For this reason we often find them endeavouring at works
of fancy, which cost them infinite pangs in the production. The
truth of it is, a man had better be a galley-slave than a wit, were
one to gain that title by those elaborate trifles which have been
the inventions of such authors as were often masters of great
learning, but no genius.
In my last paper I mentioned some of these false wits among the
ancients; and in this shall give the reader two or three other
species of them, that flourished in the same early ages of the
world. The first I shall produce are the lipogrammatists or letter-
droppers of antiquity, that would take an exception, without any
reason, against some particular letter in the alphabet, so as not to
admit it once into a whole poem. One Tryphiodorus was a great
master in this kind of writing. He composed an "Odyssey" or epic
poem on the adventures of Ulysses, consisting of four-and-twenty
books, having entirely banished the letter A from his first book,
which was called Alpha, as lucus a non lucendo, because there was
not an Alpha in it. His second book was inscribed Beta for the same
reason. In short, the poet excluded the whole four-and-twenty
letters in their turns, and showed them, one after another, that he
could do his business without them.
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