Crossword-Solution: QUATRAIN 8 letters, 8 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 17

There he stood, the moral support, the cool-headed adviser, surrounded by a crowd of brainless, empty-headed young fops, who were even now repeating from mouth to mouth, and with every sign of the keenest enjoyment, a doggerel quatrain which he had just given forth.

Can you match me that? The whole duty of man in a quatrain! And remark, I do not set up to be a professional bard; these are the outpourings of a _dilettante_.’ ‘But, my dear sir!’ he exclaimed.

Give me your opinion on my quatrain, or I vow we shall have a quarrel of it.’ ‘Certainly you are quite an original,’ he said.

Some will perhaps think that they detect in the first quatrain an indication of a lost line, which later rhapsodists, failing in imaginative vigour, have supplied by the feeble device of iteration.

This bizarre anomaly was probably observed first in 1650 by Riolanus, but the most celebrated case was that of Morand in 1660, and Mery described the instance later which was the subject of the following quatrain:-- "La nature, peu sage et sans douse en debauche Placa le foie au cote gauche, Et de meme, vice versa Le coeur a le droite placa." Young cites an example in a woman of eighty-five who died at Hammersmith, London.