In literature, a pair of lines of verse,
usually of the same length and rhymed. The
heroic couplet, consisting of two rhymed
lines in iambic pentameter, was widely
adopted for epic poetry, and was a convention
of both serious and mock-heroic 18th-century
English poetry, as in the work of Alexander
Pope. An example, from Pope's An Essay on
Criticism, is: `A little learning is a
dang'rous thing;/Drink deep, or taste not the
Pierian spring'.