THE 
 
 MIGHT AND MIRTH 
 
 OF 
 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 A TREATISE ON FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE. 
 
 IN WHICH UPWARDS OF SIX HUNDRED WRITERS ARE 
 
 REFERRED TO, AND TWO HUNDRED AND 
 
 TWENTY FIGURES ILLUSTRATED. 
 
 EMBRACING A COMPLETE SURVEY, ON AN ENTIRELY NEW PLAN, OF ENGLISH AND 
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE, INTERSPERSED WITH HISTORICAL NOTICES OF THE 
 
 PROGRESS OF THE LANGUAGE, WITH ANECDOTES OF MANY OF THE 
 
 AUTHORS, AND WITH DISCUSSIONS OF THE FUNDAMENTAL 
 
 PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM AND OF THE 
 
 WEAPONS OF ORATORY. 
 
 BY JOHN WALKER VILANT MACBETH, 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 
 
 FRANKLIN SQUARE. 
 1875. 
 
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, 
 In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, 
 
bg tfje 
 
 TO THE 
 
 REV. GEORGE S. MOTT, D.D., 
 
 PASTOR OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, FLEMINGTON, N. J., 
 
 IN SINCERE ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF WISE ADVJCE AND THE MOST 
 FRIENDLY OFFICES AS TO THE PUBLICATION OF THIS VOLUME. 
 
Introductory Notice. 
 
 The object of this volume is to create and fully equip a new 
 branch of study ; to discuss Figures of Speech far more thor- 
 oughly than ever has been done; to urge upon pleaders, preach- 
 ers, and all who write or speak English, many very important 
 practical advices ; to comment specially on Shakespeare, Milton, 
 Demosthenes, and the Bible; to present a wide review of Ameri- 
 can and English Literature; and to make the whole subject 
 as amusing and laughter-exciting as it is instructive. Also, we 
 have availed ourselves of our familiarity with Latin, Greek, and 
 Hebrew ; and with four of the modern languages, French, Ger- 
 man, Italian, and Spanish. 
 
 A 
 
LIST OF AUTHORS, 
 
 WITH BIRTH, DEATH, AND COUNTRY. 
 
 Abbadie, Rev. Jacques ; France; 1654-1727. 
 Adams, John Quincy ; United States ; 1767-1848. 
 Adams, Thomas ; published 1613-1633. 
 Addison, Joseph ; England; 1672-1719. 
 Aird, Thomas; Scotland; 1802. 
 Akenside, Mark; England; 1721-1770. 
 Alcaeus; Greece; about 611 B.C. 
 Alexander, J. A. ; United States ; 1809. 
 Alfred, King ; England ; 849-900. 
 Alison, Sir Archibald; Scotland; 1792-1867. 
 Allison, Sir Richard; England; published 1599. 
 Allston, Washington; United States; 1779-1843. 
 Ambrose, Saint ; Gaul ; 340-397. 
 Ames, Fisher; United States ; 1758-1808. 
 Anacreon; Greece; died 476 B.C. 
 
 Anselm (Archbishop of Canterbury) ; Piedmont ; 1033-1109. 
 Anthon, Charles ; United States ; 1797-1867. 
 Arbuthnot, John ; Scotland; about 1675-1735. 
 Ariosto, Ludovico ; Italy; 1474-1532. 
 Aristophanes; Greece; about 460-380 B.C. 
 Aristotle ; Greece ; 384-322 B.C. 
 Arnold, Edwin; England; published 1856. 
 Arnold, Matthew ; England ; 1822. 
 Arnold, Thomas ; England; 1795-1842. 
 Arthur, T. S.; United States; 1809. 
 Atkinson, Thomas ; published 1791-1799. 
 Atterbury, Francis ; England; 1662-1732. 
 Augustine, Saint Aurelius ; Africa ; 354-430. 
 Austen, Jane; England; 1775-1817. 
 Ayton, Sir Robert ; Scotland; 1570-1638. 
 Aytoun, William E. ; Scotland; 1813-1865. ^ 
 
iv List of Aitthors. 
 
 Bacon, Lord ; England ; 1561-1626. 
 
 Baggesen; Denmark; 1764-1826. 
 
 Baillie, Joanna ; Scotland; 1762-1851. 
 
 Bancroft, George ; United States ; 1800 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Barbauld, Mrs. Anna Laetitia ; England; 1743-1825. 
 
 Barbour, John ; Scotland ; died 1396. 
 
 Barham, Richard Harris ("Thomas Ingoldsby") ; England; 1788-1845. 
 
 Barlow, Joel ; United States ; 1755-1812. 
 
 Barnard, Lady Anne ; Scotland; 1750-1825. 
 
 Barnes, Albert ; United States ; 1798-1870. 
 
 Barnes, William ; England ; published 1803. 
 
 Barrow, Isaac ; England ; 1630-1677. 
 
 Barthelemy, Jean Jacques ; France; 1716-1795. 
 
 Barton, Bernard ; England; 1784-1849. 
 
 Bascom, John ; Professor in Williams College ; living in 1875. 
 
 Bayle, Pierre ; France; 1647-1706. 
 
 Bayly, Thomas Haynes ; England; 1797-1839. 
 
 Beattie, James ; Scotland; 1735-1803. 
 
 Beaumont, Sir Francis; England; 1586-1616. 
 
 Bedell, Gregory T. ; United States; 1793-1834. 
 
 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell ; England; 1809-1849. 
 
 Beecher, Henry Ward; United States ; 1813 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Beecher, Lyman ; United States ; 1775-1863. 
 
 Bellows, Dr. ; United States ; 1814. 
 
 Bennett, W. C. ; Ireland ; living in 1875. 
 
 Bethune, George W. ; United States ; 1805-1862. 
 
 Blair, Hugh; Scotland; 1718-1800. 
 
 Blair, Robert ; Scotland; 1699-1746. 
 
 Blanc, Charles ; France ; living in 1875. 
 
 Blanc, Louis; France; 1813; living in 1875. 
 
 Boker, George Henry; United States; born 1823. 
 
 Bolingbroke, Lord ; England; 1678-1751. 
 
 Bonar, Horatius; Scotland; born 1810. 
 
 Bossuet; France; i627-/7O4. 
 
 Boswell, James ; Scotland; 1740-1795. 
 
 Boswell, Sir Alexander; Scotland; 1775-1822. 
 
 Bourdaloue, Louis ; France; 1632-1704. 
 
 Bowles, William Lisle ; England; 1762-1850. 
 
 Boyd, A. K. H. ; Scotland ; 1825 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Brewster, Sir David ; Scotland; 1781-1868. 
 
 Bronte, Charlotte; England; 1816-1855. 
 
 Brougham, Lord ; Scotland; 1778-1868. 
 
List of Authors. 
 
 Brown, Goolcl ; United States ; 1791-1857. 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas ; England ; . 1605-1682. 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett ; England; 1809-1861. 
 
 Browning, Robert; 1812 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Bruce, Michael ; Scotland; 1746-1767. 
 
 Bryant, William Cullen; United States; 1794; living in 1875. 
 
 Brydges, Sir S. Egerton ; England; 1762-1837^. 
 
 Buchanan, George; Scotland; 1506-1582. 
 
 Bunyan, John; England; 1628-1688. 
 
 Burke, Edmund; Ireland; 1729-1797. 
 
 Burnet, Thomas ; England; 1635-1715. 
 
 Burns, Robert ; Scotland; 1759-1796. 
 
 Bushnell, Horace; United States; 1802 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Butler, Bishop Joseph; England; 1692-1752. 
 
 Butler, Samuel ; England ; 1600-1680. 
 
 Byrom, John; England; 1691-1763. 
 
 Byron, Lord; England; 1788-1824. 
 
 Caedmon; Anglo-Saxon; died 680. 
 
 Caesar, Caius Julius ; Rome ; 100-44 B.C. 
 
 Caird, Rev. Dr. ; Scotland; 1823 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro; Spain; 1600-1681. 
 
 Callanan, James Joseph ; Ireland; 1795-1829. 
 
 Camoens, Luis de ; Portugal; 1524-1579. 
 
 Campbell, Dr. George ; Scotland; 1709-1796. 
 
 Campbell, Lord ; Scotland; 1781-1861. 
 
 Campbell, Thomas ; Scotland; 1777-1844. 
 
 Canning, George ; England; 1770-1827. 
 
 Carew, Thomas ; England; 1589-1639. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas ; Scotland; 1795; living in 1875. 
 
 Cary, Alice ; United States ; 1820-1871. 
 
 Gary, Henry; England; 1700-1743. 
 
 Catullus; Rome; born 87 B.C. ; died between 57 and 40 B.C. 
 
 Cervantes Saavedra ; Spain; 1547-1616. 
 
 Chalmers, Thomas ; Scotland; 1780-1847. 
 
 Chamberlayne, William ; England; 1619-1688. 
 
 Chambers, Robert; Scotland; 1802-1871. 
 
 Chambers, William; Scotland; 1800. 
 
 Chamisso, Adelbert von ; Germany; 1781-1838. 
 
 Chapman, George ; England; 1557-1634. 
 
 Chatham, Lord ; England; 1708-1778. 
 
 Chatterton, Thomas ; England; 1752-1770. 
 
vi List of Authors. 
 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey ; England; 1328-1400. 
 
 Chateaubriand, Frangois Auguste ; France; 1768-1848. 
 
 Cheever, George B. ; United States ; 1807 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Cherry, Andrew ; England; 1762-1812. 
 
 Chesterfield, Lord ; England; 1694-1773. 
 
 Chillingworth, William ; England; 1602-1644. 
 
 Chrysostom, John ; Antioch ; 347-407. 
 
 Cibber, Colley ; England; 1671-1737. 
 
 Cicero, Marcus Tullius ; 106-43 B.C. 
 
 Clare, John; England; 1793-1864. 
 
 Clarke, MacDonald ; United States ; 1798-1842. 
 
 Clay, Henry; United States; 1777-1852. 
 
 Coe, Richard ; United States ; published 1852. 
 
 Coleridge, Hartley ; England; 1796-1849. 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; England; 1772-1834. 
 
 Collins, Anne; England; published 1653. 
 
 Collins, Wilkie; England; 1824; living in 1875. 
 
 Collins, William ; England; 1720-1756. 
 
 Colman, George ; England; 1762-1836. 
 
 Congreve, William; England; 1672-1729. 
 
 Cook, Eliza; England; 1817; living in 1875. 
 
 Cooper, James Fenimore ; United States; 1789-1851. 
 
 Coppee, Henry; United States; 1821; living in 1875. 
 
 Corbett, Bishop ; England; 1582-1635. 
 
 Cotton, Nathaniel ; England; 1707-1788. 
 
 Cousin, Victor ; France; 1792. 
 
 Cowley, Abraham ; England; 1618-1667. 
 
 Cowper, William ; England; 1731-1800. 
 
 Crabbe, George ; England; 1754-1830. 
 
 Craik, George L. ; Scotland ; 1799-1866. 
 
 Crashaw, Richard ; England; 1600-1650. 
 
 Creasy, E. S. ; England ; living in 1875. 
 
 Croly, George; England; 1780-1860. 
 
 Cumming, John ; Scotland; 1810; living in 1875. 
 
 Cunningham, Allan ; Scotland; 1784-1842. 
 
 Cunningham, John ; Ireland; 1729-1773. 
 
 Curran, John Philpot ; Ireland; 1750-1817. 
 
 Cushing, Caleb; United States; 1800. 
 
 Cyprian ; about 200-258. 
 
 Dana, Richard Henry; United States; 1787. 
 Daniel, Samuel ; England; 1569-1619. 
 
List of Authors. vii 
 
 Dante; Italy; 1265-1321. 
 
 Darwin, Charles ; England; 1809; living in 1875. 
 
 Darwin, Erasmus ; England; 1731-1802. 
 
 Dasent, George Webbe ; England; about 1818. 
 
 Davenant, Sir William ; England; 1605-1668. 
 
 Davies, President Samuel ; United States ; 1724-1761. 
 
 Davies, Sir John ; England; 1570-1626. 
 
 Davis, Thomas ; Ireland; 1814-1845. 
 
 Davy, Sir Humphrey; England; 1778-1829. 
 
 Day, Henry N. ; United States ; 1808. 
 
 Defoe, Daniel ; England; 1661-1731. 
 
 Dekker, Thomas E. ; England; died about 1638 or 1641. 
 
 Delisle, Rouget; France. 
 
 Demosthenes ; Greece ; 385-322 B.C. 
 
 Denham, Sir John ; England ; 6i5~i688. 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas ; England; 1785-1859. 
 
 De Stae'l, Madame; France; 1766-1817. 
 
 Dibdin, Charles; England; 1745-1814. 
 
 Dickens, Charles ; England; 1812-1873. 
 
 D'Israeli, Benjamin; England; 1805; living in 1875. 
 
 Doane, Bishop ; United States ; 1799-1859. 
 
 Doddridge, Philip; England; 1702-1751. * 
 
 Donne, John; England; 1573-1631. 
 
 Douglas, Gawin ; Scotland ; 1474-1522. 
 
 Drake, J. Rodman; United States; 1795-1820. 
 
 Drake, Nathan ; United States ; 1766-1836. 
 
 Drayton, Michael ; England; 1563-1631. 
 
 Drinker, Anna ("Edith May") ; United States ; published 1851. 
 
 Dryden, John; England; 1631-1700. 
 
 Dubartas, William de Sallust; 1544-1590. 
 
 Dumas, Alexander ; France; 1803-1872. 
 
 Dunbar, William ; Scotland; about. I46o-about 1520. 
 
 Dwight, Timothy ; United States ; 1780-1849. 
 
 Dyer, John; England; 1700-1758. 
 
 Earle, Bishop ; England; 1601-1665. 
 
 Edgeworth, Miss ; Ireland; 1767-1849. 
 
 Edwards, Bela Bates ; United States ; 1802-1852. 
 
 Edwards, Jonathan ; United States ; 1703-1758. 
 
 Elliott, Ebenezer ; England; 1781-1849. 
 
 Ellsworth, Erastus W. ; United States ; 1823. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo; United States ; 1803 ; living in 1875. 
 
.viii List of Authors. 
 
 Emmons, Nathaniel ; United States ; 1745-1840. 
 Erskine, Thomas, Lord ; Scotland; 1750-1823. 
 Eusebius ; Palestine ; about 264-about 340. 
 Evans, Christmas ; England. 
 Everett, Edward ; United States ; 1794-1865. 
 Ewald, Johannes ; Denmark; 1743-1781. 
 
 Faber, F. W. ; England; 1815-1863. 
 
 Falconer, William ; England; 1730-1769. 
 
 Fanshaw, Sir Richard ; England; 1607-1666. 
 
 Fantini; Italy; about 1830. 
 
 Faval, Paul ; France ; about 1800. 
 
 Fenner, Cornelius George ; United States ; 1822-1847. 
 
 Fenton, Elijah ; England; 1683-1730. 
 
 Ferguson, Robert ; Scotland; 1751-1774. 
 
 Ferguson, Samuel ; Ireland; 1805. 
 
 "Fern, Fanny" (Mrs. Parton) ; United States ; died 1872. 
 
 Fielding, Henry ; England; 1707-1754. 
 
 Fields, James T. ; United States; born 1820. 
 
 Flechier, Esprit ; France; 1632-1710. 
 
 Fletcher, Giles ; England; 1588-1623. 
 
 Fletcher, John ; England; 1576-1625. 
 
 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de ; France ; 1657-1757. 
 
 Foote, Samuel ; England; 1720-1777. 
 
 Ford, John ; England; 1586-1639. 
 
 Fosdick, William W.; United States; born 1822. 
 
 Foster, John; England; 1770-1843. 
 
 Fox, Charles James; England; 1749-1806. 
 
 Fox, W. Johnson ; England; 1786-1864. 
 
 Francis, Sir Philip ("Junius"); England; 1740-1818. 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin ; United States ; 1706-1790. 
 
 Freiligrath, Ferdinand ; Germany; born 1810. 
 
 Freneau, Philip ; United States ; 1752-1832. 
 
 Frere, John Hookham ; England; 1769-1846. 
 
 Froude, James Anthony ; England; 1818; living in 1875. 
 
 Fuller, Thomas ; England; 1608-1661. 
 
 Gall, Richard ; Scotland; 1776-1801. 
 Gallagher, W. D. ; United States ; 1808. 
 Garrick, David ; England; 1716-1779. 
 Gay, John ; England; i688-'i732. 
 Gibbon, Edward ; England; 1737-1794. 
 
List of Authors. ix 
 
 Gibbons, Thomas ; England; 1720-1785. 
 Gilfillan, George ; Scotland ; 1813. 
 Glover, Richard ; England; 1712-1785. 
 Godwin, William ; England; 1756-1836. 
 Goethe, John Wolfgang von ; 1749-1832. 
 Goldsmith, Oliver ; England; 1728-1774. 
 Gower, John ; England ; about 1325-1408. 
 Grahame, James ; Scotland; 1790-1842. 
 Grant, Sir Robert ; Scotland; 1785-1838. 
 Grattan, Henry ; Ireland; 1746-1794. 
 Gray, Thomas; England; 1716-1771. 
 Greene, Robert ; England; about 1560-1592. 
 Gregory the First, Pope ; Italy ; 540-604. 
 Griffin, Edward D. ; United States ; 1768-1820. 
 Griswold, Bishop ; United States ; 1766-1843. 
 Grote, George ; England; 1794-1871. 
 Guarini; Italy; 1537-1612. 
 Guizot; France; 1787-1874. 
 Guthrie, Thomas ; Scotland; 1800-1873. 
 
 Habington, William ; England ; 1605-1654. 
 
 Haliburton, Judge ; Canada; 1797-1865. * 
 
 Hall, Dr. John ; Ireland; living in 1875. 
 
 Hall, Robert; England; 1764-1831. 
 
 Halleck, Fitzgreen ; United States ; 1790-1869. 
 
 Halpine, Charles G. ("Miles O'Reilly") ; Ireland; 1829-1869. 
 
 Hare, Julius Charles ; England; 1795-1855. 
 
 Harms, Klaus; Germany; 1778-1855. 
 
 Harrington, John (the elder) ; England; 1534-1582. 
 
 Harrington, Sir John (the younger) ; England; 1561-1612. 
 
 Hart, John S. ; United States ; living in 1875. 
 
 Harte, Francis Bret ; United States ; 1837; living in 1875. 
 
 Hawkesworth, John ; England; 1715-1773. 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel ; United States ; 1804-1864. 
 
 Hayley, William ; England; 1745-1820. 
 
 Hazlitt, William ; England; 1778-1830. 
 
 Heber, Reginald ; England; 1783-1826. 
 
 Heeren, Arnold H. L. ; Germany ; 1760-1842. 
 
 Heiberg, Johann Ludvig ; Denmark; 1791. 
 
 Hemans, Mrs. ; England; 1794-1835. 
 
 Henry IV. ; France; 1553-1610. 
 
 Henry, Matthew ; England; 1662-1714. 
 
x List of Authors. 
 
 Henry, Patrick ; United States ; 1736-1799. 
 
 Henryson, Robert ; Scotland; 1 5th century. 
 
 Herbert, George ; Wales; 1593-1632. 
 
 Herbert, William ; England; 1778-1847. 
 
 Herder, Johann Godfrey von ; Germany; 77^/1-1803. 
 
 Herodotus ; Greece ; 484-about 424 B.C. 
 
 Herrick, Robert ; England; 1591-1674. 
 
 Hervey, James ; England; 1713-1758. 
 
 Hervey, T. K. ; England ; 1799-1859. 
 
 Hey wood, Thomas ; England - died about 1650. 
 
 Higginson, Colonel ; United States ; living in 1875. 
 
 Hill, Aaron; England; 1685-1750. 
 
 Hill, Rowland ; England; 1744-1833. 
 
 Hillhouse, James A. ; United States ; 1789-1841. 
 
 Hoffman, Charles Fenno ; United States ; 1806. 
 
 Hogarth, William ; England; 1697 or 1698-1764. 
 
 Hogg, James; Scotland; 1772-1835. 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell ; United States ; 1809 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Home, John; Scotland; 1724-1808. 
 
 Hood, Thomas; England; 1798-1845. 
 
 Hooker, Thomas ; England; 1586-1647. 
 
 Hope, Thomas; England; about 1770-1831. 
 
 Horace ; Rome ; 65-27 B.C. 
 
 Hosmer, W. H. C. ; United States ; 1814. 
 
 Howe, John; England; 1630-1705. 
 
 Howitt, Mary; England; 1800. 
 
 Hoyt, Ralph; United States ; 1810. 
 
 Hudson, Henry N. ; United States ; 1814. 
 
 Hugo, Victor ; France ; 1802. 
 
 Hume, David; Scotland; 1711-1776. 
 
 Humphrey, President; United States; died about 1800. 
 
 Hunt, Leigh; England; 1784-1859. 
 
 Hunter, Mrs.; England; 1741-1821. 
 
 Ingelow, Jean ; England; 1830; living in 1875. 
 
 Ingeman, Bernhard S. ; Denmark; 1789. 
 
 Ireland, Samuel ; England ; born early in the i8th century, died in iSoo. 
 
 Irving, Washington ; United States ; 1783-1859. 
 
 James, John Angell ; England; 1785-1859. 
 Jameson, Mrs. ; England; 1797-1860. 
 Jerrold, Douglas ; England; 1803-1857. 
 
List of Authors. xi 
 
 Johnson, Samuel ; England; 1709-1784. 
 Jones, Sir William ; England; 1746-1794. 
 Jonson, Ben; England; 1573 or 1574-1637. 
 
 Keats, John; England; 1796-1821. 
 Keble, John ; England; 1792-1866. 
 Kent, Chancellor ; United States ; 1763-1847. 
 Kingsley, Charles ; England; 1819-1875. 
 Knowles, Herbert ; England; 1798-1817. 
 Knowles, J. Sheridan ; Ireland; 1784-1862. 
 Korner, Charles Theodore ; Germany; 1791-1813. 
 Kosegarten, Ludvig T. ; Germany; 1758-1818. 
 Kossuth, Lajos ; Hungary ; 1802 ; living in 1875. 
 Kyd, Thomas ; England ; living in 1588. 
 
 Lamarck, Jean B. P. ; France ; 1744-1829. 
 
