously forestalled by an epigrammatist who lived eleven centuries before him—Palladas the grammarian:—
“This life a theatre we well may call,
Where every actor must perform with art:
Or laugh it through, and make a farce of all,