In Competition No. 2462 you were given the lines, ‘A man so various that he seemed to be/ Not one prime minister but twenty-three …’ (a rejig of Dryden’s famous couplet) and asked to continue.
Dryden’s Zimri, the various man who ‘in the course of one revolving moon/ Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon’, is a caricature of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, who killed in a duel the Earl of Shrewsbury, while the countess, Buckingham’s lover, watched, disguised as a page. The incident is commemorated at Cliveden, where it happened, by flowers arranged in the shape of crossed swords, with the date 1667.
The standard this week was exceptionally high, and judging accordingly difficult. Geoffrey Tapper summed things up nicely in his final couplet: ‘A man so various surely merits more:/ Not one prime minister but twenty-four.’ The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Ray Kelley.
His undependability is chronic:
In his true colours he’s chameleonic,
Taking his hue from his environment,
Ready to blend in, all too quickly blent.
With
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