 Lamartine, Alphonse de ; France; 1792. 
 
 Lamb, Charles ; England; 1775-1834. 
 
 Langlande, William ; England ; 1332-about 1400. 
 
 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth ; England; 1802-1838. 
 
 Landor, W. Savage ; England; 1775-1864. 
 
 Lamed, Sylvester ; United States ; 1796-1820. 
 
 Latimer, Hugh ; England; about 1490-1555. 
 
 Lee, Nathaniel ; England; 1651-1692. 
 
 Leland, John; England; 1691-1766. 
 
 Leslie, Charles ; England; 1794-1859. 
 
 Lestrange, Sir Roger ; England ; 1616-1704. 
 
 Lever, Charles ; Ireland ; 1809-1872. 
 
 Lewis, Matthew Gregory ; England ; 1775-1818. 
 
 Leyden,John; Scotland; 1775-1811. 
 
 Lillo, George ; England ; 1693-1739. 
 
 Lindsay (Lord), A. W. Crawford ; Scotland; 1812 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Lindsay, Sir David ; Scotland; born about 1490, died bet. 1555 and 1567. 
 
 Livingston, David ; Scotland; 1815-1873. 
 
 Locke, John ; England; 1632-1704. 
 
 Lockhart, John Gibson ; Scotland ; 1792-1854. 
 
 Lodge, Thomas ; England; 1556-1625. 
 
 Logan, John; Scotland; 1748-1788. 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wads worth ; United States ; 1807; living in 1875. 
 
 Longinus ; Greece ; about 213-273. 
 
 Lovelace, Richard ; England; 1618-1658. 
 
xii List of Authors. 
 
 Lover, Samuel ; Ireland; 1797-1866. 
 
 Lowe, John ; Scotland; 1750-1798. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell; United States; 1819; living in 1875. 
 
 Lowell, Prof. ; England ; living in 1875. 
 
 Loyson, Charles (Pere Hyacinthe) ; France ; living in 1875. 
 
 Luther, Martin ; Germany; 1483-1546. 
 
 Lyell, Sir Charles ; Scotland; 1797-1875. 
 
 Lydgate, John ; England; born about 1375, died about 1461. 
 
 Lyly, John (the Euphuist) ; England ; born about 1553, died about 1600. 
 
 Lyttelton, Lord ; England; 1709-1773. 
 
 Lytton (Lord), Edward Bulwer ; England ; 1805-1873. 
 
 Lytton, Robert Bulwer (" Owen Meredith") ; England; living in 1875. 
 
 Macaulay, Lord ; England; 1800-1859. 
 
 Maccarthy, Denis Florence ; Ireland; published 1850. 
 
 Macchiavelli, Nicolo ; Italy; 1469-1527. 
 
 Macdonald, George ; Scotland ; living in 1875. 
 
 Mackay, Charles ; Scotland; born 1812. 
 
 Mackenzie, Henry ; Scotland; 1745-1831. 
 
 Mackintosh, Sir James ; Scotland; 1766-1832. 
 
 Maclellan, Isaac ; United States ; 1810. 
 
 Macpherson, James ; Scotland; 1738-1796. 
 
 Mandeville, Sir John ; England; about 1300-1372. 
 
 Mangan, James Clarence ; England ; living in 1875. 
 
 Mansfield, Lord ; Scotland; 1705-1793. 
 
 Marlowe, Christopher ; England; 1564-1593. 
 
 Marsh, George P. ; United States ; 1801. 
 
 Marston, John ; England ; born about 1570, died about 1634. 
 
 Martial ; Rome ; born 43, died about 104. 
 
 Martineau, Miss ; England; 1802. 
 
 Marvell, Andrew ; England; 1620-1678. 
 
 Mason, John Mitchell ; United States ; 1770-1829. 
 
 Mason, William ; England; 1725-1797. 
 
 Massey, Gerald ; England ; 1828 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Massillon, Jean Baptiste ; France ; 1663-1742. 
 
 Massinger, Philip ; England; 1584-1640. 
 
 Mennes, Sir John ; England; 1598-1671. 
 
 Mickle, William J. ; Scotland ; 1734-1788. 
 
 Miller, Hugh; Scotland; 1802-1856. 
 
 Miller, Joaquin ; United States ; living in 1875. 
 
 Milman, Henry Hart ; England; 1791-1868. 
 
 Milner, Joseph ; England; 1744-1797. 
 
 Milton, John ; England ; 1608-1674. 
 
List of Authors. xiii 
 
 Minto, William ; Scotland ; living in 1875. 
 
 Mitford, Miss ; England; 1786-1855. 
 
 Moir, David Macbeth ; Scotland; 1798-1851. 
 
 Moliere, Jean Baptiste Poquelin de ; France ; 1622-1673. 
 
 Monboddo, Lord ; Scotland; 1714-1799. 
 
 Montague ; France ; 1533-1592. 
 
 Montaigne, Michael de ; France; 1533-1592. 
 
 Montgomery, James ; Scotland; 1771-1854. 
 
 Montgomery, Robert ; England; 1807-1855. 
 
 Moore, Thomas ; Ireland; 1779-1852. 
 
 More, Hannah; England; 1745-1833. 
 
 More, Sir Thomas ; England; 1480-1535. 
 
 Morris, G. P. ; United States ; 1802-1864. 
 
 Morris, William ; England; 1830; living in 1875. 
 
 Mosheim, Johann Laurenz ;' Germany ; 1694-1755. 
 
 Motherwell, William ; Scotland ; 1797-1835. 
 
 Motley, John Lothrop ; United States ; 1814; living in 1875. 
 
 Mudie, Robert ; Scotland; 1777-1842. 
 
 Mulock, Dinah Maria ; England ; 1826 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Nash, Thomas ; England ; 1558-1600. 
 Norton, Mrs. ; England ; 1808. 
 
 Oehlenschlaeger, Adam ; Scandinavia ; 1779-1850. 
 
 Olin, Stephen ; United States ; 1797-1851. 
 
 Opie, Mrs. ; England; 1769-1853. 
 
 Osgood, Mrs. Frances Sargent ; United States ; about 1812-1850. 
 
 Ossian ; Scotland ; in 2d or 3d century. 
 
 Overbury, Sir Thomas ; 1581-1631. 
 
 Owen, John ; England ; about 1560-1622. 
 
 Paine, Thomas ; England; 1737-1809. 
 
 Paley, William ; England; 1743-1805. 
 
 Palgrave, Sir Francis Turner ; England ; 1788-1861. 
 
 Paludan-Muller, Frederic ; Denmark; 1809. 
 
 Parnell, Thomas ; Ireland; 1679-1718. 
 
 Parr, Samuel ; England; 1747-1825. 
 
 Parsons, Thomas W. ; United States ; 1819. 
 
 Patmore, Coventry ; England ; 1823. 
 
 Paulcling, J. Kirke ; United States ; 1779-1860. 
 
 Payson, Edward ; United States ; 1783-1827. 
 
 Peacham, Henry ; England ; published 1577. 
 
xiv List of Authors. 
 
 Pearson, John ; England ; 1612-1686. 
 
 Percival, James Gates ; United States ; 1795-1856. 
 
 Percy, Thomas ; England; 1728-1811. 
 
 Perrault, Charles ; France; 1628-1703. 
 
 Pierpont, John; United States ; 1785-1866. 
 
 Pike, Albert ; United States ; 1809. 
 
 Pitt, William ; England; 1759-1806. 
 
 Plato ; Greece ; B.C. 429-348. 
 
 Plautus ; Rome ; about 254-184 B.C. 
 
 Plunkett, William C. ; Ireland; 1764-1854. 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allan; United States; 1811-1849. 
 
 Pollok, Robert ; Scotland; 1799-1827. 
 
 Pope, Alexander ; England; 1688-1744. 
 
 Person, Richard ; England; 1759-1808. 
 
 Praed, Winthrop Mackworth ; England; 1802-1839. 
 
 Prescott, William Hickling; United States; 1796-1859. 
 
 Prior, Matthew ; England; 1664-1721. 
 
 Proctor, Adelaide ; England; 1825-1864. 
 
 Proctor, Bryan Waller (" Barry Cornwall") ; England ; about 1790. 
 
 Publius Syrus ; flourished about B.C. 42. 
 
 Puttenham, George ; England; about 1529-1600. 
 
 Quarles, Francis ; England; 1592-1644. 
 Quintilian ; Latin ; born about 40, died about 118. 
 
 Radcliffe, Mrs. ; England; 1764-1823. 
 
 Ramsay, Allan ; Scotland; 1685-1758. 
 
 Ramsay, Rev. Dean ; Scotland ; living in 1875. 
 
 Randolph, John ; United States ; 1773-1833. 
 
 Raphael; Italy; 1483-1520. 
 
 Read, Thomas Buchanan ; United States ; 1822. 
 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua ; England; 1723-1792. 
 
 Richardson, Samuel ; England; 1689-1767. 
 
 Richter, Jean Paul F. ; Germany ; 1763-1825. 
 
 Robertson, William ; Scotland; 1721-1793. 
 
 Rochester (Lord), John Wilmot ; England; 1647-1680. 
 
 Rogers, Henry ; England ; about 1814. 
 
 Rogers, Samuel ; England ; 1763-1855. 
 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel ; England. 
 
 Ruskin, John ; England ; 1819 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Russell, William Howard ; Ireland; 1821. 
 
 Ryle, J. C.; England ; 1816. 
 
List of Authors. xv 
 
 Sackville, Thomas, Earl of Dorset ; England ; 1527-1608. 
 
 Sallust; Latin; B.C. 86-34. 
 
 Sappho ; Greece ; probably B.C. 630-570. 
 
 Saurin, Jacques ; France; 1677-1730. 
 
 Saxe, John Godfrey ; United States ; 1816; living in 1875. 
 
 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von; Germany; 1759-1805. 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter ; Scotland; 1741-1832. 
 
 Seed, Jeremiah ; England; died 1747. 
 
 Seneca; Spain (Latin) ; about B.C. 61. 
 
 Shakespeare, William ; England; 1564-1616. 
 
 Shaw, John ; United States ; 1778. 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe ; England; 1792-1822. 
 
 Shenstone, William ; England; 1714-1768. 
 
 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley ; Ireland; 1751-1816. 
 
 Sherlock, William ; England; about 1641-1707. 
 
 Shirley, James ; England; 1679-1717. 
 
 Sidney, Algernon ; England; 1622-1683. 
 
 Sidney, Edwin ; England; living in 1875. 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip ; England ; 1554-1586. 
 
 Sigourney, Mrs. ; United States ; 1791-1865. 
 
 Skinner, John ; Scotland; 1721-1807. 
 
 Smith, Alexander ; Scotland; 1830-1867. 
 
 Smith, Horace ; England; 1779-1849. 
 
 Smith, James; England; 1776-1839. 
 
 Smith, Seba ; United States ; 1792-1868. 
 
 Smith, Sydney ; England ; 1769-1845. 
 
 Smith, Dr. William ; England; living in 1875. 
 
 Smollett, Tobias ; Scotland; 1721-1771. 
 
 Socrates; Greece; B.C. 468-399. 
 
 South, Robert ; England; 1633-1716. 
 
 Southern, Thomas ; Ireland; 1660-1746. 
 
 Southey, Mrs. ; England; 1787-1854. 
 
 Southey, Robert ; England; 1774-1843. 
 
 Souvestre, Emile ; France ; 1806-1854. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert ; England ; living in 1875. 
 
 Spencer, W. R. ; England ; 1769-1834. 
 
 Spenser, Edmund ; England; 1553-1599. 
 
 Sprague, Charles ; United States ; 1791. 
 
 Sprague, William Buell ; United States ; 1795. 
 
 Spurgeon, Charles Haddon ; England; 1834; living in 1875. 
 
 Stedman, Edmund Clarence ; United States ; 1837; living in 1875. 
 
 Steele, Sir Richard ; Ireland; 1675-1729. 
 
xvi List of Authors. 
 
 Stephens, John Lloyd ; United States ; 1805-1852. 
 
 Sterling, John ; Scotland; 1806-1844. 
 
 Sterne, Lawrence ; England; 1713-1768. 
 
 Stevens, G. A. ; England ; about 1720-1784. 
 
 Stewart, Dugald ; Scotland; 1753-1828. 
 
 Still, John; England; 1543-1607. 
 
 Stoddard, Mrs. ; United States ; 1787-1820. 
 
 Stoddard, Thomas Tod ; Scotland ; living in 1875. 
 
 Story, Joseph ; United States ; 1779-1845. 
 
 Stowe, Mrs. Harriet Beecher ; United States ; 1812 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Street, Alfred B. ; United States ; 1812 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Strickland, Miss Agnes ; England ; 1806-1874. 
 
 Suckling, Sir John ; England ; 1608-1641. 
 
 Sully, Duke of; France ; 1559-1641. 
 
 Superville ; France. 
 
 Surrey, Earl of, Henry Howard ; England ; 1518-1547. 
 
 S urtr ess, Robert ; England; 1779-1834. 
 
 Suso, Heinrich ; Germany; probably 1300-1365. 
 
 Swain, Charles ; England; 1803; living in 1875. 
 
 Swift, Jonathan ; Ireland; 1667-1745. 
 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles ; England; 1843; living in 1875. 
 
 Sylvester, Joshua ; England; 1563-1618. 
 
 Sylvester, Matthew ; England; died 1708. 
 
 Tacitus, Caius Cornelius ; Latin ; born about 50, died after 117. 
 
 Taina, H. A. ; France; living in 1875. 
 
 Talfourd, Thomas Noon ; England; 1795-1854. 
 
 Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles Maurice ; France; 1754-1838. 
 
 Tannahill, Robert ; Scotland; 1774-1810. 
 
 Tasso, Bernardo ; Italy; 1493-1569. 
 
 Tassoni, Alessandro ; Italy; 1565-1635. 
 
 Taylor, Bayard ; United States ; 1825; living in 1875. 
 
 Taylor, Isaac ; England; 1787-1865. 
 
 Taylor, Jane; England; 1783-1824. 
 
 Taylor, Jeremy ; England; 1613-1667. 
 
 Tenant, William ; Scotland; 1784-1848. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred ; England ; 1810 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Tennyson, Frederick ; England. 
 
 Terence; Rome; about 195-159 B.C. 
 
 Tertullian, Quintus Septimius Florens ; Latin; b. about 1 60, d. bet. 220-240. 
 
 Thackeray, William Makepeace ; England; 1811-1863. 
 
 Theocritus ; Greece ; flourished about 270 B.C. 
 
List of Authors. xvii 
 
 Theremin ; Germany ; died lately. 
 
 Thierry, Jacques N. A. ; France; 1795-1856. 
 
 Thiers, Louis Adolphe ; France ; 1797 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Thorn, William ; Scotland; 1799-1850. 
 
 Thomson, James ; Scotland; 1700-1748. 
 
 Thorpe, T. B. ; United States ; living in 1875. 
 
 Tilton, Theodore ; United States ; living in 1875. 
 
 Titian; Italy; 1477-1576. 
 
 Tooke, John Home ; England; 1736-1812. 
 
 Toplady, Augustus M. ; England; 1740-1788. 
 
 Tourneur, Peter le ; France ; 1736-1788. 
 
 Trench, Richard Chenevix ; England; 1807; living in 1875. 
 
 Trollope, Anthony ; England; 1815; living in 1875. 
 
 Trumbull, John ; United States ; 1750-1831. 
 
 Tuckerman, Henry Theodore ; 1813 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Tupper, Martin Farquhar ; England; 1810; living in 1875. 
 
 Tyndale, Professor ; England; living in 1875. 
 
 Valdez, John Melendez ; Spain; 1754-1817. 
 Vaughan, Henry ; England; 1621-1695. 
 Veronese, Paul ; Italy; about 1530-1588. 
 Vinet, Alexander ; Switzerland; 1797-1847. 
 Virgil, Publius Maro ; Italy ; 70-19 B.C. 
 Volpi, John Anthony ; Italy; 1514-1588. 
 Voltaire; France; 1694-1778. 
 
 Waller, Edmund ; England; 1605-1687. 
 
 Walpole, Horace ; England; 1717-1797. 
 
 Walpole, Sir Robert ; England; 1676-1745. 
 
 Watts, Isaac; England; 1674-1748. 
 
 Webster, Daniel ; United States ; 1782-1852. 
 
 Webster, John ; England ; flourished 1633. 
 
 Wesley, Charles ; England; 1708-1788. 
 
 Wesley, John ; England ; 1703-1791. 
 
 Wesley, Samuel ; England; about 1662-1735. 
 
 Whately, Richard ; England; 1787-1863. 
 
 Whewell, William; England; 1795-1866. 
 
 Whipple, Edwin P. ; United States ; 1819. 
 
 White, Blanco ; Spain; 1773-1840. 
 
 White, Henry Kirke ; England; 1785-1806. 
 
 Whitfield, George ; England; 1714-1770. 
 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf; United States ; 1807; living in 1875. 
 
 B 
 
xviii List of Authors. 
 
 Wilde, Richard ; United States ; 1789-1847. 
 
 Willis, Nathaniel Parker ; United States; 1807-1867. 
 
 Wilson, Alexander ; Scotland; 1766-1813. 
 
 Wilson, John (" Christopher North ") ; Scotland; 1785-1854. 
 
 Winther, Rasmus V. C. F. ; Denmark ; 1796. 
 
 Winthrop, R. C. ; United States ; 1809 ; living in 1875. 
 
 Wirt, William ; United States ; 1772-1834. 
 
 Wither, George ; England; 1588-1667. 
 
 Wolcott, John (" Peter Pindar ") ; England ; 1 738-1819. 
 
 Wolfe, Charles ; Ireland; 1791-1823. 
 
 Wordsworth, William ; England; 1770-1850. 
 
 Wormius, Olaf; Denmark; 1588-1654. 
 
 Worsley, Philip Stanhope ; England; died 1866. 
 
 Wotton, Sir Henry ; England; 1568-1639. 
 
 Wycliffe, John de ; England ; about 1324-1384. 
 
 Young, Edward ; England; 1684-1765. 
 Young, Charlotte ; England; living in 1875, 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Object of this Volume. Power, Beauty, Wealth, and Wit of Language. 
 Survey of American and English Writers. Figurative Language, in 
 above Two Hundred Figures. No Literature ever before so Surveyed. 
 Author Claims entire Originality. Old yet Immortal Flowers, but a 
 New Ribbon. Of utmost Use to all who Speak or Compose. No good 
 Treatise on Figures in our Language. No good Distinction between 
 Trope and Metonymy. What in the World is a Hypocatastasis ? A 
 Sweet Volume given away by its Papa. Wonderful Number of Figures. 
 Hard Names they have. Ridiculed by Addison. Names will be Hu- 
 manized. Definition of a Figure. The Dawn and the Twilight. A 
 Mermaid of a City discovered by Washington Irving. Barbarossa De- 
 claims. A Water-kelpie Shrieks. Sermon by Dr. Chalmers. Criti- 
 cism on his Style. Sir Thomas More's Fool. Earliest Prose published 
 in England. Figures Needful in Religion. Language of the Old Testa- 
 ment Described. How Figures wear Old and get Young. Blunder by 
 Lord Macaulay. Daisy and Skylark. Style of Jesus. French Oratory. 
 Felicities by Beecher. Enoch Arden. Jokes by Jerrold. Thunder- 
 ous Prose by Milton. Pennsylvania Dutch. The Bird in the Bosom. 
 Six great Points. Claims of Greek and Latin, and one good Reason 
 Why. Music .in our Speech. Milton's Melodies Proved. Tarn 
 O'Shanter Croons. Three Books necessary in this Volume : Bible, Para- 
 dise Lost, Shakespeare. Panegyric on Monosyllables. Beautiful Quota- 
 tions. How Figures aid Invention. Dr. Mott's admirable Sermon : 
 the Soil, the Seed, the Sower. Sublimity and Poesy of the Christ. 
 Christ's Death-mantle Page xxxvii 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 FIGURES OF ETYMOLOGY. PART FIRST. 
 
 Three Kinds of Figures : In Etymology, or Spelling; in Syntax, or Construc- 
 tion; in Rhetoric, or Application, in Obedience to Moods of Mind. I. 
 Aphseresis, or Front-cut. In Allan Ramsay, Burns, Tannahill. Jerrold 
 Cuts up a Scoundrel. Bret Harte goes down in 'Frisco. Blind Harry. 
 Death of the Douglas. Full Account of John Gower. He Great in 
 Lifeless Doggrel. First Parliamentary Speech in English was in 1362. 
 
xx Table of Contents. 
 
 Man's Wealth, Poverty, Youth, and Old Age. Why Treason can 
 never Prosper. A Strain by the Author. Sharp and Sweet. George 
 III. and his Hard Head. Morris and Campbell Copy the One from the 
 Other. Robin Hood under the Greenwood Tree. A Lyric of London. 
 Four Answers in Four Minutes. Death of a Son. Cupid Defeated 
 by a Young Lady. How Parents live over again in their Children. A 
 Flirt Discarded. Southern's Classic Lines ; and One by Lord Burkhurst. 
 Disastrous One Hundred and Ninety Years between Chaucer and 
 Spenser. Pope Described. Specimen of his Wit. Epigram on a Block- 
 head. Shakespeare's Death in the Two Sixteens. Four opposite De- 
 vices in Figures. Dr. Watts Defends his Small Size. Story of Washing- 
 ton by Washington Irving. Compliment to Miss Edgeworth. II., III., 
 IV.,V. Syncope, or Mid-cut ; Synaeresis ; Crasis ; Synezesis. Miss War- 
 ing gives a pretty Example. Condoling with Mamma. Noble Line by 
 Dekker. Bitter Sarcasm by Burns. Smooth Verse by Chamberlayne. 
 Epigram on Author of " Hudibras." Sonnet on Shakespeare. The 
 Men of Genius Contemporaries with Shakespeare, Fourteen mentioned. 
 Example of Homeliness in the Pulpit that can not be forgotten. 
 Knocking an Eye out, by Curran the Orator. An Irish Poacher Dis- 
 covered among the Constellations. VI. Apocope, or End-cut. Curran 
 Treated as a Little Cratur. Critique on " Hudibras." Sam Patch, Sam 
 Weller, and Sam Slick. Mr. Bear finds his Match. My poor Pol, Go 
 in the Pi. Praise of the Doric, the Scottish Dialect. Bold Instance in 
 Crashaw of Cutting off. Fletcher, Marvel, Keats, and the Author. 
 Potates and Chestnuts. Fall of the Leaf. A Daring and Graceful 
 Illustration. Sonnet by an Archbishop. The Sun Clouded. Nebu- 
 chadnezzar Depicted. Style of Shakespeare. Burke Defines Majesty 
 Stripped of its Externals. Direction how to Study this delightful 
 Subject 55 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 FIGURES OF ETYMOLOGY. PART SECOND. 
 
