Variety turn

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.