Sometimes the end has a point which does not sting, as in the following quatrain of an Arabic poet: "When I sent you my melons, you cried out with scorn, They ought to be heavy and wrinkled and yellow; When I offered myself, whom those graces adorn, You flouted, and called me an ugly old fellow.

Lamb had written some quatrains to the editor of the Every-Day Book, which were printed in the London Magazine for May, 1825.

He tells us that when the statue of the Night was opened to the public view, it drew forth the following quatrain from an author unknown to himself by name: The Night thou seest here, posed gracefully In act of slumber, was by an Angel wrought Out of this stone; sleeping, with life she's fraught: Wake her, incredulous wight; she'll speak to thee.

Yet Petrarch could allow himself to write such a quatrain as the following list of rivers "Non Tesin, Pò, Varo, Arno, Adige e Tebro, Eufrate, Tigre, Nilo, Ermo, Indo c Gange, Tana, Istro, Alfeo, Garrona, è 'l mar the frange, Rodano, Ibero, Ren, Senna, Albia, Era, Ebro!"

When James Lane Allen's novel, The Reign of Law, came out (1900), a little quatrain by Lampton that appeared in The Bookman (September, 1900) swept like wildfire across the country, and was read by a hundred times as many people as the book itself: "The Reign of Law"?

They were introduced at a garden-party at Fulham, and Mr. WESTMORELAND overheard the memorable quatrain in which Madame CLARA BUTT greeted her sister-artist: "In our names we 're alike But in minstrelsyah