 Excellent Advice to a Young Man by William Cullen Bryant. Another by 
 Marsh and by your Author. VII. Prosthesis, or Prefixing. Chaucer's 
 Favorite Flower and Burns's. Poesy's Skylarks and Devotion's Bells. 
 Pocahontas Daguerreotyped. Hurricane at Midnight. Chaucer's 
 Portrait of a Nun. Four Eras of English Poetry. Piers the Plowman 
 warmly Lauded ; as also the " Faerie Queene." How the Old Testament 
 grows as Age grows. VIII. Epenthesis, or Insertion. American and 
 Scotch Humor highly Commended. They are Accounted for. Philoso- 
 phy of Fun. A Candidate's Creed. An Attempt to Reorganize a Wife. 
 How to do it Best. IX. Paragoge, or Annexation. No Preachee and 
 Floggee both. Endearing Effects of aj in Courting. Of Thumping her 
 Deary, by a Lady. A Portrait of a Schoolma. Milton's supremely 
 beautiful Word. Lubricating the Joke. Thumpaty, Glurnpaty, and 
 Stumpaty. A Bullying Lawyer Outdone. Taking "No" out of the Com- 
 
Table of Contents. xxi 
 
 mandments and Putting it in the Creed. Piers the Plowman Praised 
 very highly a Second Time, and Quoted. X. Diaeresis, or Separation. 
 Milton's " Comus." Speech of a Guardian Angel. Milton's Exquisite 
 Style. The Palace and the Hut. XI. Tmesis, Diacope, or Cutting. 
 Power of Curiosity. Sublimity of Law. Account of Milton, Hooker, 
 and Ruskin's Prose ; of Macaulay's. XII. Metathesis, or Twisting. 
 One who hain't got an Umbrella. Ike and Mrs. Partington. The Old 
 Lady's Oilfactories. Dr. Holmes on Widdahs. A Pig Squales like an 
 Infidel. XIII. Intentional Misspelling. Account of Henry Kirke 
 White. The Land of the Toomeniaitches. Thackeray Lisps Cleverly. 
 A Lapland Witch. XIV. Full Syllabification. Curds under a Tree 
 Served up by Skakespeare. XV. Dialect. In the Stillness o' the 
 Night. XVI. The Alphabetic, a Newly Invented Rhyme by Punch. 
 XVII. Combination. The Cleek-um-inn. Do-the-boys Hall. The 
 Wooden Spoon and the Treacle. A go-to-meetin' Coat. The Helter- 
 skelter-ding-dong-horse-and-foot Style. Account of Addison. Anec- 
 dote of Him. XVIII. Accentuation. By Two great Bards, and by 
 a Talented One. Catholicity of Taste will be Cultured in this Vol- 
 ume. Pope and Macaulay Defended. Wordsworth, Crabbe, Burns, 
 Shakespeare, and Milton Characterized. Debate between Byron and 
 Bowles 75 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 FIGURES OF SYNTAX. PART FIRST. 
 
 Need of Figures of Syntax. We are Recording, not Inventing Phenomena. 
 Study of Language is Study of Mind. XIX. Ellipsis, or Omission. 
 Style without this would be Chains, not W T ings. How Women are the 
 Opposite of Clocks. Pope meets a Retort. Pun by Jerrold. Jemmy 
 Wright has just Popped out. Poetical Recipe for Boiling Chicken. 
 Another Strain by your Author. Anecdote of a Mad Poet. Picture of 
 Charles XII. of Sweden. New Translation of a Hebrew Prophet. 
 Call for New Version of Bible. Sallust Criticised. Railway Collision. 
 Sad Death of Edgar A. Poe. Caesar Slain. Scene in Grave-yard. 
 Shipwreck in Bay of Biscay. The Gray Forest Eagle. Military Fame. 
 Moon in Storm, by King Alfred. Anecdotes of Ben Jonson. Proof 
 of his Pellucid Style. Saying " Bo " to a Goose. Letter Addressed to 
 " Mr. Newton, Europe." Disrespect is Highest Respect. A Husband 
 and a Wife Differ. What is a Prosist ? King Francis and the Lions. 
 Able Critique on Milton's Style. Boyd's Notes Recommended. How 
 to Acquire Accuracy in Words. Mr. Vagabond Addressed. Twenty- 
 nine Varieties of Ellipsis. Dana's Book of Poetry Commended; and 
 also Bryant's. "Go where is de most Devil." Epitaph on Charles II. 
 The only Secret a Woman can Keep. A Statuesque Group by Chau- 
 cer. To the Song-sparrow. The Education given by Mountains. A 
 Far View that can be Seen. Milton's Theology Defended. Addison's 
 Praise of Milton. A Mother Offering her Son to the Country. Grace 
 
xxii Table of Contents. 
 
 by Burns. Flowers : What they Say. A Sign-board got up by a Philos- 
 opher. An Early Walk by Sydney Smith. Need of " Which." Amavi 
 is Am-have-I. Improvements on Common Version. Sarcastic Letter by 
 Hogarth. XX. Asyndeton, Lack of Ands. Birth of the Earliest Re- 
 public. Birth-shout of a Nation. Style of Spectator Lauded. Lamar- 
 tine's Home of God. Scene in Holland. Speech by Henry IV. of 
 France. A Picture the Young Gentlemen will Recognize. A True 
 Christian Home 96 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 FIGURES OF SYNTAX. PART SECOND. 
 
 XXI. Polysyndeton, or Superfluity of Ands. Examples from Holy Writ. 
 Beautiful Tradition about our Master. A Death-scene. Poesy comes 
 Best from Deepest Wells. A full Account of the Great and Good Demos- 
 thenes. Two great Lessons from him. Two Charges against him Re- 
 futed. Battle of Solferino. XXII. Zeugma, or Junction. Of Language 
 as Multitudinous. XXIII. Syllepsis, Synesis, Synthesis. The Infinite 
 Hand. XXIV. Paradiastole, or Neithers and Nors. How it is Possible 
 to Join Disjunctively. Denunciation of an Oppressor. XXV. Pleonasm, 
 or Superfluity. " O Jamie Thomson ! Jamie Thomson, O !" A Weak 
 Pleonasm where it should not be. Being in Doleful Dumps.-; The 
 Mother of the Flowers. A Hard Thing to Die. Criticism on Carlyle. 
 " Going for to Go." How Ancient Ladies are Safe from Sparks. " Ha, 
 ha, the Wooin' o't." Dancing on a Young Irishman's Heart. Boots, Su- 
 gar-tongs, and Tinder-boxes. XXVI. Me-ism. XXVII. Hypallage, the 
 Cart before the Horse. Virgil Commits an Irish Bull. Strange that 
 the Weather-glass has so little Effect on the Weather. The great Word, 
 Remorse. True Historic View of English Language 121 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 FIGURES OF SYNTAX. PART THIRD AND LAST. 
 
 Figures not Tawdry. Language Approves Man very High-born. Figures 
 as Natural as is Breathing. How no Kettle ever Boiled, though Bridget 
 says so. XXVIII. Enallages of great Importance. They are a Feast 
 of Strawberries. Twenty-six Sorts. Cradle of Jesus. The Servant- 
 boy of all Work Rushes in. XXIX. Antiptosis. XXX. Antemeria. 
 XXXI. Heterosis. Indescribable Beauty of Shakespeare's Style. One 
 who Furs himself round with Hearts. A Youthful Witch. Apostrophe 
 to the Sun Panegyric on the Normans. A Beautifulest Bride. Open- 
 ing of Piers the Plowman. XXXII. Metastasis. Caesar Fights on 
 the Arar. Literature Bears us every where. Sam Slick on Widdahs. 
 An Immortal Line by Keats. Unsurpassed Examples from the Swan 
 of Avon. The Author hath another Fytte. XXXIII. Hyperbaton, In- 
 version, or Transposition. Its Immense Power. Mrs. Sippy and Miss 
 
Table of Contents. xxiii 
 
 Souri. The Wild Sea-mew. A Married Blue-stocking's Interruptions. 
 The Snout of an Elephant. Opening of " Paradise Lost." Opening of 
 Hooker's Great Book. Of the "Iliad." Of Tasso's Italian Epic. Odys- 
 seus Bids Good-bye to a Nymph. XXXIV. Anastrophe. Relief by 
 Tears. Eleven Instances of Inversion. Marmion's Swarthy Cheek. 
 Death of Hector, from Cowper's "Iliad." Plato's Six Arrangements of 
 his Sentence. Ariosto's Ten. How Euphony can be Won. Consecra- 
 tion of Wordsworth. Wolsey Stigmatized. Fall of Sathanas. A Love 
 that Refuses to Die even under Deceit. Admirable Argument by Pro- 
 fessor Bascom that Emotion, Eloquence, Figures, will Increase. Dis- 
 cussion of the Periodic Sentence. True Definition of Good Style.. 137 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART FIRST. 
 
 Our most Important Division Come at Last. A Protest against the Com- 
 mon Definition. Our New Definition. No Surfaceness or Sham neces- 
 sary in Figures. A Defense from the German. Demosthenes Unsur- 
 passed in Figures, yet Altogether Simple. Every Good Figure has 
 Truth in it, and is not Sham. Play of Wit between Voltaire and Lord 
 Chesterfield. Madness of a March Hare. The Laws of Figurative Lan- 
 guage Sweep away Transubstantiation. High Compliment not Meant 
 for One. Figures not to make Obscure, but Clear. XXXV. Simile, 
 Fixed Laws of. A Lovely and Calm Evening. A Heroic Scotch Ped- 
 dler. A Bible Spirit is always Noble. Account of Coleridge. Attack 
 on Tall Men as to their Upper Story. Pulpit Poem by Jeremy Taylor. 
 Spurgeon and his Rose-leaves. Prediction of Sharp Nails after 
 Wedlock. A Steam-engine in Trousers. Tear on Childhood's Cheek. 
 Two Ways of Treating Simile. Description of Oliver Goldsmith. 
 Swiss Mountaineer. Secret of How to Enrich your Style. Science 
 greatly Fitted to Contribute to Poesy Proved by Noble Instances. An 
 Embodied Storm. A Young Lady who was like an Apple-dumpling. 
 Homer's Earliest Simile. Full Account of his Similes. A Hero 
 Likened to a Haggis or a Pommeled Ass. Bushnell Admirable on 
 Figures. Wit of Dr. Emmons. Milton's Similes excellently Done by 
 Addison. Noble Eulogy on our English Bible by a Roman Catho- 
 lic 156 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART SECOND. 
 
 Poesy by no Means Fights against Common-sense. Study Shakespeare's 
 Ariel and Caliban. The Ladies' Eyes Likened by a Poor Poet to Bram- 
 bles, and the Stars to Confectioners. An Absurdity Committed by a 
 Great Poetess. Example of Genuine Poesy. Another, of First-class 
 Eloquence. A Reverend Dr. like Butter. How Thomson was Im- 
 
xxiv Table of Contents. 
 
 proved by Pope. A Felicitous Philosopher. Naturalness is a Figure's 
 Finest Charm. Instances of how Infidelity Degrades Man and Litera- 
 ture. A Sea-fight Mismanaged. True Glow of Soul Required, not 
 Sham Emotion. The Muses are Sensible Women. The Saucy Are- 
 thusa Sails by. Two Fine Writers ably Contrasted. Charm that 
 Rhythm Adds to Poesy. Facts about the Spectator. A Gazette in 
 Rhyme. Philosophy of Experiment very Different from the Ape-honor- 
 ing Guess-work of Darwin. Cowley on Lord Bacon. Beauty of River 
 Thames. Distinction between Simile and Allegory. Two Fine Exam- 
 ples. We Visit Loch Katrine. Mists from Mountain Torrents. A 
 Demon's Dread Thought. How Scott's Novels make a Fellow Hun- 
 gry. A Bunch of Exquisite Wild Flowers by Burns. Two Grand 
 Similes by an Old Greek The Youngest Babes the Nearest to God. 
 Nature like a Tender Nurse. A Noble Comparison by " Euphues." Ad- 
 mirable Poesy Fresh from Ireland. A Scene Truly American. Very 
 Important Distinction by the Author between Poetry and Poesy. The 
 Deepest Source of Similes. Meanness of Atheism. How Opposed to 
 Philosophy and to Poesy. Happy Simile from Dryden. Cromwell 
 well Expressed. Dr. Craik Contrasts Beattie's " Minstrel " and Thom- 
 son's " Castle of Indolence " 170 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART THIRD. 
 
 XXXVI. Metaphor. Old Father Taylor Rouses the Sailors. A Bridge 
 of Rainbows. An Infidel Book is a Landscape without a Sky. Tran- 
 substantiation Examined according to the Philosophy of Figures. "Is" 
 very often means "Represents," never "Is changed into." Meeting 
 between Washington Irving and Sir Walter Scott. Genius can never 
 Run Out of Materials. Two Sorts of Metaphors Depicted. A Mount- 
 ain Eagle. Relations between Matter and Mind. Two Roses Inter- 
 twine over Two Tombs. Union in One Great Mind of the Hebrew and 
 the Greek Genius. Account of Milton. The World's most Sublime 
 Poem. Two Conflicting Verdicts on Milton. A Good Metaphor given 
 us by Botany. Contributions of Science to Poesy. The Severely True 
 is the most Romantic. Bright Sparks from an Eminent Wit. A Scold- 
 ing Woman's Tongue. Lines on an Infant. New Definition of Man. 
 Strange Visit to Byron's Corpse. What Sir W T alter Esteemed the 
 Finest Metaphor in the World. A Student's Frolic by a Great Poet. 
 How Light is the Shadow of God. Definition of the Poetical Principle. 
 Two Church Historians Criticised. Against Abridgments of Great 
 Works.-r-Two Mixed Metaphors Dissected. Account of the Famous 
 " Euphues." Nothing is Lasting that is a Sham. Many Speakers should 
 Thunder Less and Lightning More. A Republic Surrounded by a 
 Ghost. Recipe: How to Cook Metaphors. Splendid Passage by a 
 Genial Orator. How to Read the Bible Nobly in the Pulpit. What 
 History Blushes at. Your Author Breaks into a Strain. Old Gower 
 
Table of Contents. xxv 
 
 is Unmercifully Exposed. Fuller is Pleaded for. The Three Mourners, 
 a First-rate Poem never before Translated, from the German 184 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART FOURTH. 
 
 XXXVII. Metonymy. Lies always in a Noun, never in an Adjective. 
 You and Bridget make Them without Knowing of it. Thirty-four 
 Enumerated. Largest List in the World. Language Proves Man 
 God-born. A Beaker full of the Warm South. The Summer of 
 Shiraz. A Daily Sip of Spenser. The Cave of Mammon do we Enter. 
 Tennyson's Bow found Fault with. Dreamland Peopled with Won- 
 ders. Una in White. Hush before Thunder. Time, the Deep Voice. 
 Astronomy Displays the Great Thinker. Ballad by Italian Shoe- 
 maker. Mornrise. The Glories of the Tartan. A Charge of Spear- 
 men. Make a Bow to your Conscience. The Shadow Fearad of Man. 
 Toplady's Beautiful Hymn. A Sleighful of Beauty on Broadway. 
 A Wood-pigeon's Nest. Grave of Lazarus. A Bad Way of Doing a 
 Good Act. The Last Slice of Plum-pudding. To See a Voice. The 
 Cloud-thrones of Fancy. Rise of the Moon. Glimpse of Hell. Indian 
 War-whoop. Cool Dew. A Pope Inside. The Mighty Dead. 
 A Tight Gale at Sea. A Perfect Poem. Noses who make Good 
 Customers. A Bishop Riding to Heaven on the Back of a Cow. 
 A Terrific Name. A Pate well Covered. A Cimeter Flashes in 
 Battle. XXXVIII. Synecdoche. A Queer Notion by Beecher. 
 A Midnight of Snow. XXXIX. Metalepsis. An Echo in a Great 
 Dome. An Essay on Veal. Drinking Crummie. "The Kye come 
 Hame." The Mystery that Solves Mysteries. A Metonymy is not a 
 Trope 202 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART FIFTH. 
 
 XL. Tropes. Never Precisely Defined. Distinction between Metonymy 
 and Trope. The Latter always in an Adjective. Fourteen Varieties. 
 Fullest List in the World. Young Love. A Forgiving Rainbow. 
 Braidclaith much Lauded. A Washing-day : its Discomforts. A Dying 
 Soldier's Visor. A Fan in Different Tempers. Adieu to a Bride. 
 Summer in the Far North. The Gentleman with the Foolish Teeth. 
 Pathless Groves. A Sultry Summer Eve. The Birth of Jesus. A 
 Rainy Night. The Cheerful Hearth Listening to the Tempest at Sea. 
 Of a Child in Heaven. The Cannon Rattles. The Purple Dresses of 
 the Proud and Fair. The Dawning Hills. Office of Imagination to 
 Discover Gossamer Truths. Bunyan's Despair, and Lear's. A With- 
 ered Leaf Preaches a Sermon. Gift of Interpreting Nature. The Uni- 
 verse Crowded with Jehovah's Thoughts ; therefore Poesy can not get 
 
xxvi Table of Contents. 
 
 Exhausted. A False Religion Hinders Noble Writing. Draw up Full 
 List of Outward Objects used by Jesus as Illustrations. He Led Men 
 Back to Nature. Three Heads of Arrangement ; nay, Four. Tropes 
 very Various in their Sorts. Very Fairylike they are. They are Change 
 of Adjectives 221 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART SIXTH. 
 
 XLI. Hypocatastasis, or Implication. Wretched Neglect into which our 
 Subject has Fallen. Most Beautiful and Far-reaching. A Palm-grove. 
 Marvelous Capabilities of English. Ruins of Persepolis. Vales Surg- 
 ing with Autumn. William the Testy Stumps About. Closing Lines 
 of " Pleasures of Memory." Fancy's Fairy Frostwork. Closing Lines 
 of" Pleasures of Hope." A Vision Appears of Drowned Seaman. Mrs. 
 Partington with her Mop Defies the Atlantic. Awful Lightning. Elo- 
 quence of Demosthenes. Words Full of Poesy and of Wisdom. Great 
 Thinkers Abound in Figures. Sediment if we Dip too Deep in Pleasure. 
 Discussion of Scripture Style. Elegant Distinction in Greek New Test- 
 ament. Bad Figure by Irving. Dunbar Describes Well. Example of 
 Light and Sinewy Style. Bird Helen is Shot. " Your Maggotship." 
 Tom Paine does Well for Once. Advice to Would-be Author. Pas- 
 sion is Priceless. Fame Crows Early. The Woods put a Wig on 
 their Pate. Visit to the Vatican. XLII. Epanorthosis, or Correction. 
 Emma's Portrait. Grave of a Sage. Rats Turned into Mice. De- 
 fense of Bible. A Bad Position to be in. XLIII. Anamnesis, or Recol- 
 lection. One who is ever Present when you Speak of him. XLIV. 
 Aposiopesis, Sudden Silence. Neptune Interrupts himself. The 
 Bride's Tragedy. XLV. Sudden Self-interruption. Wondrous from 
 Shakespeare. Slaughter of Five Hundred Children. Tameness in Pul- 
 pit is Inexcusable. XLVI. Emblem. A Thrilling Figure. A Magnifi- 
 cent Instance. Sullied Snow. Sonnet from Italian. Hon er Sings. 
 Critique by Theodore Tilton 231 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART SEVENTH. 
 
 XLVII. The Weird. Anticipations of Heaven by Horatius Bonar, a True 
 Bard of the Cross." The Ancient Mariner." XLVIII. The Quaint. 
 Legal Damages Secured. XLIX. Antithesis ; Epantiosis. Pope's 
 Contrast of Homer and Virgil. Johnson's, of Dryden and Pope. The 
 Most Sublime of all Sciences and the Most Important of all Arts. The 
 Telescope and the Microscope. L. Antimetabole. LI. Parison, or An- 
 nomination. LI I. Omoioteleuton. Caesar's Famous Letter. LI 1 1. 
 Isocolon. Cicero Declaims. LIV. Commutation. A Poem and a 
 Picture. A Writer who is a Continent of Mud. How he that hath 
 
Table of Contents. xxvii 
 
 Slight Thoughts of Sin never had Great Thoughts of God. The Devil's 
 Chapel. Importance of Small Things. A Cry that is a Silence. A 
 Silence that is a Cry. Aphrodite, the Genius of Beauty, is Born from 
 the Sea-wave. Enters the Almshouse Physician. The Duke of Buck- 
 ingham every thing by Starts, but nothing Long. We Go to See a 
 Haunt of Pirates. Of Gunpowder and Painting, by the Sixth American 
 President. Jackasses and their Ditties. The Roar of Yarrow. Por- 
 trait of a Clown. Two Overdone Antitheses. Literature should Image 
 Nature, which Abounds in the Opposition of Situation. Splendid 
 Situations in Cervantes, Schiller, and Shakespeare .Marked by Con- 
 trasts. Repose in Painting. Shield of Achilles. Trip to Alnwick Cas- 
 tle. A Collection of Figures Thrown Together Purposely in Disorder. 
 A Vast Constellation of Common Faiths, in Literature and in Religion, 
 ever Increasing 247 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART EIGHTH. 
 
