A Pea beneath the Mattress

The seventeenth century verse of John Dryden is not everyone's cup of tea, but it is often witty and always immaculate in rhythm. For him, a hexameter* has ten syllables, never nine or eleven, so when I came across (in The Bedside Book of Insults**) his estimate of George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, something seemed awry: "Stiff in his opinions, always in the wrong, / Was everything by starts, and nothing long; / But in the course of one revolving moon / was chymist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon."

Look it up in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and you find that the opening words of the quotation should have read "Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong . . . " Dryden's rhythm is impeccable. The otiose 'his' is as uncomfortable to the reader as the pea beneath the mattresses was to the delicate princess.

* Looks as if it should be an instrument for measuring nuts and bolts, but means a ten-syllable line of verse.

** First published (as can be inferred by the sources of many of the quotes) in USA. British edition by John Murray, 1992. A very entertaining book. Incidentally, I think it is a pity that it is indexed only for the insulters: it would be more fun if there was an index of the insulted too.

A Pea beneath the Mattress