sentences:  It is with similar wryness that Carl Sandburg's statue of "Momus" (1914) surveys the never-changing human scene, "On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known, solemn repetitions of history", as they continue to overpopulate the world and then bleed it.Elsewhere in Europe, Momus was becoming softened into a figure of light-hearted and sentimental comedy, the equivalent of Harlequin in the French and Italian "Commedia dell'arte".A typical production has him competing for the amorous favours of a nymph in Henry Desmarets' opéra-ballet "Les amours de Momus" (1695).