 LV. Intentional Discrepancy. Love of Variety should be Humored. La- 
 ment over Erin. LVI. Nonsense an Important Figure. Some Folk- 
 verses in Savannah, Georgia, and on the Clyde. " Zickaty, Dickaty, 
 Dock." "Igo and Ago." "Sing Hey Trix, Trim Go Trix." "Lilli- 
 burlero." LVII. Oxymoron, or Wise Folly. A Silent Voice. Addi- 
 son's Celebrated Hymn. "I Love them Both Best." Jesus, more Man 
 than any Man. He who Saw what was Not to be Seen. A Press-gang 
 Hauls off Young Ben. Having Nothing, he has All. Resemblance be- 
 tween Paul and Demosthenes. Less than the Least. Saying Things too 
 Simple for Words. Sedan and the Commune. Imprisoned in Unbound- 
 ed Space. Herbert Spencer's Weakness of Omniscience. Magnificent 
 Evidence of Emptiness. What a Favor to Die. " Powerful Weak but 
 Cruel Easy." Seeing too many Ghosts to Believe in Them. The Am- 
 bition of Infidelity. Dr. Hitchcock Speaks Eloquently. LVIII. Eu- 
 phemism, or Smooth Handle. Twa Neives that were scarce Weel- 
 bred. A Volley of Presbyterian Bullets. LIX. Misnomer. Great 
 Wealth of Figures by our Saviour. Lament over Cleopatra. Flies 
 that were Free Men. LX. Hyperbole, or Exaggeration. One Hundred 
 from Shakespeare. A Dainty One from Anacreon. Bridget Comes 
 with the Coals in Less than No Time. A Lover's Rhapsody. Pellucid 
 Elegance. A Roe Bounds along a Moss-grown Forest Pathway. A 
 Spectre Glares on us. An Old Woman Tries to put herself Back into 
 a Girl. Marrying Beelzebub's Eldest Daughter and Going Home to 
 Live with the Old Folks. The Fox of Ballybotherem. Pigs that Squeak 
 Greek. A Giant's Big Glove. The Dramatists of Elizabeth's Time give 
 us Grand Quotations. Another Lover Breaks Out. A River Runs 
 Crazy. How the Morning Dresses herself. A French Barber Talks 
 Big. A Lady who Writes the Hottentots into Top-boots. An Um- 
 brella over a Duck in a Shower of Rain. Delightful Little Letter to a 
 
xxviii Table of Contents. 
 
 Child. LXI. Peculiarity of Usage. Figures can be Easily and Largely 
 Cultivated 263 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART NINTH. 
 
 LXII. Litotes, Meiosis, or Lessening. Opposite of Hyperbole. Satan 
 Hating the Sun. The Mountain and the Squirrel have a Debate. En- 
 glish but Half Developed. Flora's Fairest Daughterling. LXIII. The 
 Irish Bull a Copious Supply of Them. Stealing the Keyhole. How 
 the Child's the Father of the Man. Explanation Philosophic of a Bull. 
 Making Tay of Chocolate. A Shilling Short : Who Put it In ? Keep- 
 ing One's Spake to One's Self. A Papa would not Object to the Chil- 
 dren's Noise, if They would only Keep Quiet. A Poor Woman who 
 was the Mother of Six Small Children and a Sick Husband. A Man 
 Makes Two Chairs out of his Own Head, and has Plenty of Wood left 
 for Another. LXIV. Repetition, Many in Bible. LXV. Ploce. 
 Lord Chatham on Cromwell. LXVI. Gemination. LXVII. Anaphora, 
 Epanaphora. An Irishman's Heart. LXVI II. Epistrophe, Antistro- 
 phe, Epiphora, Conversion. A Noble One by Dr. Griffin. A Great 
 Bell at Midnight. LXIX. Symploce. Return of the Birds. LXX. 
 Anadiplosis. LXXI. Epadiplosis. A Monosyllabic Line by your Au- 
 thor. LXXII. Completion. An Attack on Rullus by Cicero. 
 LXXHI. Epanalepsis. Persecutions of the Apostles. Immortality of 
 Sin will make Suffering Immortal. LXXIV. Epanodos, or Regression. 
 LXXV. Polyptoton. A Man who has Learned How to Learn can Learn 
 any Thing. LXXVI. Epizeuxis, or Traduction. LXXVII. Pareg- 
 menon. LXXVIII. Summation. Sublime Cases of. A Great Nation 
 Made a Widow. Three Great Reforms that Might easily be Made in 
 the Pulpit. Eager Appeal to Modern Preachers. LXXIX. Choral 
 hant. Art far Surpassed. Panegyric on the Old Ballads. Noble 
 Quotations from Them. A Depth of Woe. Ballads from Four Lands. 
 Rev. Ralph Hoyt Exhorted to Write more. The Gudeman Comes 
 Hame. LXXX. Echo. A Figure wondrously Beautiful. LXX XI. 
 Redoubled Negation. Great Quotation from our Demosthenes. 
 LXXXII. Redoubled Affirmation. "A Thousand Times Yes." A Su- 
 preme Poem from the German by your Author 280 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART TENTH. 
 
 LXXXIII. Synonym. Noble Liturgy of English Church. Professor Cop- 
 pee Contributes a Valued Distinction between Liberty and Freedom. 
 LXXXIV. Ascription of Value. By Luther. A Saucy Miss is Rebuked. 
 LXXXV. Dubitation. By Earl of Strafford. Thorn the Weaver- 
 Poet. Chrysostom on Abraham's Offering Up of Isaac. The Mind 
 
Table of Contents. xxix 
 
 Tortured in an Eddy. LXXXVI. Pretended Discovery. The Anti- 
 quarian Trade. LXXXVII. Aporia, or Pretended Impossibility. Elo- 
 quence of Paul ; Our Need of a Better Translation. LXXXVIII. Ig- 
 norance. Willie Winkie, the Genius of Slumber. LXXXIX. Indis- 
 tinctness. A Hazy Mist. ^Eneas and the Sibyl Enter Hell in a Dim 
 Light. Grand Passage. Two Shades Sit on their Sepulchres. A Hid- 
 den Monster. A Dreaded Name. Two Sublime Pictures. Christ's 
 Face in Eclipse. Magnificent Argument by a Great Reasoner in Be- 
 half of our Position as to Figures. XC. Affirmation. XCI. Affirma- 
 tion and Negation. The Maniac. Appeal to the Pulpit. XCII. 
 Apostrophe. Very Important. Adversity Light compared with Guilt. 
 Invocation of Freedom. Ossian Discussed. Napoleon's Favorite. 
 Address to the Sun. William Tell Holds Communion with Alpine 
 Winds. The Soul's Defiance. Ode to the Cuckoo. Biography of the 
 Ettrick Shepherd. Address to the Skylark. Darwin the Elder Apos- 
 trophizes the Stars. XCIII. Denunciation. Sublime Instances. 
 XCIV. Solemn Appeal to Deity. By Demosthenes and by Brougham ; 
 by Cicero and by Erskine. Never Done any More. XCV. Oath, or 
 Adjuration. Tremendous Power of Shakespeare. Anathema. XCVI. 
 Command. Cutting the Mast Away. XCVII. Exclamation of Sorrow. 
 Widow Malone and Widow Machree. XCVIII. Spiritualization. 
 Sweet Butter and Mountain Thyme 301 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART ELEVENTH. 
 
 XCIX. Irony. The Dry Mock. In Scripture, no Contempt of Man, there- 
 fore Irony Seldom. A Prisoner for Debt. Catiline Defies the Senate. 
 A Pretty Sum to Begin the Next World with. The Apostolical Suc- 
 cession from Judas. Four Best American Satires. C. Antiphrasis. 
 The Broad Flout. CI. Ironical Permission, or Ironical Command. 
 Jesus Commands Disciples to Arm Themselves. Bold Bacchanals 
 Rise. C II. Anti-Irony, or Pretended Blame. Wee Willie Winkie 
 Comes a Second Time. CHI. Mock-Heroic. A Boiled Sheep's Head 
 Cooked for a Scotchman. CIV. Prosopopeia, or Personification. 
 Scripture Overflows with It Feelings Bodied Forth in Forms or Out- 
 ward Things Find a Heart and Mind. Man is the Most to Man. The 
 Captive Fay. The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins. Ocean's Froth- 
 ing Lips. A Steed's Mane. The Sun's Pretty Daughters. Ghastly 
 Amazement. Sleeping Moss. A Welcome to Dawn. How Numerous 
 the Figures of Jesus. A Vast Oak with an Altar under it of the 
 Druids. Natural Religion Chooses between Jesus and Mohammed. 
 Launch of a Man-of-war. A War-ship Hastes to Battle. A Death- 
 march of Waves. The Pyramids Dote with Age. A Castle over the 
 Sea. Column of Bunker Hill Speaks. A Pilgrim Gray. War Yclad 
 in Steel. Milk-white Asphodel. The Poet Kisses the Rose. The 
 Nymph, Content. Outburst of Tecumseh. The Dimples on the Cheek 
 
xxx Table of Contents. 
 
 of Home. A Wild Storm among the Mountains. Red Battle Stamps 
 his Foot. Nature at her Evening Prayers. A Wicked If. The Pul- 
 pit, Angel-like. Two very Different Kinds of Words. Delightful Feet. 
 Maids of Honor to the Spring. CV. Ascription of Intention. Love- 
 ly Scene in Ireland. CVI. And- Personification. A Horse with a 
 Thing on its Back. Things Soft as Girls. Aristotle's Wondrous 
 Prayer. No Atheist He, yet how Vast an Intellect. Five Great 
 Thinkers in the Olden Time who Abounded in Prayer. How Shallow 
 our Atheists are compared with them. Three very Important Re- 
 flections. First, the Present Atheism is a Piece of Good Fortune for 
 Christianity. Second, in Prayer is no Priestcraft. Third, Bible the 
 Great Extirpator of all Priestcraft. The Rampart of Liberty. A For- 
 tune-hunter Meets an Ignominious Fate. CVI I. Enhancement by Dif- 
 ference. An Emigrant's Tears. The Ruins of Petra 321 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART TWELFTH. 
 
 CVIII. Egoism. Demosthenes, Brougham, and Cowper. Appeal to 
 Common-sense. A Burst of Eloquence from the Pulpit. Grandeur of 
 Immortality. How Wise in Christ to Give in His System so Leading a 
 Place to Preaching. Never will Pulpit be Superseded by the Newspa- 
 per or by the Printing-press. CIX. Self-depreciation. Egoism must 
 not Flavor of Egotism. On Death of Marshal Turenne. CX. Parano- 
 masia, or Pun. Falling from a Style and Breaking One's Neck. Learn- 
 ing a Craft so as to Live Without Craft. CXI. Antanaclasis, a Peculiar 
 Kind of Pun. The Best of Acids. Hanging so as to Avoid Hanging. 
 Pun on Tombstones. "Diggin' a Tattie." CXII. Soliloquy. Many 
 Fine Ones from Holy Writ. Need of a New Translation, and Precisely 
 Why. CXIII. Direct Address. Sublime One in Genesis. The Old 
 Clock Talks to Us. A Dying Mother Pleads for her Babe. The Coon 
 Speaks to the Colonel. Sacrifice of Isaac. Speech by the Moon to a 
 Shy Lover. CXIV. Dialogue. Demosthenes very Personal. Pilot in 
 a Hurricane. Dialogues for the Pulpit. Brougham to House of Lords. 
 Very Wonderful from Rowland Hill. Intense Beauty from Holy 
 George Herbert. Your own Death-bed. Shakespeare Beaten for 
 Once. Anselm very Emphatic. The Impetuous Sword-song. XCV. 
 Prediction. Lord Chatham Argues for the Americans. How Faith 
 Inspires an Orator. A Cottage that is Impregnable. Appeal for 
 Missions. CXVI. Anticipation. A Murdered Man Stalks through 
 a Ball-room. CXVII. Paralepsis. CXVIII. Apophasis. Pre- 
 tended Omission. St. Paul's Good Manners. "The Lady of the 
 Lake." A Young Lady's Secret. Noble Instances from Demosthenes. 
 CXIX. Disparity. The Full-winged Eagle. Your Author Opens 
 to You a Vast Forest. CXX. Outward Illustration. A Ghost Ap- 
 pears. The Clank of Chains. The most Magnificent Passage in 
 our Oratory. Wonders of a Pen. CXXI. Accompaniment. A 
 
Table of Contents. xxxi 
 
 Thunder-crash. CXXII. Meeting of Opposites. Mice and Men Gang 
 aft Agley 341 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART THIRTEENTH. 
 
 CXXIII. Onomatopy. Sound Resembling Sense. Tick, Tick. The Oar 
 on Lake Leman. Lodore Waterfall Dashes down. A Mighty Castle 
 Falls. A Zephyr and a Torrent. Cry of a Wolf. The Last Red Leaf. 
 Soft Music. Gates of Hell Open, and Gates of Heaven. Burst of 
 Thunder. Farewell to Life. The Fairies Come Tripping in. Pittle 
 Pattle ! CXXIV. Interrogation. A Fact never Named before, about 
 Jesus. The very Soul of Christianity. Whitefield Electrifies the Sail- 
 ors. The Last Burning of the World. A Question Put to Each of Us. 
 Lines in a Grave-yard. Goethe's Genius and his Trash. Mignon's 
 very Fine Song. A Great Fire in a City. Erotesis. The Strut of a 
 Few Men of Science. Innumerable Blunders by them. As Many as 
 by Theologians. The Herald of the Second Crusade. An Infant De- 
 scribed. Prediction that Garibaldi would Arise. Admirable Sonnet 
 on Night. Lord Lytton on Cicero. A Struggle between Murder and 
 Greed. CXXV. Question and Answer. Responsion. Inimitable 
 Story by Sterne. Lay of Last Minstrel. CXXVI. Exclamation. Ec- 
 phonesis. CXXVII. Epiphonema. A truly Tremendous Scolding 
 which Serves him Right. Sabbath Morning. The Evening Hour. 
 The Tenth Muse. Two Death-bed Scenes. Your Author Breaks Out. 
 CXXVIII. Nomination. Broad Hindostan. Bearing Away for 
 Squam. Noble Music 361 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 TIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART FOURTEENTH. 
 
 CXXIX. Technicality. Land-lubbers Taken too Far out to Sea. CXXX. 
 Indication. Mary Laid in her Coffin. The Gale out on the Beach. 
 A Daring Scene in the Pulpit. Jesus Points to the Lilies and to the 
 Stars. Conscience Remonstrated with. CXXXI. Vision. The 
 Clachan Seen which will Never be Revisited. The Night Steals on. 
 Silence Sits on a Three-legged Stool. An Action Sermon by Dr. 
 Alexander. The Mayflower in a Storm. Broadswords flashing. How 
 Dr. Guthrie Composed his Sermons that were so Sea-like. Death-bed 
 of the Saint. CXXXII. Hypotyposis, or Visible Presentation. Cicero 
 Declaims. Elijah Soars. A Martyr's Bleeding Head. CXXXIII. 
 Present Occurrence. A Worldling Dies before you. CXXXIV. 
 Hearing. Queen Victoria's Night Journey. A Hush before Waterloo. 
 How Dread is Conscience ! At Midnight in an Old Cathedral. The 
 Marseillaise Hymn. Translation from Spanish. CXXXV. Motion. 
 We Go to an Impenitent Offender Dying. Death of our Lord. A 
 
xxxii Table of Contents. 
 
 Visit to Hell that would do us Good. A Good Heathen Urges us to 
 Pray. Visit to Calvary. Obedience and Liberty go Together. Satan 
 Hastens on. Urgent Appeal for Study of Figures. CXXXVI. Climax. 
 Climbing the Catskills. John Wesley is Humorous. Grand Burst 
 from a Grand Irishman. A Man of True Science Speaks for Religion. 
 Panegyric on Greece. Amplification. Epiploce. A Specimen of 
 Contempt. Epitaph on Cowper. Chief-Justice Story Defends Mans- 
 field. CXXXVII. Anticlimax. Lord Rochester Foiled by a Bishop. 
 Catabasis. CXXXVIII. From Less to Greater. Eternal Woe. 
 Development of Character. CXXXIX. From Greater to Less. Fine 
 Examples from the Swan of Avon. God Works with the Meanest 
 Things, and so can Genius. Exceeding Value of this. God compared 
 to a Hen. A Discovery concerning Jesus, to which Attention is 
 Challenged. This Deserves Twenty Years' Study 378 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART FIFTEENTH. 
 
 CXL. Parallelism. Favorite of Hebrew Poesy. New Way in which the 
 Bible should be Printed. The Fathers of the Church give us Specimens. 
 CXLI. Numeration. The First Red Cent. Where a Saxpence 
 should be Put. In what Time Americans Expect to do Every Thing. 
 Sublime Peculiarity in the Deity. Obedience on God's Part. Dr. 
 Bushnell's Great Book. An Objection against Scripture Removed. 
 The Ballads Quoted. Stupendous Displays of Eating Prowess. Beef 
 and Ale Disappear. How Much can be Done in Battle by a Stay-lace. 
 Folly of Unbelief. Wit from Joe Miller. Solemnity from an Old 
 Mystic. A Jocund Landlord. The Town Mouse and the Country 
 Mouse. CXLII. Sudden Address. Distinction between Rhetoric and 
 Logic. First Approach to the Sea. Sense Expostulates with Reason. 
 What Charm Avon's Swan puts in Slightest Turns of Utterance. My 
 Mother in Heaven is still my Mother even at that Distance. An Inim- 
 itable Address that was Sudden. CXLIII. Surprisal. Our Ever-dear 
 and Thrice-honored Demosthenes. Jesus, a Master of Oratory. The 
 Sufferings of Jesus not the most Deplorable. Some French Roman 
 Catholic Sermons with very Little Popery in them are very Noble. 
 CXLIV. Reservation. Aaron Burr, Satan-like. CXLV. Pause. 
 Caesar in his Coffin. Pope's Death-bed. CXLVI. Double Meaning. 
 Two Smart Specimens. CXLVII. Mimicry. Sea Lingo and Law 
 Lingo. A Mare that the Lawyers Swallowed. Monastery at Midnight. 
 CXLVIII. Archaism. Authors, their Rust and their Gold. Soft 
 Sounds. CXLIX. Concession. CL. Paramologia. CLI. Synchoresis, 
 or Permission. Poor Man's Cottage. Oratory Fed by Bible. Great 
 Speech by Ames. Hymn by Watts. A Man Pulled up to Heaven by 
 his Ears. A Swiss Lauds Holy Writ. Jesus Wishes to be Refuted and 
 is. Do you Believe Eternal Things ? CLII. Prohibition 398 
 
Table of Contents. xxxiii 
 
 CHAPTER XXL 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART SIXTEENTH. 
 
 CLIII. Indirect Statement, or Coverture. The Gentle Hint. Attack by 
 Lord Chatham. A Great Sally by Patrick Henry. Everett's Defense 
 of Daniel Webster. Sir Walter Raleigh and the Lady's Pigs. CLIV. 
 Specification of Details. Portraits of Robespierre, Danton, and Marat. 
 Eloquence by Burke and Curran. The Captive in his Dungeon. A Miser 
 in his Coffin. Dr. Bethune makes Good Use of a Door-lock. Steal- 
 ing the Coo was Necessary. CLV. Plurals. CLVI. Optation, or Wish. 
 The Fat Monk who Wished to be Kicked. CLVII. Anacoenosis. 
 Applying to Others for an Opinion. What Drubbing Means. Prepar- 
 ing to Read the Bible Nobly. Two Things we Want on Sunday. 
 CLVIII. Supposition. By Junius and by Payson. CLIX. Isolation. 
 The Great French Pulpit Triumvirate. Awful Sermon by Jonathan 
 Edwards. Demosthenes. What is Highest in the Pulpit. CLX. Uni- 
 fication. Shakespeare Succeeds. CLXI. Assumption of Agreement. 
 Several First-rate Examples. CLXII. Pretended Assent. By a Soldier. 
 CLXIII. Interpolation. Shakespeare Excels in Oratory as much as 
 in Poesy. A Misfortune that Befalls a Stocking. CLXIV. Catachresis. 
 Philosophy of the Ungrammatical. CLXV. Anacoluthon : a Kind of 
 Bad Grammar that is Good. CLX VI. Affirmative Negation. Beauti- 
 ful Poem by Alice Gary. CLXVII. Negative Affirmation. Fun from 
 Saxe. CLXVIII. Community. CLXIX. Proprietorship. CLXX. 
 Prolepsis. CLXXI. Procatalepsis. What in the World can these Two 
 Mean? What can be Meant by Reading the Bible so Badly in the 
 Pulpit? 417 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART SEVENTEENTH. 
 
 CLXXII. Self-substitution. Put Yourself in Another's Place. Fine from 
 Dr. Griffin. CLXXIII. Retort. By Pitt, against Slave - trade. 
 CLXXIV. Conversion. By Demosthenes. A Likeness done to the 
 Death. Disaster on the Battle-field. Bidding us Good-morning in 
 Heaven. CLXX V. The Prosaic. Wife, Children, and Friends. Lob- 
 bin Clout Turnips and Oatmeal. CLX XVI. Indirection. A Mag- 
 nificent Reception. CLXXVII. Oratorical Syllepsis. Wounding the 
 Flesh, Tearing the SouL CLXXVIII. Attitude. The Moon takes up 
 a Tail. Slaying Isaac twice over in the Pulpit. An Epic Attitude ; by 
 Napoleon and by Algernon Sydney. The most Sublime of all Attitudes. 
 Pitt Kills by One. Sir Walter Dying. CLXXIX. Epiphonema. 
 Grand Examples from Milton ; from the German; from Burke. Transla- 
 tion from Spanish by your Author. CLXXX. Abbreviation. Gents on 
 Broadway Cane in Hand. CLXXXI. Hendiadys. The Might of an 
 Archangel. CLXXXII. Antonomasia. Proper Name for a Common 
 
 C 
 
xxxiv Table of Contents. 
 
 Name. A Village Hampden. A D.D. Deep in Love. CLXXXIIT. 
 Alliteration. Rhyme at the Beginning. Henry Clay Inherits Three I's. 
 Praise of the Robin. Prince Arthur's Crest. A Beautiful River 
 Scene. September Lauded. Picture of a Mill. A True Poet from 
 California. Your Author Ventures a Poem. CLXXXIV. Poetic 
 Forms. Scottish Doric much Commended. Warnings against Frip- 
 pery. Tinsel from Tennyson. A Great Truth from an Able French- 
 man 440 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART EIGHTEENTH. 
 
