by Coleridge · Cluster: Satire of Society · Epigram · Satire
Abstract
An epigram glossing Pope’s line on wits, joking that nowadays every wit hangs by a bookseller; satire of the literary marketplace.
Connections
Motifs: Letters and Writing Themes & Concepts: Satire of Society, Artist and Society Forms & Genres: Epigram
Testo integrale / Full text
‘A heavy wit shall hang at every lord,’
So sung Dan Pope; but ‘pon my word,
He was a story-teller,
Or else the times have altered quite;
For wits, or heavy, now, or light
Hang each by a bookseller.
S. T. C.
First published in News of Literature, Dec. 10, 1825. See Arch.
Constable and his Literary Correspondents, 1873, iii. 482. First
collected in 1893.