the Games,
Come down and assist me, for, true to your aims,
I have ruled off this paper in syllable squares.
Come, help me--

After explaining the game and describing the handsomest cup-and-balls
recorded in history, after relating what fabulous custom it had formerly
brought to the Singe-Vert and to all dealers in toys and turned ivories,
and finally, after proving that the game attained to the dignity of
statics, Gourdon ended the first canto with the following conclusion,
which will remind the erudite reader of all the conclusions of the first
cantos of all these poems:--

'Tis thus that the arts and the sciences, too,
Find wisdom in things that seemed silly to you.

The second canto, invariably employed to depict the manner of using "the
object," explaining how to exhibit it in society and before women, and
the benefit to be derived therefrom, will be readily conceived by the
friends of this virtuous literature from the following quotation, which
depicts the player going through his performance under the eyes of his
chosen lady:--

Now look at the player who sits in your midst,
On that ivory ball how his sharp eye is fixt;
He waits and he watches with keenest attention,
Its least little movement in all its precision;
The ball its parabola thrice has gone round,
At the end of the string to which it is bound.
Up it goes! but the player his triumph has missed,
For the disc has come down on his maladroit wrist;
But little he cares for the sting of the ball,
A smile from his mistress consoles for it all.

It was this delineation, worthy of Virgil, which first raised a doubt as
to Delille's superiority over Gourdon. The word "disc," contested by
the opinionated Brunet, gave matter for discussions which lasted eleven
months; in fact, until Gourdon the scientist, one evening when all
present were on the point of getting seriously angry, annihilated the
anti-discers by observing:--

"The moon, called a _disc_ by poets, is undoubtedly a ball."

"How do you know that?" retorted Brunet. "We have never seen but one
side."

The third canto told the regulation story,--in this instance, the
famous anecdote of the cup-and-ball which all the world knows by heart,
concerning a celebrated minister of Louis XVI. According to the sacred
formula delivered by the "Debats" from 1810 to 1814, in praise of these
glorious words, Gourdon's ode "borrowed fresh charms from poesy to
embellish the tale."