 CLXXXV. Sudden Transition. Maggie Lauder comes frae Fyfe to De- 
 light us. An Invitation which Some of you will be too Glad to Accept. 
 Execution by a Rapid Widow. Two Fat Duennas Devoured. Glad 
 that a Baby has nae Wings. CLXXXVI. Allusion. Atheists Branded. 
 A Smoke-pipe. " Let Newton be !" Sir Walter Admonishes us to 
 Keep the Sabbath. Boiling in a Caldron. Master the Bible if you 
 would Master the Heart. " Shoo-fly !" Old Schoolmaster lets out 
 School. Eagle on a Thunderbolt. CLXXXVII. Hint CLXXXVI II. 
 Ascription of Determination. Able Passage from the French. 
 CLXXXIX. Periphrasis, or Circumlocution. Dean Swift Cuts Deep. 
 We Correct a Mistake made by many Authors. Old Way to Make 
 Poets Fluent. "Trundling the Hoop "not Dignified enough. Dr. John- 
 son Talks Big ; as also McQueen. Hugh Miller, or Old Red. Plain 
 Mary. Definition of a Fishing-rod. A Large Variety of very Clever 
 Expressions. CXC. Superfine English made Fun of. CXCI. Inter- 
 pretation. Your Author has another Fytte. CXCII. Proverbs. A 
 Fine Collection from the Yorubas in Africa. Others that are First-rate. 
 A Long Spoon Needed for Queer Society. Please Don't Sup with 
 Him. CXCIII. The Third Person. Pathetic Instance. CXCIV. Odd 
 Rhymes. " Shall " and " Will " Mastered at Last. As also the Latin 
 Verbs. CXCV. Odd Bits of Prose. CXCVI. Household Words. 
 They are Praised very Greatly, and Great Examples Given. CXCVII. 
 Pretended Depreciation. How they Court in Ireland. CXC VIII. Rhe- 
 torical Use of the Past. Philosophy of Rhetoric. CXCIX. Rhetorical 
 Use of the Future Fine Poem of Victor Hugo's, Translated by Author. 
 CC. Ascription of Rationality to Lower Animals. A New Defense of 
 Balaam's Ass Worth Reading. CCI. Nicknames. Panegyric on Rev. 
 Dr. Guthrie. CCII. The Doric. CCIII. Impersonation, or Character- 
 acting. CCIV. The Materialistic. CCV. The Singular Number. 
 CCVI. Double Words. An Expression Dear to Burns and to Chal- 
 mers. CCVII. Celerity. Smallest Figures are Grains of Gunpowder. 
 CCVIII. Epithetic. Go to School to Homer. CCIX. Passing from 
 Literal to Figurative. " Dried Tongue." A Good Sample from Rev. 
 Dr. Mott. CCX. Threat. Love will Produce it. CCXI. Repose. The 
 Brow of the Dead Invoked. Death of Demosthenes 459 
 
Table of Contents. xxxv 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART NINETEENTH. 
 
 CCXII. Bulk. Uncouth Size. Polyphemus not a Beauty. Leviathan. 
 Picture of Death. CCXIII. Classicality. Fine Instance from Sir 
 Walter Raleigh. CCXIV. Rallying-Cries. Battle of Bannockburn. 
 A Great Contest coming Soon. CCXV. Appeal to Knowledge. Bat- 
 tle of Blenheim. CCXVL Reverse. Smart Hit by a Yankee. 
 CCXVII. Specification of Place. CCXVIII. Specification of Time. 
 On Eve of Marathon. Before the Armada. The Normans Start for 
 England. CCXIX. Cry of Warning. Dreadful Preparations to Kill 
 Two Chickens. A Jackass Brays. CCXX. Familiarity. Beautiful 
 by Luther. No Buffoonery in the Pulpit. CCXXI. The Obverse. 
 From Macaulay. Praise and Blame of Woman. Closing Remarks: 
 i. Our English is but Half Developed. Grand New Words. A Great 
 Attempt in this way by Author to Coin a New Word Cosmarch. 
 Our Country is not yet Baptized. 2. The Homely is again Urged. 
 Examples, and Good Ones from Dr. Mott. A Mighty Effect made by 
 " You Sha'n't !" 3. Sources whence Figures may be Obtained. 4. 
 Shakespeare's Three Chief Faults. 5. One Hundred Figures still to 
 be Discovered. Send them in, for our Tenth Edition. 6. Certain Ad- 
 mirable Productions to be Read by you. 7. Suggestiveness, Try to 
 Acquire. Lastly, Medley, Number Two. See Close of Chapter XII. 
 Panegyric on the Bible, by a Romanist. Dryden Lauds Cromwell. 
 Martyrdom of Honest Hugh Latimer. Fine Poem from Spanish, Trans- 
 lated by your Author. . . ; 494 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART TWENTIETH. 
 
 CCXXII. Parody. What Caricature is in Portrait-painting. The Last 
 Golden Dollar Bewept. Daemon of Socrates. CCXXIII. Idioms. A 
 Charm in the Spectator. Thomas Fuller highly Bepraised. " Moving, 
 Sir," saith the Yankee. Style Recommended of Defoe, Paley, Steele. 
 Inimitable Grace of Addison. Cicero is Attacked and Admired. 
 Amusing Inconsistencies in English Language. Burns Compared to 
 Tennyson. Tennyson is Decidedly too Fine. CCXXIV. Parable. 
 Severe Complaint against Modern Pulpit in this One Point Never a 
 Parable. Some Examples. Make Jesus your Chief Model for Pulpit 
 Oratory. Your Author Breaks out. Tennyson's "Queen Mary" is a 
 Manly, Plain Exposure of Priests. He is now too Earnest to be Dan- 
 dyish. CCXXV. Our Last Figure is here at Last Allegory. " The 
 Mariner's Hymn." No Allegory in the Bible. Account of Bunyan. 
 Popping the Question. Hawthorne's " Celestial Railroad." Mr. Hide 
 Sin in the Heart, Mr. Scaly Conscience, and Others like Him. A List 
 of Noble Allegories. Longfellow's " Ship of State." Peggy and Jenny 
 
xxxvi Table of Contents. 
 
 Discuss the Great Question, Is a Married or a Single Life the Better ? 
 Meanings in a Gothic Cathedral. Close of our Subject. Have we 
 Established our Daring Claim to Thorough Originality? May United 
 States and Britain, that have One Great Language, be One Great Nation. 
 Farewell, in a Poetic Outburst 512 
 
 LIST OF FIGURES OF SPEECH 531 
 
 INDEX 535 
 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ONE main object of this volume is to set forth the 
 power, beauty, wealth, and wit of language the Might 
 and Mirth of Literature by taking a wide survey of our 
 American and English writers, from the Anglo-Saxon 
 times till now; not from many unconnected points of 
 view, but from strictly one point whence, as from a 
 green hill-side in the centre of a great domain, the whole 
 rich landscape can be beheld. That one view-point is 
 Figurative Language ; by their mode of using which you 
 may with accuracy judge of our authors, by almost all 
 of whom figures of speech are largely employed, from 
 the gravest disquisition to the airiest breathing of song 
 that ever milk-maid chanted over her milking-pail. This 
 volume will thus possess strict artistic and scientific 
 unity. 
 
 Besides and of this assertion the severest scrutiny is 
 challenged, the affirmation being very venturesome and 
 improbable the author avers that this plan of his has 
 the merit, even at this late day, of the most entire orig- 
 inality ; never before has figurative language been taken 
 as a point from which to examine a whole literature. 
 Nobody will readily believe that, after the most invent- 
 ive minds have been treating of literature for twenty-two 
 centuries, an entirely new and exceedingly comprehen- 
 
xxxviii Introduction. 
 
 sive and searching mode of treatment can possibly re- 
 main to be discovered ; yet such is the case, remarkable 
 as is the fact ; as the quaint old French essayist, Mon- 
 taigne, has said : " The flowers I have gathered are from 
 others ; the string that ties them together is mine own." 
 A string to which we ascribe great worth. This volume 
 claims to be of the greatest value in studying language 
 and literature, and of special use to all public speakers 
 for instance, to clergymen and to lawyers. 
 
 Farther, there is no even tolerably good treatise on 
 Figures existing at present in our language Is there in 
 any other tongue? There is no consecutive discussion 
 of them of more than a few pages ; the examples brought 
 forward by all others being trivial in the extreme and 
 threadbare ; while the main conception of what consti- 
 tutes the chief class of figures is altogether narrow, er- 
 roneous, and unphilosophical. Writers generally, even 
 the ablest, are wholly in the dark as to the precise dis- 
 tinction between a trope and a metonymy ; and very few 
 even of literary men have so much as ever heard of Im- 
 plication or Hypocatastasis, one of the most important 
 figures, and one, too, that is perpetually shedding its 
 light on us. 
 
 On all occasions, mournful and joyous, figures break 
 in ; if any thing is natural, they are. Professor Wilson, 
 the once celebrated editor of Blackwood's Magazine 
 Christopher North he called himself one of the noblest- 
 looking of men, was waited on in his study by the young 
 gentleman who had won his daughter's heart : the youth 
 wished to obtain papa's consent. The Professor heard 
 him, and was satisfied ; the match was in every respect 
 a good one. He rung the bell for Miss Wilson. She 
 came blushing like the morn. An author had sent a 
 
Introduction. xxxix 
 
 book to Wilson, on the fly-leaf of which were written 
 the words, " With the author's compliments." The Pro- 
 fessor tore out the leaf, pinned it to his daughter's dress, 
 and presented her to her lover certainly a figurative 
 use of the inscription. 
 
 Two things might almost scare you from the study of 
 these forms of expression. The first is, the great num- 
 ber of them which rhetoricians enumerate. Holmes, in 
 his "Rhetoric Made Easy," published in 1755, gives a 
 list of two hundred and fifty ; and in this volume two 
 hundred and twenty are catalogued, all of eminent value, 
 besides many elegant subvarieties: for instance, thirty- 
 two metonymies ; but thus you should the more be con- 
 vinced beforehand how overflowing is the exuberance of 
 our theme, whose every variety is a variety of beauty. 
 Language! How many-tinted a mountain haze is this, 
 through which the sun of thought is shining ! The other 
 circumstance, for a moment alarming, is the hard names, 
 meaningless save to such as are profound in Greek, by 
 which rhetors catalogue the weapons of oratory. A great 
 pity we have not English names for them a long word, 
 unmeaning to all but classical scholars, though it may be 
 taken direct from the most refined of languages, being to 
 an English, a Celtic, or an American ear nothing better 
 than a barbarism. Joseph Addison, in one of his wonder- 
 fully graceful papers in the Spectator which renowned 
 periodical was begun in 1710 and discontinued in 1714 
 thus ridicules these names so overrun with syllables : " I 
 remember a country schoolmaster of my acquaintance 
 told me once that he had been in company with a gen- 
 tleman whom' he looked upon to be the greatest para- 
 grammatist among the moderns. Upon inquiry, I found 
 my learned friend had dined that day with Mr. Swan, the 
 
xl Introduction. 
 
 famous punster ; and desiring him to give me some ac- 
 count of Mr. Swan's conversation, he told me that he 
 generally talked in the Paronomasia ; that he sometimes 
 gave into the Ploce ; but that, in his humble opinion, he 
 shined most in the Antanaclasis." We pledge ourselves, 
 however, to explain very thoroughly every crabbed many- 
 syllabled term we introduce, and to illustrate each from 
 our great authors, by examples as radiant as genius and 
 merriment can make them. We shall use, too, English 
 names as far as we possibly can, giving the Greek names 
 at the same time. For all science uses, more and more, 
 Greek nomenclature so utterly mistaken are the narrow 
 minds who call the language of the undying Greeks, con- 
 temptuously, a dead language. 
 
 A figure is a form a word or words thrown into a 
 peculiar form. A word is used figuratively when it is 
 brought forward in a form, construction, or application 
 different from its first or its simplest form, construction, 
 or application. Thus, when we speak of the head of an 
 animal, we use the word " head " in its literal and first 
 signification, as meaning that part of the body in which 
 are placed the eyes, nose, and so forth ; but when we 
 speak of the head of an army, we think of the resem- 
 blance between an army and an animal's body, as to the 
 highest or most prominent part in the animaland in the 
 army, and then we apply the name of that part of the 
 animal to the similar part of the army. In the same way, 
 the dawn and the twilight mean originally the earliest 
 and latest parts of the day ; but figuratively these two 
 terms are applied to the earliest and latest parts of other 
 things as the dawn of bliss, the twilight hours of life. 
 You see at once that forms or figures are often the fruits 
 of that prolific faculty of association which so strongly in- 
 
Introduction. xli 
 
 fluences the mind. The ordinary names, qualities, and 
 acts of things are ascribed to other things with which 
 they are associated in time or place, or by the tie of cause 
 and effect, or by the perception of delicate and beautiful 
 resemblances that flicker on the surface or that centre 
 in the heart of objects ; so that thus figures can give to 
 things otherwise cold and dark a lustre and a glow 
 caught from the fairest or sublimest existences of earth 
 or- sky. To employ a word with a figurative force is as 
 good as to add a new term to the language a term 
 dipped in the richest rose-hues of fancy, or coming on 
 us with a sudden, delightful surprise, all twinkling with 
 the rapid flashings of wit. To say of Venice that it is a 
 city half land, half water, is a very plain statement. 
 Washington Irving, in his " Geoffrey Crayon's Tales of a 
 Traveler," which, like his " Life of Washington," gives 
 by no means a great impression of power, puts it thus : 
 " Venice, that mermaid of a city." You perceive that 
 our American Addison was led to call the Queen of the 
 Adriatic a mermaid from this point of resemblance be- 
 tween that creature and Venice, that both have a double 
 nature one nature belonging to the land, the other to 
 the sea. If we say, " Our present sufferings, by improv- 
 ing us, will give peace and virtue in the future," this 
 would be language as plain as it can be made. In the 
 closing sentiment of Dr. Brown's tragedy of Barbarossa 
 the same truth is flung into this form : 
 
 " The heavens but try our virtue by affliction, 
 And oft the cloud which wraps the present hour 
 Serves but to brighten all our future days." 
 
 To say that a swollen river produces a strange noise 
 at midnight is literally true. John Home, in his standard 
 
xlii Introduction. 
 
 tragedy of Douglas, makes a peasant hear the water- 
 kelpie shriek ; for fancy and fear whisper that the mid- 
 night stream dashes with the cry of a wild and angry 
 spirit : 
 
 " One stormy night, as I remember well, 
 The wind and rain beat hard upon our roof; 
 Red came the river down ; and loud and oft 
 
 The angry spirit 'of the water shrieked." 
 
 
 
 Take an extract from the great heart of Dr. Chalmers ; 
 mark the numerous figures to which his zeal for the 
 truth constantly hurries him : 
 
 " There must be a sad mistake somewhere. The commission 
 put into our hands is to go arid preach the Gospel to every 
 creature under heaven ; and the announcement sounded forth 
 from heaven's vault was, 'Peace on earth; good will to man.' 
 There is no freezing limitation here ; but a largeness and mu- 
 nificence of mercy boundless as space free and open as the 
 expanse of the firmament. We can not doubt that the time of 
 the complete emancipation of Christianity is coming, when it 
 shall break loose from the imprisonment in which it is held ; 
 but meanwhile there is, as it were, a stricture upon it, not yet 
 wholly removed, in virtue of which the largeness and liberality 
 of Heaven's own purposes have been made to descend in par- 
 tial and scanty droppings through the strainers of an artificial 
 theology ; instead of falling, as they ought, in a universal shower 
 upon the world." 
 
 The above extract is from Chalmers's " Institutes of 
 Theology," which we recommend highly. There is often 
 in Chalmers's style a lumbering want of classical finish, 
 especially in his " Lectures on the Romans ;" but in his 
 "Institutes" this fault is almost wholly absent, while 
 every paragraph glows with that deep-seated warmth of 
 
^ Introduction. xliii 
 
 eloquence which so greatly distinguishes him among di- 
 vines. Especially read his " Commercial Discourses " and 
 his "Astronomical Discourses." The latter had a circu- 
 lation when they first appeared as great as Scott's Wav- 
 erley Novels had at first an invaluable hint to our pulpit 
 instructors to come forward as the chief popularizers of 
 science. To do so, means not that Christ is to be sub- 
 ordinated to science, but that science delights to be in 
 accord with him, and yearns, unconstrained, to do him 
 honor. 
 
 We are proving that figures are most ornamental, and 
 are a growth of nature ; as much so as the violets of 
 spring or the rays of dawn. That they are natural and 
 instinctive, take an incident which we find in that delight- 
 ful work, Lord Campbell's " Lives of the Lord Chancel- 
 lors of England." There is a figure, ycleped Litotes, or 
 Lessening, which Sir Thomas More's Fool uses, proving 
 that, both to grave divines and to jesters, to use figures 
 comes as natural as to breathe : 
 
 " Yesterday while we were dining," saith the ever-merry and 
 ever-wise Sir Thomas, " Pattison, the fool, seeing a guest with 
 a very large nose, said, * There is one at table who has been 
 trading to the Promontory of Noses.' All eyes were turned to 
 the great nose, though we discreetly preserved silence, that the 
 good man might not be abashed. Pattison, perceiving the mis- 
 take he had made, tried to set himself right, and said : ' He 
 lies who says the gentleman's nose is large ; for, on the faith 
 of a true knight, it is rather a small one.' At this, all being in- 
 clined to laugh, I made signs for the fool to be turned out of 
 the room. But Pattison, who boasted that he brought every 
 affair that he commenced to a happy conclusion, resisted ; and, 
 placing himself in my seat at the head of the table, said aloud, 
 with my tone and gesture : * There is one thing I would have 
 
xliv Introduction. f 
 
 you to know that gentleman there has not the least bit of nose 
 on his face.' " 
 
 Mark how unaffected, buoyant, elastic, is the prose of 
 this great, good man, as far back as the time of Henry 
 VIII., earlier than the birth of Shakespeare. Little good 
 English prose will you find sooner than this. The first 
 prose work published in England was Sir John Mande- 
 ville's " Travels." 
 
 Figures of speech, then, it is proved, are, when they 
 are worth writing, pre-eminently natural and decorative, 
 as are the dew-drops on the grass, or the frost-work on 
 the window. But they are far more: often they are a 
 necessity of argument, of truth, of reason, of religion. 
 Absolutely impossible is it, in many cases, to set forth 
 what is mental save through words originally descriptive 
 of outward and material things, but applied to things 
 mental from some resemblance in nature or in effects 
 yes, in effects between the outward and the inward. 
 Thus we speak of the light of thought, the warmth of 
 indignation, the chill of fear ; we use such expressions as 
 iron firmness, melting affection, piercing judgment ; nay, 
 in Holy Scripture, the Supreme One hath to be depicted 
 with natural organs, not from any tendency to ascribe a 
 body to God the Hebrew idea of the unity of Jeho- 
 vah, an idea which forms the most sublime and most 
 peculiar historic fact in ancient history, rises starry high 
 above the notion of his having a body but simply be- 
 cause the All-Encircling could otherwise be scarcely at 
 all described to such as we are, to whom, from our in- 
 fancy, matter, inexhaustibly suggestive anpl teeming .with 
 the thoughts of Deity, has been eloquently offering its 
 wondrous forms as emblems, illustrations, hieroglyphics 
 of the spiritual. This subject of figures and rhetoric 
 
Introduction. xlv 
 
 runs up to the Divine, and hath its roots in God. There- 
 fore the language of the Old Testament, matchless in 
 grandeur, massiveness, simplicity, is the language of com- 
 mon-sense and universal feeling. Nothing can be more 
 manifest than that the Great Thinker intended to utter 
 forth the thoughts of his mind by the works of his 
 hand here, by a mountain's mass ; there, by an ocean's 
 flow ; at our feet, by the glinting of a flower ; over our 
 heads, by the geometric curves of a system. Matter and 
 mind must be interwoven ; language must be continually 
 busying itself to express these twain, and the one of 
 them by the other. From the deepest sources it follows, 
 not from trivial causes, as many dream, that human speech 
 must be full of figures ; and these figures, so mind-like 
 often is matter, so far from obscuring the truth, set it forth 
 with far more graphic vigor, nay, even with far greater ac- 
 curacy. Mark what we say with far greater accuracy 
 (Zech. ii., 8). We in the cities of the nineteenth century 
 can not speak of the Vast Pervader with more philosophic 
 wisdom than did the noble Emir Abraham under his oak- 
 shaded tent ; we, too, have to revere that Eye and lean 
 on that Hand. It can not but be, then, that the Great 
 Book of religion must be the great book of figures. 
 
 By no means are figures confined to savage or half- 
 savage life : they are the result of every fervid passion or 
 tender feeling that quickens the eye of the heart or sets 
 the intellect aglow. But it has been argued that figura- 
 tive language must continually, in the course of ages, be 
 becoming less and less vivid ; for it is at a very early pe- 
 riod in the formation of a language that words which at 
 first were descriptive of things external were used to de- 
 scribe mind ; and in the course of long usage such terms 
 lose all their liveliness ^they cease to be felt as figures. 
 
xlvi Introduction. 
 
 We speak of a person's Yankee sharpness of mind, or we 
 say his heart is hard, without our feeling more in the 
 phrase than the most commonplace statement. It is 
 manifest that thus through long handling a large num- 
 ber of figures can not but lose all their force as figures; 
 and so some writers, prominent among whom is Lord 
 Macaulay, have rushed to the conclusion that language 
 must constantly be growing less poetic, less picture-like. 
 But such tendency is far more than counterbalanced by 
 the inventive, quick-discovering, keenly observant ener- 
 gy of imagination and the heart ever finding out new 
 ties, new points of association between one object and 
 another. And so, while spring carpets the earth with 
 leafage and youth ; while contentment and good temper 
 beam from the face of sisters and mothers ; while there 
 are warm hearts, summer flowers, and streams that sing 
 under apple blossoms ; while mountain-peaks converse 
 with heaven, and the North Star guides the seafarer ; 
 while original genius sees that in the daisy with Burns 
 or hears that in the skylark with Shelley which no one 
 till that moment ever saw or heard no fear of language 
 losing its freshness on the whole, or its sheen of poesy. 
 Nay, as in the progress of man, as Discovery, like a might- 
 ier Columbus, unfolds Nature's glorious or lovely secrets, 
 and whole worlds that are new, Science itself will ever 
 be supplying to fancy new materials. 
 
