Polygynia

(polyandria polygynia); whence you hear the sound of jingling spinets and women singing; where little porter pots hang on the railings sunning themselves; whither of evenings you see City clerks padding wearily: here it was that Mr.

Echoing the diction of popular mock-heroic verses from half a century before, Darwin proceeds with a series of tableaux from the Canna indica or Indian Reed (monandria, monogynia) to the Adonis (polyandria, polygynia).

The paragraphs quoted from Jeffrey compare Marmion adversely with the Lay and criticize the epistles, but they also attack the fundamental enterprise of the poem, renewing the regrets the Edinburgh had expressed about the Lay--'that an author endowed with such talents should consume them in imitations of obsolete extravagance, and in the representation of manners and sentiments in which none of his readers can be supposed to take much interest, except the few who can judge of their exactness'--and predicting that Scott's popularity would prove merely temporary, the taste for his antiquarian jargon as fleeting as that for Erasmus Darwin's 'gnomes, sylphs, oxygen, gossamer, polygynia, and polyandria' (M ii.