We laugh at "Then came Dalhousie, that great God of War, Lieutenant-Colonel to the Earl of Mar," because of the relaxation which follows the sudden tension of the mind; but if we remove the idea of the colonelcy from this position of anti-climax, the same couplet becomes energetic rather than ludicrous "Lieutenant-Colonel to the Earl of Mar, Then came Dalhousie, that great God of War.

The heroic couplet in which it was cast was the standard metre.

While Dryden, Pope, and Johnson were successively the dictators of English letters, and while, under their leadership, the heroic couplet became the fashion of poetry, and literature in general became satiric or critical in spirit, and formal in expression, a new romantic movement quietly made its appearance.

The couplet was Coleridge's, and Lamb protested (June 10, 1796), describing them as good lines, but adding that they "must spoil the whole with me who know it is only a fiction of yours and that the rude dashings did in fact not rock me to repose.

this couplet is the precise exemplar, not only of the thirty-six lines of which it is a part, but also of the most common of our trochaic metres; and if this may be thus scanned into iambic verse, so may all other trochaic lines in existence: distinction between the two orders must then be worse than useless.

This couplet, like all the rest of the piece from which it is taken, is iambic verse, and to be divided into feet thus: "Those ev' | -ning bells, | those ev' | -ning bells, How man | -y a tale | their mu | -sic tells!"

The classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do.

In the sestet (the last six lines) more liberty of rhyme and arrangement is permitted, but a rhymed couplet at the end is not usual except when the sonnet departs from the Italian model and is on the English or, as we say, "Shakespearian" pattern.