 It is a fact, than which none is more important, con- 
 tinually to be borne in mind if we would attain a wise 
 creed, that no public speaker ever used figures more 
 abundantly than the Christ. How else could he have 
 discoursed of the inward struggle against sin? of the 
 beauties that shine in duty and in God ? of the undying 
 principles of truth and providence ? On the text, seem- 
 
Introduction. xlvii 
 
 ingly so simple, " I am the way, and the truth, and the 
 life," Daniel de Superville, eminent as a French Protest- 
 ant preacher, thus expresses himself: 
 
 "That the language of Jesus is evidently figurative can not 
 be doubted. Here you perceive how very familiar and com- 
 mon the use of figurative terms was with Him, even when He 
 was conversing with His dearest disciples, with a view to their 
 instruction and consolation. Such modes of expression serve 
 to convey an idea with more vividness and power, and in fewer 
 words than could be done by simple terms. There is some- 
 thing at once far more concise and energetic in Jesus calling 
 Himself ' the way, the truth, and the life ' than if He had simply 
 described Himself as the guide to heaven, the teacher of truth, 
 and the giver of life." 
 
 Thus the study of figures has an emphatic bearing on 
 religion, and will bring into brilliant and unexpected view 
 certain remarkable peculiarities, never before pointed out, 
 in the intellect of the Saviour. 
 
 Let us hang around the portal of this work a bunch of 
 miscellaneous figures, in the hope that their fragrance 
 may allure you to enter. How many can be understood 
 and enjoyed by the commonest minds ! 
 
 Hear Henry Ward Beecher he speaks a universal 
 dialect : 
 
 " You need not break the glasses of a telescope, or coat them 
 over with paint, in order to prevent you from seeing through 
 them. Just breathe upon them, and the dew of your breath 
 will shut out all the stars. So it does not require great crimes 
 to hide the light of God's countenance : little faults can do it 
 just as well." 
 
 Or saith he 
 
 " The mother's heart is the child's school-room." 
 
xlviii Introduction. 
 
 Or again 
 
 " It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim-milk." 
 
 6r we open that perfect poem, Tennyson's " Enoch 
 Arden." It contains a famous line, meant to utter forth 
 the sound made by the rush of waves on the beach a 
 use of words termed Onomatopoeia, or, as we would call 
 it, sound-painting : 
 
 "The league-long roller thundering on the reif.'' 
 
 Douglas Jerrold's epitaph on Charles Knight was 
 
 "Good Night!" 
 
 When the fool-hardy and atheistic letters of Thomas 
 Atkinson and Miss Martineau appeared, he observed that 
 the creed of the twain was 
 
 "There is no God, and Miss Martineau is his prophet." 
 
 For a fine ellipsis, mark the close of the following pas- 
 sage from the sublime and thunderous prose of Milton. 
 He is discoursing of how an epic must be prepared : 
 
 " A work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the 
 vapors of wine ; nor to be obtained of dame Memory and her 
 siren daughters ; but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit 
 who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends 
 out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch 
 and purify the lips of whom he pleases." 
 
 Mimesis, or mimicry, we give next, from a work of 
 great ability, " Hans Breitman's Ballads," written in Penn- 
 sylvania Dutch a work of humor by Mr. Leland, quite 
 in the American style and humor every where must 
 have in it " the flavor of character." The captain, Hans, 
 is captured by the rebels : 
 
 " Dey shtripped off his goat, and skyugglecl his poots ; 
 Dey dressed him mit rags of a repel recruits ; 
 
Introduction. xlix 
 
 But von gray-hair'd oldt feller shmiled grimly, and bet 
 That Breitman vouldt pe a pad egg for dem yet. 
 " He has more in ish pipe as dem vellers allows ; 
 He has cardts yet in hand und das spiel ist nicht aus ; 
 Dey'll find dat cley dock in der teufel to poard 
 De day dey pooFd Breitman veil ofer de ford." 
 
 Good Matthew Henry, in his " Commentary," found it 
 necessary to employ a figure when he said 
 
 "How delightful it is to have the bird in the bosom sing 
 sweetly." 
 
 And Bowes had to resort to one in his " Illustrative 
 Gatherings" when he wrote 
 
 " The Christian who has put aside his religion because he is 
 in worldly company is like a man who has put off his shoes 
 because he is walking among thorns." 
 
 In concluding this Introduction, we urge upon you six 
 points, valuable in bringing this subject before us : 
 
 1. Seek not to disparage the claims of the Greek and 
 Latin classics, in order, forsooth, to clear the way for the 
 fuller study of English. Though nothing were said of 
 them as masterpieces of style, what incomparable aid 
 they give toward the acquisition of our own English ! 
 We meet in Virgil the Latin verb cano. We hunt it up 
 in a lexicon ; but there it may have fifteen or twenty 
 English words by which it is translated. The young stu- 
 dent has therefore to discover which of these translations 
 suits the context best ; that is, he has forced on him the 
 very close study of all these fifteen English words. 
 
 2. It is a duty and a delight, which we assure you will 
 accompany the students of this volume from beginning 
 to end, to mark the thousand forms of music that teem 
 in our language, both in prose and poetry. Are you un- 
 
 D 
 
1 s Introduction. 
 
 der the delusion that only in poetry is cadence found ? 
 The prose of our great prose writers, such as Milton, 
 Dryden, South, Jeremy Taylor, Addison, Burke, Ruskin, 
 overflows with melody, in their single words and in the 
 wondrously cunning structure of their sentences ; while 
 English poetry is capable of as many varieties of meas- 
 ure as hath Horace himself nay, even when the meas- 
 ure is deemed by the uninitiated to be one, it is actually 
 shaping its flow into many a variety of break, eddy, and 
 ripple. For proof of this, turn to the opening of " Para- 
 dise Lost," quoted at page 149. The cesural pause is 
 varied with consummate art, rather with a seraphic in- 
 stinct, in almost every one of the twenty-five marvelous 
 opening lines : as after the words disobedience, tree, 
 world, Eden, us, must, Sinai, shepherd, and so on ; from 
 which changes, inimitably sweet, arise the melodies that 
 emanate from Milton's pages ; as in a mighty forest each 
 great tree sways, in the wind of June, with a motion and 
 a rustling of its foliage peculiar to itself. 
 
 To start at once your training as a lover of the melo- 
 dious, we place before you a few single lines remarkable 
 for their sweetness. Burns says of Tarn O'Shanter that, 
 in his celebrated midnight gallop, he was 
 
 " Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scotch sonnet." 
 This is exactly the process whereto you should addict 
 yourself. " Croon " over each of the subjoined, one hun- 
 dred times to begin with. Notice how front-rhyme, or 
 alliteration, intensifies the melody helps the honey, as 
 it were, to cling to the lip : 
 
 " Sonorous metal breathing martial sounds." Milton. 
 "Like a glow-worm golden in a dell of dew." Shelley. 
 " Blaw saft ye westlin' winds, blaw saft ; bring hame the laden 
 bees." Burns. 
 
Iniroduction, li 
 
 " It was an Abyssinian maid, and on her dulcimer she played, 
 Singing of Mount Abora."* 
 
 "The splendor falls on castle walls, 
 
 And snowy summits old in story ; 
 The long light shakes across the lakes, 
 
 And the wild cataract leaps in glory." Tennyson. 
 
 3. Another point to have fixed here at the outset of 
 these special studies is to specify the smallest appara- 
 tus of books that is essential to the subject. First, the 
 Bible ; second, Shakespeare ; third, Paradise Lost. To 
 Demosthenes, also, freshly translated by your author, 
 very frequently will reference be made, and to the words 
 of Jesus, that coruscate with figures, especially such fig- 
 ures as take for granted the responsibility, the free will, 
 and the great faculties of man. We will use these ab- 
 breviations throughout these pages: S. and P. L., for 
 two of the authorities just named. 
 
 4. You can not too soon form a very high opinion of 
 the many high qualities of the one-syllabled words of 
 our tongue. The quickest way to get into such an opin- 
 ion is for each reader to go a-botanizing, and form a her- 
 barium of at least a hundred such lines. Exquisitely 
 will you be rewarded. We have collected a few. Ten- 
 nyson especially abounds in them. As all words, in all 
 languages, were at first one-syllabled, so it would appear 
 as if it were an instinct of genius and mental vigor to try 
 to get back to these monosyllables, in which the mus- 
 
 cular strength and lurking music of our great language 
 not a little lie. Admire with an intense enjoyment the 
 ivory finish, the fairy-like, delicate polish and vocalization 
 of the lines we refer to. Your gathering, of a hundred 
 of them will, of itself, entitle you to be named a person 
 
lii Introduction. 
 
 of exquisite taste ; while you will have in your posses- 
 sion a pellucid fountain of enjoyment the most refined. 
 
 "The sun is up, and 'tis a morn of May." Leigh Hunt. 
 
 " The moon is up, and yet it is not night." Byron. 
 
 " God wept ! The tear he shed, its name was Christ."- 
 Author. 
 
 " Where are the songs of spring ? Ah, where are they ? 
 We wail the wants that oft wait on the Muse." Heywood. 
 
 "On that lone shore loud moans the sea." Wild. 
 
 "He of his port was meek as is a maid." Chaucer's Knight. 
 
 " Oh, it came o'er mine ear like the sweet South." Shakespeare. 
 
 " Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves." 
 Milton. 
 
 "So runs the round of life from hour to hour." Tennyson. 
 " We miss thy small step on the stair." Macbeth Moir. 
 
 " Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea." Words- 
 worths Milton. 
 
 " Oh, think on all my love, on all my woe." Campbell. 
 " He thought as a sage, yet he felt as a man." 
 " God swells the roar of sea on rock and reef, 
 Tunes the brook's lay of love, the lark's light trill." Author. 
 
 "How deft his touch, who rounds and wheels the worlds !" 
 Author. 
 
 "Not aught on earth that doth not change, save change." 
 Author. 
 
 " Oh, in that sleep of death what dreams may come." Shake- 
 speare" 
 
 " Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold." Milton. 
 " As far at sea is seen a peak of And, 
 Its base in cloud, but o'er its top the sun ; 
 So God, though wrapt in dusk, yet crown'd with Christ ! 
 
Introduction. liii 
 
 And so we're sure, as Love's great day rolls on, 
 
 The clouds will lift, and vales of Prime be shown." Author. 
 
 "With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies 
 How silently, and with how wan a face !" Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 5. That department of Rhetoric, or Art of Discourse, 
 which is by far the most important, is Invention. The 
 ignoring of this department in recent times has pitiably 
 degraded rhetoric. An intimate knowledge of the figures 
 in this volume will greatly quicken and happily guide 
 your powers of invention. We lately asked our pastor, 
 who had the previous Sunday, in a sermon on the para- 
 ble of the sower, divided it into three heads the soil, 
 the seed, the sower what led him to that division, which 
 to be admired has but to be heard. "Alliteration helped 
 a good deal," replied he, " for I wished the heads of dis- 
 course at least to be remembered ; and I knew that al- 
 literation would much help to fix them in my people's 
 minds." So with other figures : a knowledge of them 
 will much aid you to invent impressive ways of speech 
 a momentous consideration. 
 
 6. With a principle that soars very high, but not to be 
 on that account disliked or suspected, let us close our 
 Introduction. Not even will our painful feeling of per- 
 sonal unfitness shut our mouths. As Jesus is the em- 
 bodiment of the highest truth in morals and religion, so 
 is he the personation of the noblest poesy. The har- 
 monies of Handel and of Beethoven, every sublimest 
 minster and cathedral, the epics of Dante and of Milton, 
 attest the imperial sway which Christ so strangely yet so 
 undeniably puts forth over the realms of intellect. As 
 from the Cross comes a worship destined to dethrone 
 every other, so comes from that Cross, too, a literature 
 
liv Introduction. 
 
 to outglow every other literature. Not the highest view 
 this of the mission of the Messiah, yet a view worthy 
 and interesting. In the same way, the most essential 
 conception of the Deity is as the holy God who hates 
 sin, and as the Father God who loves souls. Yet it is de- 
 lightful, too, to mark how Jehovah rejoices in the beau- 
 tiful ; else why does he tint the sea-shell with such love- 
 ly colors, and wreathe the mountain -mists into such 
 graceful forms? And so, as we might anticipate of one 
 who is peculiarly the Son of God, wherever Jesus treads, 
 though his feet be weary or bleeding, yet the Beautiful 
 springs from his footprints, like the violet from the tears 
 of evening. Let us gather around his cradle, as the shep- 
 herds and the magi worship there, and yon strange me- 
 teor looks wondering down, and the last notes of the 
 angel choir die away far up in heaven, and deny it if you 
 can that exquisite poesy hovers around the Saviour. Or 
 think of him giving back her son to the mother -heart 
 of the widow of Nain ; or, empire on his brow, death 
 under his feet, uttering at the door of the sepulchre 
 these words of command, " Lazarus, come forth ;" or on 
 the midnight lake, saying to Gloom and Tempest, " Peace, 
 be still !" or see him like a great chief, who wraps 
 around him, to die in it, a death-mantle worthy of him 
 for the gloom of the eclipse was Christ's death-mantle. 
 The sublime floats around him like a luminous mist 
 around a sun that sets. Beyond measure he the most 
 poetic personage that ever walked the earth grand cen- 
 tral Figure of that mightiest of all epics, the epic of 
 Human Redemption, whereof every other epic is but a 
 slight episode. From him must come the brightest in- 
 spirations of poetry ; he must be the living soul of any 
 literature that is fit to shine on that path which we walk 
 toward the stars. 
 
THE MIGHT AND 
 
 i 
 
 MIRTH OF LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 FIGURES OF ETYMOLOGY. 
 PART FIRST. 
 
 FIGURES are of three kinds: Figures of Spelling or 
 Etymology, alterations of the original spelling of words ; 
 figures of Syntax, alterations of the original construction 
 of words ; figures of Rhetoric, deviations from the orig- 
 inal application of words, the moulding of them into 
 those forms which the more energetic moods of the 
 mind require. 
 
 Figures of Etymology are lowest in importance, but 
 they come first to be considered. We are thus constrain- 
 ed to begin with the least interesting part of our subject. 
 We can not put our best foot foremost. However, these 
 chapters will and must, on this very account, rise in in- 
 terest as we proceed. Yet even of Etymological figures 
 admirable use can be made : even they can impart an in- 
 expressible charm and delicacy to language. 
 
 I. Front-cut, or Aphseresis, very common in Allan 
 Ramsay, Burns, Tannahill, and other Scottish bards, is 
 
56 Might andt'vMif'th of Literature. 
 
 the cutting off one or more letters from the beginning 
 of a word : as 'ghast for aghast, 'mazed for amazed, 'fore 
 for before, 'feeble for enfeeble; as in Douglas Jerrold's 
 description of a scoundrel : " That scoundrel, sir ! why, 
 he'd sharpen a knife upon his father's tombstone to kill 
 his mother." So there is 'dures for endures, 'front for 
 confront, Venge for avenge, 'danger for endanger, 'tend 
 for attend, 'larms for alarms, 'scapes for escapes, 'proach- 
 es for approaches, 'Nelope for Penelope, 'sdeigned for 
 disdained, while speculation would thus be an honester 
 word, for then it would be peculation. Bret Harte tells 
 us of what goes on "down in 'Frisco." 
 
 Blind Harry is a name well remembered in Scotland. 
 He wrote " Sir William Wallace," a poetical biography 
 of the national chieftain of North Britain. We have 
 from him this line : 
 
 " Wham Thou's thou, Scot ? In faith thou 'serves a blow." 
 
 In the old form of the immortal ballad of " Chevy 
 Chace," written some time between 1422 and 1461, is 
 this line, very statuesque : 
 
 " The Piercie leaned on his brand, 
 
 And saw the Douglas dee : 
 He took the dead man by the hand, 
 And said, ' Woe's me for Thee !' " 
 
 We carry you back to old John Gower, a contempora- 
 ry of the great English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, though 
 much Chaucer's inferior, at least so far as the narrative 
 in the Canterbury Tales is concerned. Some of Chau- 
 cer's pieces are as heavy as Gower's. Gower died seven 
 years later than Chaucer. We quote from the " Confes- 
 sio Amantis " the Lover's Confession an exceedingly 
 long poem in English, with the scantiest possible supply 
 of poesy in it, but very valuable from the light it throws 
 on the history of the language. This mass of lifeless 
 doggrel has the conscience to inflict eight books on us. 
 
Figures of Etymology. 5 7 
 
 Considering that Parliament was opened by a speech in 
 English for the first time in 1362, and that in the be- 
 ginning of the fourteenth century, 130x3, the national lan- 
 guage was not as yet more than new-born to the Nor- 
 mans, it is astonishing that this author's pen gives us such 
 good English, which it costs so little trouble to read. The 
 poem was completed about 1392; Gower died in 1408. 
 This, his bulkiest work, was edited in 1857, by Dr. Rein- 
 hold Pauli, in three volumes. In 1300, at which time En- 
 glish must have been current among the common people, 
 the Court and the Law Courts used French ; the Church, 
 in any written documents it issued, used Latin ; Gower 
 himself wrote several of his works in Latin, and sev- 
 eral in French. We quote from his Fifth Book : 
 
 "Thus it befell upon a night 
 Whan there was nought but sterre light, 
 She (Medea, the Witch) was vanisshed right as her list, 
 That no wight but her self it wist, 
 And that was ate midnight tide ; 
 The world was still on every side. 
 With open hede and foot all bare 
 Her hare to sprad she gan to fare. 
 Upon her clothes girt she was, . 
 All specheles, and on the gras 
 She glode forth as an adder doth." 
 
 Francis Quarles, whose great vigor was often over- 
 grown by oddities, is the writer of a book called " Quar- 
 les's Emblems," once in great repute. In the following 
 significant stanza you can detect the Front-cuts : 
 
 " So rich is man, that all his debts being paid 
 His wealth's his winding-sheet wherein he's laid; 
 So young is man, that, broke with care and sorrow, 
 He's old enough to-day to die to-morrow." 
 
 From an epigram by Sir John Harrington, we take 
 the following, a favorable specimen of the writer's abil- 
 ity : 
 
58 Figures of Etymology. 
 
 " Treason doth never prosper ! What's the reason ? 
 For, if it prosper, none dare call it treason." 
 
 In the subjoined, the author of this volume concludes 
 with 'suage for assuage : 
 
 " Let Nature lead thee with her sister hand 
 To meditative vales to Alps God-fraught 
 Let mist-wrapt cataracts, sunrise-lighted hills, 
 Skies piled with thunder, Earth's volcanic thrills, 
 Awe thee to prayer ! May the bright, flute-voiced stream, 
 That sooth'd thy boyhood with sweet symphonies, 
 Still flow harmonious through thy heart in age, 
 And bring thy pillow many a youthful dream 
 Of childhood's mates and thy ancestral trees. 
 Ah ! sights and sounds of youth Eld's load can 'suage, 
 Like young birds singing in a rust-worn cage." 
 
 Ann Collins gives us 'dure for endure : 
 
 " O if we could with patience 
 
 A while possess the mind, 
 By inward consolations 
 
 We might refreshing find, 
 To sweeten all our crosses, 
 
 How little time they 'dure ! 
 So might we gain by losses, 
 
 And Sharp would Sweet procure." 
 
 On a certain occasion a miscreant threw a stone at the 
 head of George III. of England, more famous for his 
 sound moral life than for his brilliant intellect. His head 
 was popularly considered one of the thickest in Europe. 
 Dr.Wolcott (Peter Pindar, his "Pen-name") wrote the 
 following, on the idea that the head would have cracked 
 the stone : 
 
 " Talk no more of the lucky escape of the head 
 
 From a flint so unluckily thrown ; 
 I think very different, with thousands indeed 
 'Twas a lucky escape for the stone." 
 
Might and Mirth of Literature. 59 
 
 George P. Morris ranks as one of the best song-writers 
 of America. Take from him a stanza of his far-famed 
 song a close copy, as to its idea, of Thomas Campbell's 
 " Beechen Tree's Petition :" 
 
 " Woodman, spare that tree ! 
 
 Touch not a single bough ! 
 1 In youth it shelter'd me, 
 
 And I'll protect it now. 
 'Twas my forefather's hand 
 
 That placed it near his cot ; 
 There, woodman, let it stand : 
 Thy axe shall harm it not." 
 
 A pleasant touch of bolder aphaeresis is presented by 
 Michael Drayton, in his lengthy geographical poem, the 
 " Polyolbion." Of Robin Hood he speaks, England's fa- 
 mous forest outlaw : 
 
 "Then, 'taking them to rest, his merry men and he 
 Slept many a summer night under the greenwood tree." 
 
 We next select lines by Proctor, who has written much 
 and well under the name of Barry Cornwall. These lines 
 you will find in " Without and Within, a Lyric of Lon- 
 don " a contrast very powerfully drawn : 
 
 " WITHOUT. 
 " The outcast's fame was her doom to-day 
 
 Despair ! contempt ! By to-morrow's light 
 The roughen'd boards and the pauper's pall ; 
 
 And so she'll be flung to endless night. 
 Without a tear or a human sigh, 
 
 She's gone ! Poor life and its fever o'er ! 
 So let her in dark oblivion lie, 
 While the world runs merry as before. 
 
 " WITHIN. 
 " The skies are wild and the blast is cold ; 
 
 Loud riot and luxury brawl within. 
 
 Slaves are waiting, in crimson and gold, 
 
 The insolent nod of a leader of sin. 
 
60 Figures of Etymology. 
 
 The fire is crackling, wine is bubbling 
 Up in each glass to the beaded brim; 
 
 The jesters are laughing, the parasites quaffing, 
 ' Happiness ! honor !' and all for him !" 
 
 It was so usual for poets to be in debt in former times, 
 when there was no Great Public to patronize literature, 
 that the following is told both of Ben Jonson, Shakes- 
 peare's intimate, and of Burns's precursor in Scotland, the 
 gifted barber, Allan Ramsay. A creditor assured the 
 poet that his debt would be canceled if he told him, on 
 the spot and in rhyme, four things in four minutes : What 
 God is best pleased with ; what the devil is best pleased 
 with ; and what the world, and what he, his creditor. 
 Within the time the poet wrote : 
 
 " God is best pleased when men forsake their sin ; 
 The devil's best pleased when they persist therein ; 
 The world's best pleased when riches on them flow; 
 And you're best pleased when I pay what I owe." 
 
 We exemplify this figure farther from a pathetic poem 
 of an American bard, the Rev. John Pierpont. It is of 
 his son he speaks, taken from him by death, yet whom he 
 can not feel to be dead ; or rather he is continually for- 
 getting that the boy is dead, and as continually, with a 
 bitter start, awakening to the reality : 
 
 " I walk my parlor floor, 
 
 And through the open door 
 I hear a footfall on the chamber stair ; 
 
 I'm stepping toward the hall, 
 
 To give the boy a call 
 And then bethink me that he is not there." 
 
 In elegant diction, John Lyly, the once famous Eu- 
 phues, describes a game at cards between his Campaspe 
 and Cupid, in which Cupid loses his charms, one by one, 
 to the young lady : 
 
Figures of Etymology. 61 
 
 " The coral of his lip, the rose 
 Growing on's cheek (but how, none knows) ; 
 With these the dimple of his chin 
 All these did my Campaspe win." 
 
 How exquisitely the blissful feeling is brought out in 
 the following, by John Byrom, that aged parents grow 
 young again in their children : 
 
 "How should Hove the pretty creatures, 
 
 While round my knees they fondly cling ! 
 To see them look their mother's features, 
 
 And hear them lisp their mother's tongue ! 
 And when with envy Time transported 
 
 Shall think to rob us of our joys, 
 You'll in your girls again be courted, 
 
 And I'll go wooing in my boys." 
 
 The poems of Sir Robert Ayton were reprinted at Ed- 
 inburgh in 1844. This is the opening verse of one of the 
 best of his pieces ; at least it is ascribed to him by the 
 modern editor: * 
 
 " I do confess thou'rt smooth and fair, 
 
 And I might have gone near to love thee, 
 
 Had I not found the slightest prayer 
 
 That lips can speak had power to move thee ; 
 
 But I can let thee now alone 
 
 As worthy to be loved by none." 
 
 Southern embalms for us a deep feeling in these classic 
 vrords : 
 
 " Could I forget 
 
 What I have been, I might the better bear 
 What I am destined to. I'm not the first 
 That have been wretched. But, to think how much 
 I have been happier !" 
 
 How exquisite the line, by Thomas Sackville, Lord 
 Buckhurst, in " The Mirror of Magistrates," the best En- 
 glish poem in the disastrous 190 years between Chau- 
 
62 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 cer and Spenser. This line feels to us unsurpassable. 
 Please make a study of it. It owes a very great deal to 
 the humble aid of front-cut. We have not words to 
 express the refined delight which such usages of lan- 
 guage give us. Croon it over at least a hundred and 
 fifty times. How alliteration, too, aids : 
 
 " The darke had dimm'd the day ere I was 'ware." 
 
 We lead you next to a poet, born in the year of the 
 glorious Revolution, whose muse never visits the sublime 
 summits of Nature, such as Alps or Andes never gives 
 voice to the deeper or wilder emotions the nightingale 
 of Twickenham, Alexander Pope, that " Homer in a nut- 
 shell," unsurpassed in all those qualities of poesy that 
 rank as second in importance, such as smoothness, finish, 
 consummate tact, compact good sense, cutting sarcasm 
 ever wielded on virtue's side, elegant fancy, sparkling 
 wit. Ruskin has said that the two most accomplished 
 artists, merely as artists, who ever wrote, were Virgil and 
 Pope, and that " the * Dunciad ' of the latter is the most 
 absolutely chiseled and monumental work in our lan- 
 guage." Pope's shining intellect was cased in a pigmy 
 frame. When he had published his " Dunciad " and other 
 satirical pieces, he had a tall Irishman, armed with a huge 
 shillalah, to walk behind him on London streets, to protect 
 him from personal violence. Wharton tells us: " He was 
 protuberant both on back and chest, and so very feeble 
 as not to be able to dress or undress himself without as- 
 sistance, and so susceptible of cold that he was not only 
 wrapped up in fur and flannel, but was obliged to wear 
 a boddice made of stiff canvas closely laced about him." 
 Yet he, whose life was a long disease, had a more than 
 triple share of soul, was the immediate and indisputable 
 successor of John Dryden on the throne of English lit- 
 erature, and waged deathless war on fools and knaves. 
 The six successive kings were Chaucer, Spenser, Shakes- 
 peare, Milton, Dryden, Pope. Ever since then it has 
 
Figures of Etymology. 63 
 
 been a republic. But we hasten to give you a front-cut 
 from this Alexander le Bref, from his epigram on a 
 blockhead : in " there's " for " there is." Pope saith : 
 
 " You beat your pate, and fancy Wit will come. 
 Knock as you please ; there's nobody at home." 1 
 
 Shakespeare, whose death in the double sixteen is eas- 
 ily remembered, affords very many admirable instances. 
 Nor does he despise this usage, if you do ; as thus : 
 
 " Why, all the souls that are were forfeit' once ; 
 And He that might the 'vantage best have took, 
 Found out the remedy." 
 
 A short word is " begin," yet this great model of En- 
 glish, all nerve and muscle, much improves it by making 
 it shorter still : 
 
 "I 'gin to be a-weary of the sun." 
 
 Here, too, let the wondrous versatility of our subject, 
 Figures, impress you ; how language can, through them, 
 avail itself of exactly opposite devices : in forfeit', short- 
 ening the word at the end ; in 'vantage, at the beginning ; 
 in 'gin, cutting off at the beginning ; in a-weary, length- 
 ening at the beginning and all with admirable effects, 
 which, we trust, are perceptible to your ear and to your 
 mind. 
 
 Dr. Isaac Watts was, like Pope, of very small stature ; 
 at which fact a certain lady was making merry. The 
 great hymn-writer defended himself by this impromptu, 
 wherein are two front-cuts : 
 
 " Could I in stature reach the pole, 
 
 Or grasp creation in my span, 
 I'd still be measured by my soul 
 The soul's the stature of the man." 
 
 Washington Irving gives us an incident too beautiful 
 )t to insert here. He was asked if he had ever seen 
 r ashington. He said he had seen him twice. The fol- 
 lowing is his account; of the second interview : 
 
64 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " My Scotch nurse suddenly caught sight of the General en- 
 tering a shop. Clutching my hand eagerly, she hurried into the 
 shop, and caught him by the sleeve, crying, ' General ! -General ! 
 here's a bairn that's called after you. Wull ye no gie him your 
 blessing ?' ' Called after me, is he ?' said the General, in a pleased 
 voice, and laying his hand on my head in a most reverential 
 manner : ' God bless the little one forever,' he said, and went out 
 of the shop. I never saw him again, and I am an old man 
 now; but I can sometimes even now feel the gentle pressure 
 of his hand on my head ; and I know his blessing abode with 
 me, for I have been blessed." 
 
 We take leave of front-cut bjr introducing you to a 
 case when it was made a complimentary use of. James 
 Smith, who, with his brother Horace, wrote the once re- 
 nowned " Rejected Addresses," thus paid his devoirs to 
 Miss Edgeworth, whose excellent novels are a school of 
 pure morality and good sense, especially to young ladies : 
 
 "We every-day bards may anonymous sign; 
 That refuge, Miss Edgeworth, can never be thine ; 
 Thy writings, where satire and moral unite, 
 Must bring forth the name of their author to light : 
 Good and bad join in telling the source of their birth ; 
 The Bad own their Edge, and the Good own their Worth." 
 
 II., III., IV., V. Mid-cut, or syncope, is our second fig- 
 ure, the cutting out from the middle one or more letters. 
 Here also may be mentioned III., synaeresis, a taking or 
 drawing together, whereby two vowels are not changed, 
 but coalesce into a diphthong, as aeronaut for aeronaut; 
 while IV., crasis, mixture, means in rhetoric precisely the 
 blending or mixing together of two vowels belonging to 
 two different words that come into contact with each oth- 
 er, the first of which words ends with a vowel, and th( 
 second begins with a vowel ; attended at times with 
 change of at least one of the two vowels for some othei 
 vowel, as " th' oar " for the oar ; " in't " for into it. When 
 a crasis is not designated in writing, but is left to the 
 
Figures of Etymology. 65 
 
 vocalization of the reader, it is termed V., synezesis, or 
 synecphonesis, as when " do ye " is pronounced " d'ye." 
 Massing together these four under the one head of 
 mid-cut, we are glad to escape from words whose very 
 look is barbarous, to a sweet example, from Anna Leti- 
 tia Waring. "E'er" for ever, is mid-cut : 
 
 " Wherever in the world I am, 
 
 In whatsoe'er estate, 
 I have a fellowship with hearts 
 
 To keep and cultivate ; 
 And a work of lowly love to do 
 For the Lord on whom I wait." 
 
 Another specimen take we, from the words of a wail 
 too common on the part of very young ladies of from 
 thirty to forty summers, not to say winters. It is from 
 the once very fashionable pen of Thomas Haynes Bayly, 
 whose heroine casts herself on the sympathy of mamma 
 in the United States, mama : 
 
 " Why don't the men propose, mamma ? 
 
 Why don't the men propose ? 
 Each seems just coming to the point, 
 
 And then away he goes. 
 It is no fault of yours, mamma 
 
 That every body knows ; 
 You fete the finest men in town ; 
 
 Yet, oh ! they don't propose." 
 
 At once to annihilate your idea that this figure is ut- 
 terly insignificant, notice how it enables Thomas Dekker, 
 the old dramatist, to express compactly in one noble line 
 a most noble thought : 
 
 "We ne'er are angels till our passions die." 
 
 Robert Burns, the great Nature -taught Scots poet, 
 with all his faults, despised infidelity ; could not bear to 
 have any one ridicule the Bible, heart-and-life-book of 
 his most patriarchal father and mother. In a company 
 
 E 
 
66 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 where he was, a conceited fellow, a Mr. Andrew Turner, 
 was giving vent to a loud and lengthy attack on religion. 
 Some of those present nudged the mighty plowman to 
 favor the mouther with an intellectual drubbing ; but he 
 sat silent, his broad, swarthy brow gathering a sterner 
 and sterner gloom. At length, when the scoffer had got 
 through with his jibes, Burns, having first asked the age 
 of the man who had honored 1759 with his birth, broke 
 forth, volcanic, with this epigram ; in which be sure to 
 notice the mid-cuts " de'il " for devil ; " ca't " for called : 
 
 " In seventeen hunner fifty-nine, 
 The de'il gat stuff to mak a swine ; 
 
 But flung it in a corner. 
 But afterward he changed his plan, 
 And made it something like a man, 
 
 And ca't it Andra Turner." 
 
 To " Love's Victory " pass we next a production of 
 rare polish, to which of late years attention has deserv- 
 edly been directed. The author was William Chamber- 
 layne : 
 
 " The morning hath not lost her virgin blush, 
 Nor step save mine soil'd the earth's tinsel'd robe ; 
 How full of heav'n this solitude appears ! 
 This healthful comfort of the happy swain, 
 Who, from his hard but peaceful bed rous'd up, 
 In's morning exercise saluted is 
 By a full choir of feather'd choristers, 
 Wedding their notes to the enamor'd air. 
 Here Nature, in her unaffected dress, 
 Sits lovely in her native russet." 
 
 The Rev. Samuel Wesley, John Wesley's father, is re- 
 membered' in literature by his epigram respecting a mon- 
 ument to Butler, author of " Hudibras." Butler was 
 abandoned to obscurity and want by the unprincipled 
 Charles II. and his worthless courtiers : 
 
Figures of Etymology. 67 
 
 " While Butler, needy wretch, was yet alive, 
 No generous patron would a dinner give. 
 See him, when starved to death and turn'd to dust, 
 Presented with a monumental bust. 
 The poet's fate is here in emblem shown : 
 He ask'd for bread, and he receiv'd a stone." 
 
 The memorable sonnet on Shakespeare, by Hartley 
 Coleridge, makes repeated use of syncope : 
 
 " The soul of Shakespeare's larger than the sky, 
 Deeper than ocean, or the abysmal dark 
 Of the unfathom'd centre. Like that ark 
 Which in its sacred hold uplifted high 
 O'er the drown'd hills the human family, 
 And stock preserv'd of ev'ry living kind, 
 So in the compass of thy single mind 
 The seeds and pregnant forms in essence lie 
 That make all worlds. Great poet, 'twas thy art 
 To know thyself; and in thyself to be 
 Whate'er love, hate, ambition, destiny, 
 And the firm, fatal purpose of the heart 
 Can make of man. Yet thou wert still the same 
 Serene of thought ; unhurt by thine own flame." 
 
 The name of Shakespeare admonishes us to state the 
 fact, none more memorable in the history of English let- 
 ters, that contemporary with the Bard of Avon, in the era 
 of Elizabeth and James, flourished a large number of 
 writers for the stage, men of very great genius undisci- 
 plined, but genuine ; such as Marlowe, Nash, Ben Jonson, 
 Chapman, Kyd, Ford, Dekker, Shirley, Webster, Mars- 
 ton, Massinger, Heywood, Greene, Peele, Beaumont, and 
 Fletcher, which last two wrote, it is said, fifty-two plays in 
 concert, in a very singular dramatic copartnership ; nay, 
 even wearing each other's clothes. The dramas of all these 
 writers have within the last sixty years commanded a good 
 deal of attention, to the great advantage of our speech, 
 their diction is so light, vigorous, and of such ivory polish. 
 
68 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Slight as mid-cut may seem, yet have you never felt 
 its happy effect in a- sermon in removing the essay-like 
 deadness, and giving to pulpit eloquence the thrill it al- 
 ways should have of an earnest, life-like, personal address, 
 poured fresh from, the heart? As when the preacher 
 cries, " Why don't you improve the grace you have ? 
 then you would receive more grace." Consider a remark- 
 able phenomenon in the writer's mind. Many years ago 
 we heard a sermon from an eloquent young Methodist 
 minister on Abraham's offering up of Isaac, in which 
 were many impressive paragraphs ; yet only one do we 
 in the very least remember. Speaking of Isaac as an 
 only son, he said : 
 
 " Parents are aware that the only child in a family is apt to 
 get a little bit spoil'd." 
 
 These artless words of the hearth and homestead, " a 
 little bit spoil'd," we shall never be able to forget. They 
 brought the speaker into our home and down to our level ; 
 they made the whole so life-like. Such precisely is often 
 an effect of mid-cut, as when don't is used. 
 
 Comes neptt an example in which wit embodies itself: 
 a witticism of Curran's, the Irish orator. Walking along 
 Dublin streets with a friend, they heard a person use the 
 word cur'osity, by syncope for curiosity. Exclaimed Cur- 
 ran's friend : 
 
 " How that fellow murders the king's English !" " Not so 
 bad as that," observed the wit ; " it is not murder quite ; he has 
 only knocked an eye (i) out." 
 
 Or we may conclude our treatment of this figure by 
 referring to a line in the Second Part of Henry IV., by 
 S., where he uses " sick'd " for sickened : 
 
 " It did so a little time before, 
 That our great-grandsire, Edward, sick'd and died." 
 
 Or will it be more ingenious to finish off with a spice 
 
Figures of Etymology. 69 
 
 of Irish astronomy, from the pen of Miles O'Reilly, who 
 has discovered an Irish poacher among the constellations, 
 raised thither by St. Pathrick : 
 
 " So to conclude my song aright, 
 
 For fear I'd tire your patience, 
 You'll see O'Ryan any night 
 
 Amid the constellations. 
 And Venus follows in his track, 
 
 Till Mars grows jealous r'ally ; 
 But troth he fears the Irish knack 
 
 Of handling the shillaly." 
 
 VI. End-cut, or apocope, next meets us : the cutting 
 off a letter or letters from the end of a word, as seld for 
 seldom ; Pont for Pontus ; Lucrece for Lucretia ; obstruct 
 for obstruction ; submiss for submissive ; auxiliar for aux- 
 iliary ; amaze for amazement ; Moroc for Morocco ; ad- 
 dict for addicted. Chaucer and Gower have some strik- 
 ing, daring, elegant specimens, Chaucer giving Pers for 
 Persia; Ind for India; Adon for Adonis; S. giving targe; 
 reverbs ; conduct for conductor ; Hyrcan tiger for Hyr- 
 canian tiger. 
 
 Some end-cuts rise to the dignity of being national : 
 thus Sawney is Scotch for Alexander ; Pat is national for 
 Patrick. Curran, after his speech for Rowan, was sur- 
 rounded by the admiring populace, bent on chairing him. 
 In vain he ordered them to let him go. A gigantic 
 chairman, eying the little orator as an elephant might 
 a lap-dog, bellowed to another : 
 
 "Arrah, Pat, don't mind the little cratur ; pitch him up this 
 minute on my showlder." 
 
 Having presented you with the epitaph on Butler, to 
 Butler himself be introduced, and to his poem of " Hudi- 
 bras." Dull through constant straining after wit, illus- 
 trating the old saying : " Salt is good as a savor ; but if 
 one undertakes to dine on salt, it ceases to be a savor, 
 without becoming food " " Hudibras" has seldom been 
 
70 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 read through. The tediousness of a production which 
 must surely be witty, since every body says so, arises from 
 the absence of a sufficient story ; from the want of skill in 
 painting character ; from the obscurity in which through 
 lapse of time many of the allusions are now involved, and 
 from the almost total absence of elevating moral princi- 
 ples ; for, as the author's object was to laugh at the Puri- 
 tans, champions of civil liberty, martyrs for earnest re- 
 ligion, though open to ridicule in some points, there runs 
 through the whole book a sneer at lofty truths ; and the 
 work is destitute of moral vigor and solid interest. God 
 and ethical realities are important elements in literature 
 after all, and of that " Hudibras " is a convincing negative 
 proof. It is a suspicious circumstance that one standing 
 quotation is the only one that is continually served up 
 those stale lines about Alexander and Diogenes. We 
 present you with something new, instead of putting you 
 in the tub again, among old clothes as worn out and of- 
 fensive to nostril as what FalstafT encountered. 
 
 So memorable a thing is End-cut, or Apocope, that it 
 inweaves its eloquent self with two of our dearest names, 
 never-to-be-forgotten personal acquaintances, Sam Weller 
 and Sam Slick, from the latter of whom we cull one 
 sample : 
 
 " That 'ere man, Sam Patch, was a great diver," says the Clock- 
 maker, "and the last dive he took was off the falls of Niagara, 
 and he was never heerd of agin till t'other (Crasis, observe) day, 
 when Captain Wentworth, of the Susy Ann whaler, saw him in the 
 South Sea. " Why," says Captain Enoch to him " why, Sam, 
 how in airth did you git here ? I thought you was drowned at 
 the Canadian lines ?" " Why," says Sam, " I didn't get on earth 
 here at all, but I came right through it. In that ere Niagara 
 dive, I went so deep, I thought it was just as short to come up 
 t'other side, so out I came in these parts. If I don't take the 
 shine off the sea-serpent when I get back to Boston, then my 
 name's not Sam Patch." 
 
 There are apocopes, too, through which impudence 
 
Figures of Etymology. 71 
 
 can be quashed by true spirit. Dr. Vansittart, an emi- 
 nent lawyer, was pleading a cause against Sergeant Bear- 
 croft. Said Bearcroft to the Court : 
 
 "As long names will be tiresome, I beg leave to call the 
 counsel on the opposite side Mr. Van." "I have no objection," 
 said Vansittart ; " and I will return the compliment, and will 
 name the learned gentleman by the appropriate title of Mr. 
 Bear." 
 
 Even into sacrec] things apocope comes with won- 
 drous sway. Who but hath felt the potency of the 
 Psalm-singer's apocope ? In a Brooklyn church the choir 
 began : 
 
 " My poor pol my poor pol my poor polluted heart !" 
 
 Another line went thus 
 " Go in the pi go in the pi go in the pious throng." 
 
 All our readers are by this time convinced that even 
 these slightest figures are of gigantic worth. 
 
 This cutting off from the end is a main feature of our 
 invaluable Doric, the Scottish dialect rich in humor and 
 in the pastoral ; of which we mean to make large use, as 
 Sir Walter Scott does, in his novels never excelled. If 
 you have as yet read none of his, pray lose no time 
 to peruse " Rob Roy," and " Old Mortality," and " The 
 Heart of Mid-Lothian." We have all the advantage, and 
 much more than ,all, that the Greek has, in possessing 
 not only the sixty dialects of which Britain can boast, 
 but one most expressive classic dialect, in which is the 
 finest pastoral poem in the world, Allan Ramsay's 
 " Gentle Shepherd," which Greece and Theocritus never 
 equaled. 
 
 From Richard Crashaw let us seek a bold instance : 
 there is a potent charm in such liberties of diction : 
 
 " It is the mind that maketh good or ill, 
 That maketh wretch' or happy, rich or poor." 
 
72 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 So Giles Fletcher describes a thunder-cloud 
 " That sads the smiling Orient." 
 
 And Andrew Marvel utters this desire : 
 " Oh let our voice His praise exalt, 
 Till it arrive at heaven's vault ; 
 Which then, perhaps, rebounding may 
 Echo beyond the Mexic' bay." 
 
 Your author lays before you this, from an address to 
 the aged : 
 
 " When age steals on, 
 Let glory glisten in the whitening hair ; 
 A throne of empire be the grandsire's chair ; 
 The prophet-furrows that thy brow adorn, 
 Be hieroglyphs of morn." 
 
 John Keats writes swelt for swelter; suit for sultry: 
 
 " With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt, 
 Enriched from ancestral merchandise ; 
 And for them many a weary hand did swelt." 
 
 In agreement with this special device, it will be found 
 that er may often be dropped, as fost' for foster ; while 
 Chaucer has this, near the opening, so admirable, of the 
 " Canterbury Tales :" 
 
 " At Alesahdr' he was, when it was won." 
 
 Peter Pindar, speaking of Whitbread's brewery, has 
 this 
 
 "A charming place beneath the grates, 
 For roasting chestnuts and potates." 
 
 Henry Neale furnishes this case 
 
 " Fall, fall, thou wither'd leaf! 
 Autumn sears not like grief, 
 
 Nor kills such lovely flowers. 
 More terrible the storm, 
 More mournful the deform', 
 When dark misfortune lowers." 
 
Figures of Etymology. 73 
 
 Joshua Sylvester gratifies us with a daring and grace- 
 ful illustration : 
 
 " I see Ambition never pleased ; 
 
 I see some Tantals starved in store. 
 I see Gold's dropsy seldom eased ; 
 I see even Midas gape for more." 
 
 In the following beautiful sonnet supremely beauti- 
 ful by Archbishop Trench, " after " is used for " after- 
 ward :" 
 
 " The Present we fling from us, as the rind 
 Of some sweet Future, which we after find 
 Bitter to taste ; or cloud it o'er with fears, 
 And water it beforehand with our tears 
 Vain tears, for that which never may arrive. 
 Meanwhile the joy whereby we ought to live, 
 Neglected or unheeded, disappears. 
 Wiser it were to welcome and make ours 
 Whate'er of good, though small, the Present brings: 
 Kind greetings, sunshine, song of birds, and flowers, 
 With a child's pure delight in little things; 
 And as to griefs unborn, to rest secure, 
 Knowing that mercy ever will endure." 
 
 The poems of Matthew Arnold are superior. A master 
 of language he. How fine the effect of the end-cut in 
 this, from his " Sohrab and Rustum," one of the truest 
 poems of our times : 
 
 "A cloud 
 Grew suddenly in heaven, and dark'd the sun." 
 
 James A. Hillhouse's poem on the " Judgment " is 
 highly finished. Of Nebuchadnezzar he thus writes: 
 
 " His countenance, more piercing than the beam 
 Of the sun-gazing eagle, earthward bent 
 Its haught, fierce majesty." 
 
 Let the student of English that great and urgent ob- 
 ject of study and care, so neglected and trifled with 
 
74 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 open his Shakespeare, marked S. in this volume, and no- 
 tice how by end-cuts that consummate writer adds not 
 a little to the masterly compactness and elasticity which 
 characterize his wondrous style, which is so light and so 
 massive, like a war-mace of gold swung lightly by a ser- 
 aph. Give five or six days to such an examination of 
 the effect in his hands of front-cuts, mid-cuts, and end- 
 cuts, and you will be astounded at the superb uses which 
 a master can make of even the minutest and the most 
 opposite dexterities of diction. 
 
 This first chapter will suffice to give some idea of the 
 work we aim to engage you in. To obtain any thing like 
 as much benefit from the subject as you easily may, let 
 each reader be a student ; purchase a manuscript book, 
 strongly and handsomely bound, of four hundred pages 
 at least ; there will be above two hundred figures, those 
 first given being least by far in importance, as can not 
 but be the case. Let two pages be devoted to each fig- 
 ure ; these pages let each student fill with specimens of 
 each figure, botanized for himself from the best authors 
 accessible to him ; after each quotation write each au- 
 thor's name ; prefix your whole herbarium, as in this vol- 
 ume, by a catalogue of writers, with their date and coun- 
 try. Thus will open before you an employment that 
 will crown your entire life with instruction and delight. 
 
 A witticism will aptly close this chapter. From Ed- 
 mund Burke we quote, whose prose is a very model of 
 style. He gives you at once a specimen of front-cut and 
 of end-cut ; of wit that sparkles, and of sound sense that 
 weighs heavy : 
 
 "Strip majesty of its externals, and it is merely a jest" 
 m)ajest(y. 
 
Figures of Etymology. 75 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 FIGURES OF ETYMOLOGY. 
 
 PART SECOND. 
 
 BEFORE proceeding to our seventh figure, we have a 
 valuable prefatory remark to make. 
 
 William Cullen Bryant gave the following excellent 
 advice to a young man who offered him an article for 
 the Evening Post : 
 
 " I observe that you have used several French expressions 
 in your article. I think, if you will study the English language, 
 you will find it capable of expressing all the ideas that you 
 may have. I have always found it so; and in all that I have 
 written I do not recall an instance, when I was tempted to use 
 a foreign word, but that on searching I found a better one in 
 my own language. 
 
 " Be simple, unaffected ; be honest in your speaking and 
 writing. Never use a long word when a short one will do. 
 Do not call a spade a well-known oblong instrument of man- 
 ual industry; let a home be a home, not a residence; a place 
 a place, not a locality, and so of the rest. Where a short 
 word will do, you always lose by using a long one. You lose 
 in clearness, you lose in honest expression of your meaning; 
 and in the estimation of all men who are competent to judge, 
 you lose in reputation for ability. 
 
 " The only true way to shine even in this false world is 
 to be modest and unassuming. Falsehood may be a very 
 thick crust, but in the course of time truth will find a place to 
 break through. Elegance of language may not be in the 
 power of all of us, but simplicity and straightforwardness 
 are. 
 
76 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Write much as you would speak ; speak as you think. If 
 with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual ; if with your 
 superior speak no finer. No one ever was a gainer by singu- 
 larity of words or of pronunciation. The truly wise man will 
 so speak that no one will observe how he speaks. Sydney 
 Smith once remarked : 
 
 " * After you have written an article, take your pen and strike 
 out half of the words, and you will be surprised to see how 
 much stronger it is.' " 
 
 So much for the advice of our revered sage. It is far 
 from any contradiction of his principle to say that the 
 great recommendation of a word is not its shortness, not 
 its Anglo-Saxon origin, nor yet its length, but solely 
 its being the best fitted to express your idea. Says 
 Marsh : 
 
 " Truly able writers select their words, not with reference to 
 their historical origin, but solely for the sake of their adapta- 
 tion to the effect aimed at on the mind of the reader or hearer; 
 and he who deliberately uses an Anglo-Saxon instead of a more 
 expressive Romance word is as much a pedant as if his diction 
 were composed, in the largest possible proportion, of words 
 borrowed from the vocabulary of Rome. The masters of the 
 English tongue know that each of its great branches has its 
 special adaptation." 
 
 Still it is from the well-spring of Anglo-Saxon that the 
 great future, the approaching enrichments, of our lan- 
 guage are to come. What vigor of youth, what freshness 
 of spring-time, lie in that direction ! What an unlimited 
 supply of words, gloriously new, yet from old ancestral 
 roots, such as unwisdom, disearth, motherland, auld lang- 
 syne, inhearth, ingle nook ! 
 
 VII. Prefixing, or Prosthesis, is the seventh figure of 
 spelling; the prefixing of one or more letters to the be- 
 ginning of a word, as when Chaucer says of his favorite 
 flower, as it was that of Burns, the daisy : 
 
 " The ground was green, ypowder'd with daisy." 
 
Figures of Etymology. 77 
 
 However, this is a prefixing only in appearance ; the 
 original is that which Chaucer gives ; " powdered " is 
 really a front-cut. After his death, in 1401, the very 
 daisies seem to have been poisoned by blood in the fields 
 of England, accursed by civil strife for 190 years; until, 
 in 1590, the " Faerie Queene" was published a dark age, 
 during which, as old Fuller, the Church historian, has it, 
 " the bells in the church steeples were not heard, for the 
 sound of drums and trumpets ;" and Poesy's skylarks 
 were scared into a silence as dismal as was the silence 
 of Devotion's bells. 
 
 Mrs. Sigourney supplies us with " amid " for " mid." 
 A poetess she, far from great, yet of much sweetness, and 
 of a piety very attractive. We place on your parlor wall 
 the portrait of Pocahontas, daguerreotyped by mind-light. 
 Alas ! if ever History with rude hand should drag down 
 and blur the picture, and put in its place the features of 
 a coarse savage : 
 
 " On sped the seasons, and the forest child 
 
 Was rounded to the symmetry of youth, 
 While o'er her features stole, serenely mild, 
 
 The trembling sanctity of woman's truth 
 Her modesty, and simpleness, and grace. 
 Yet those who deeper scan the human face, 
 
 Amid the trial hour of fear or ruth, 
 Could clearly read, upon its heaven-writ scroll, 
 The high and firm resolve that moved the Roman soul." 
 
 The longer we gaze on this picture, the more have we 
 our misgivings. Not at all likely that ever such a youth- 
 ful maiden budded under thy wigwam, O Powhatan ! In- 
 deed, it is not probable that a female bard of the highest 
 inspiration would be soft enough to believe in any such 
 vision. On the page of Edith May, of Pennsylvania, 
 we recognize far firmer power, in the subjoined descrip- 
 tion of a hurricane at twilight. The loftier chants of the 
 muse can always bear the scrutiny of common -sense. 
 
78 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Here bursts on you a genuine tempest ; here is no pict- 
 ure, but the great original : 
 
 "The roar of a chafed lion in his lair 
 Begirt by leveled spears ! A sudden flash 
 Intense, yet wavering, like a beast's fierce eye 
 Searching the darkness ! The wild bay of winds 
 Sweeps the burnt plains of heaven; and from afar 
 Ranked clouds are riding up like eager horsemen, 
 Javelin in hand. From the north wings of twilight 
 There falls unwonted shadow, and strange gloom 
 Cloisters the unwilling stars. The sky is roof 'd 
 With tempest, and the moon's scant rays fall through, 
 Like light let dimly through the fissur'd rock 
 Vaulting a cavern. There is no bough 
 But lifteth its appealing arm to heaven. 
 The scudding grass is shivering as it flies; 
 And herbs and flowers crouch to their mother earth, 
 Like frightened children. 'Tis more terrible 
 When the hoarse thunder speaks, and the fleet wind 
 Stops, like a steed that knows his rider's voice." 
 
 Character-painting, in keeping with historic fact, or in 
 accordance with the profundities of universal man, as in 
 unerring Shakespeare, is a chief thing in poesy. Of this 
 Chaucer is a proof. His production of most value, the 
 " Canterbury Tales," excels in its portraitures, as witness 
 his " Nun." If it be true that so much of character- 
 painting runs through poesy, how deep, how pervading 
 must be sagacity, accuracy, a profound science true to 
 God and to the depths of the human heart, in the flights 
 of the muse; just as the rule of scientific law prevails as 
 much in the wildest whirl of the topmost storm-wave, 
 when realizing the tragic at its highest, as in the dust of 
 the common road, when commonest, most prosaic, most 
 passionless. But let the Nun speak for herself; mark 
 how close an observer of human manners we meet with 
 in Chaucer: 
 
Figures of Etymology. 79 
 
 " There also was a nun, a prioress, 
 That in her smiling was full simple and coy ; 
 Her greatest oath was but by Saint Eloy; 
 And she was cleped Madame Eglantine. 
 Full well she sang the service divine, 
 Entuned in her nose full sweetly; 
 And French she spake full fair and fitishly, 
 After the school of Stratford at Bow, 
 For French of Paris was to her unknowe. 
 At meat was she well ytaught withal; 
 She let no morsel from her lips fall, 
 Nor wet her fingers in her sauce deep. 
 Well could she carry a morsel and well keep, 
 That no drop ne'er fell upon her breast ; 
 In courtesie was set full much her lest." 
 
 You will mark how Chaucer, known as the Morning 
 Star of our literature, ridicules the most gently in the 
 world the style of this great lady's French ; while neat- 
 ness in eating hath with him the stress which it truly de- 
 serves. At his death befell the earliest of the four eras 
 of English poetry, the dark age ; next, from Spenser to 
 Milton, its grand heroic age; from Milton to Thomson, 
 the artificial; from Thomson till now, the age of revival. 
 How striking the condemnatory fact, dwelt on by Words- 
 worth, that between the publication of " Paradise Lost " 
 (P. L.) and that of Thomson's " Seasons," not a single 
 new image fresh from nature can be found in all the po- 
 etry of these sixty years with its " verses of society." 
 These two remarks also demand special notice that Wil- 
 liam Langlande's" Vision concerning Piers the Plowman " 
 has a value that is very high, as a mine of the most vig- 
 orous English ; and that in Mr. Wright's edition you 
 ought by all means to read it over; while we do here- 
 by retract our contemptuous verdict on the " Faerie 
 Queene " passed in the first forty years of our life. As 
 it stands with us at present, the older we grow the more 
 do we like it ; as also do we the Old Testament. 
 
8o Might, and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 See for other cases of prosthesis . L., vi., 258, 353 ; and 
 let yourself grow familiar with the TkctrttraT~by-the-*nost 
 opposite expedients does literature effect her wonders. 
 Prefixing is quite the opposite of front-cut. 
 
 VIII. Epenthesis, or Insertion, is our next figure of ety- 
 mology, the inserting of a letter or letters in the middle 
 of a word. This usage, the opposite of mid-cut, is rare, 
 except in our comic literature. American humor is of 
 the broadest ; the United States people, like the Scotch, 
 are a proof that the gravest folks are exactly they who 
 can laugh the heartiest, for humor is fed on the quiet, 
 shrewd observation of the character of those around us. 
 A humorous man is usually a man of some depth of judg- 
 ment, whose eyes are open to the ludicrous points in 
 others. Nothing more amusing, in the American way, 
 than the " Bigelow Papers," by James Russell Lowell. 
 Hear his candidate's creed. The speaker is applying for 
 office : 
 
 " I du believe in prayer and praise 
 
 To him that hez the grantin' 
 Of jobs; in every thing that pays; 
 
 But most of all in cantin' ; 
 That doth my cup with marcies fill, 
 
 That lays all thought o' sin to rest; 
 I don't believe in Princerple, 
 
 But, oh ! I du in Interest." 
 
 In a celebrated letter, that of Art em us Ward to the 
 Prince of Wales, on the occasion of his friend the Prince's 
 marriage, we find not a few insertions, like that last one 
 in " princerple." Saith Artemus : 
 
 "I never attempted to reorganize my wife but once; I shall 
 fiever attempt it agin. I'd bin to a public dinner, and had al- 
 lowed to be betrayed into drinkin' several people's health; and 
 wishin' to make 'em as robust as possible,! continuered drinkin' 
 their healths until my own became affected. Consekens was, 
 I presented myself at Betsy's bedside late at night with con- 
 
Figures of Etymology. 81 
 
 sid'ble lickor concealed about my person. I had sumhow got 
 perseshun of a hosswhip on my way home ; and rememberin' 
 sum cranky observations of Mrs. Ward's in the mornin', I snapt 
 the whip pretty lively, and, in a very loud voice, I cried, ' Betsy, 
 you need reorganizin' ! I have cum, Betsy,' I continuered, 
 crackin' the whip over the bed ' I have cum to reorganize you ! 
 Have you per-rayed to-nite?' I dream'd that nite that sum- 
 body had laid a hosswhip over me sev'ral consekootiv' times; 
 and whin I woke up I found she had. I hain't drank much of 
 any thin' since ; and if I ever have another reorganizin' busi- 
 ness on hand, I shall let it out by the job. There's varis ways 
 of managin' a wife, friend Wales, but the best and only safe way 
 is to let her do jist about as she wants to. I 'dopted that there 
 plan sum time ago, and it works like a charm." 
 
 IX. Annexation, or Paragoge,- the contrast to end-cut, 
 is the putting of a letter or letters to the end of a word, 
 as withouten for without. When Lord Howe was in 
 command of the Magnanime, a negro sailor was ordered 
 to be flogged. Every thing being ready, and the ship's 
 company assembled, the Captain made a long address to 
 the culprit on the enormity of his offense. Poor Sambo, 
 tired of the harangue, and of having his unfortunate back 
 exposed to the cold, exclaimed : 
 
 " Massa, if you floggee, floggee ; or if you preachee, preachee : 
 but no preachee and floggee both." 
 
 He knows little of English and of courting, who knows 
 not the endearing effects of a y at the end. Thus, in R. 
 H. Barham, the humorist : 
 
 "The wearied sentinel 
 At eve may overlook the crouching foe, 
 Till, ere his hand can sound the alarum bell, 
 
 He sinks beneath the unexpected blow; 
 Before the whisker of grimalkin fell, 
 
 When slumbering on her post, the mouse may go: 
 But woman, wakeful woman's never weary; 
 Above all, when she waits to thump her deary." 
 F 
 
82 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Shenstone, too often lackadaisical, in his poem " The 
 Schoolmistress," wherein are some sketches true to nat- 
 ure, presents a paragoge in his use of grieven for grieve ; 
 which leads us to whisper, parenthetically, albeit very 
 earnestly, that you might much enrich your English by 
 turning adjectives into verbs, through this annexation 
 of n, as when Milton and Southey use the verb worsen, 
 to make or grow worse ; and milde-n, to make mild. 
 Would that you all went back to Anglo-Saxon, that over- 
 flows with riches, to beyouth and bestrengthen your style. 
 But hie we to the tasteful Laird of the Leasowes and his 
 school-marm : 
 
 " In every village marked by little spire, 
 Embowered in trees, and hardly known to fame, 
 There dwells in lowly shed, and mean attire, 
 A matron old, whom we Schoolmistress name; 
 Who boasts unruly brats with birch to tame : 
 They grieven sore in piteous durance pent." 
 
 In Milton's supremely beautiful word " eremite/' for 
 hermit, he deftly gives us in one fine creation an aphaere- 
 sis, a paragoge, and an epenthesis: a front-cut of the h ; an 
 insertion in the second e ; an annexation in the final e. 
 
 Sir John Suckling, a poet very minor indeed, was rid- 
 iculed as follows by a contemporary knight, Sir John 
 Mennis, wherein annexation lubricates the fun : 
 
 " Sir John he got him an ambling nag, 
 
 To Scotland for to ride-a, 
 With a hundred men, all his own he swore, 
 To guard him on every side-a." 
 
 You are by this time convinced that even things so 
 tiny as Forms Etymologic, the least important part of 
 our theme, may add much of humor, of quaint oddity, 
 nay, of considerable attraction, to language. As thus: 
 a country swain makes an insidious attempt to persuade 
 Dolly to let him carry on the courtship at an unseason- 
 
Figures of Etymology. 83 
 
 able hour ; which, we rejoice to say, the buxom maiden 
 triumphantly repels ever be it so : . 
 
 "Young Roger came tapping at Dolly's window 
 
 Thumpaty, thumpaty, thump. 
 He begged for admittance. She answered him ' No !' 
 
 Glumpaty, glumpaty, glump. 
 ' No, no, Roger; No ! As you came you may go !' 
 
 Stumpaty, stumpaty, stump." 
 
 From Horace Smith we purloin the following : sar- 
 donical, ironical, for sardonic, laconic ; while yees is epen- 
 thesis. A bullying barrister would make a butt of a 
 Yorkshire farmer: 
 
 " Well, Farmer Numskull, how goes calves at York ?" 
 " Why not, sir, as they do wi' you, 
 But on four legs instead of two." 
 "Officer!" cried the legal elf, 
 Piqued at the laugh against himself, 
 
 " Do pray keep silence down below there ! 
 Now look at me, clown, and attend: 
 Have I not seen you, somewhere, friend ?" 
 
 "Yees, very like; I often go there." 
 " The rustic's waggish quite laconical," 
 The counsel cried, with grin sardonical ; 
 " I wish I'd known this prodigy, 
 This genius of the clods, when I 
 On circuit was at York residing. 
 But, Farmer, do for once speak true. 
 Mind, you're on oath ; so tell me, you 
 Who doubtless think yourself so clever, 
 Are there as many fools as ever 
 
 In the West Riding?" 
 "Why no, sir, no; we've got our share, 
 But not so many as when you were there." 
 
 Such figures as we are at present handling are small, 
 but it is important for us all to remember that things 
 small are in language often of great value. It was said 
 
 
84 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 by a witty lady, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, that the 
 sole difference between the infidel and the Christian lies 
 in very small compass ; the former merely took the " No " 
 out of the Commandments and put it in the Creed. 
 
 We have spoken more than once of a monk of Mal- 
 vern Abbey, whose name, somewhat uncertain, is given 
 as William Langlande unsparing in his attacks on the 
 monks ; invaluable in the glimpses he gives of the wretch- 
 ed social life of the fourteenth century ; a powerful orig- 
 inal genius and reformer ; a spirit of a far higher order 
 than John Gower, who was a mere listless harper on dead 
 Greek mythologies, but this a soul of flame, warring 
 against oppressions and for the wretched. His work 
 was produced between 1360 and 1370; is older therefore 
 than the " Canterbury Tales." We give you a sample 
 from him we feel it to be very powerful and deeply 
 pathetic the description of the miserable life of a poor 
 plowman in those grim days. Mark the annexations, 
 and the alliterations in every line, after the manner of 
 all Anglo-Saxon poetry, and of all Icelandic. Let it be 
 said, also, that it is not even yet, perhaps, too late to 
 restore the plural form of the verb in " n " ; as " they 
 loven," which might be in poetry a fine variety: 
 
 " As I went by the way, 
 Weeping for sorrow, 
 I saw a simple man me by, 
 Upon the plow hanging. 
 His coat was of a clout 
 That cary was called (coarse cloth); 
 His hood was full of holes, 
 And his hair out, 
 
 With his knopped shoon (buttoned) 
 Clouted full thick. 
 His toes toteden out (pushed) 
 As he the land treaded. 
 His hosen overhung his hock shins 
 On every side. 
 
Figures of Etymology. 85 
 
 All beslomered in fen (mud), 
 
 As he the plow followed ; 
 
 Four rotheren him before (oxen), 
 
 Men might reckon each rib. 
 
 His wife walked him with, 
 
 With a long goad, 
 
 In a cutted coat, 
 
 Cutted full high ; 
 
 Barefoot on the bare ice, 
 
 That the blood followed. 
 
 And at the land's end layeth 
 
 A little crumb-bowl (kneading-trough), 
 
 And thereon lay a little child 
 
 Lapped in clouts ; 
 
 And twins of two years' old 
 
 Upon another side. 
 
 And all they sungen one sang 
 
 That sorrow was to hear. 
 
 They crieden all one cry 
 
 A careful note. 
 
 The simple man sighed sore, 
 
 And said, < Children, be still!' " 
 
 In our humble opinion, no more pathetic passage in 
 all our literature ; for it refers to that sore struggle for 
 life which is going on at this hour, in the winter of 1874- 
 75, in New York, the most advanced city of our imper- 
 iled civilization. 
 
 X. Diaeresis is another figure of spelling, the sepa- 
 rating the vowels that might form one syllable a diph- 
 thong into two; as aerolite for aerolite. From that 
 thoroughly classical poem of Milton's, the " Comus," take 
 we an example in the word aerial. A guardian angel 
 thus speaks. Study the production as a whole : 
 
 " Before the starry threshold of Jove's court 
 My mansion is, where those immortal shapes 
 Of bright aerial spirits live ensphered, 
 In regions mild of calm and serene air, 
 
86 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot 
 Which men call Earth, and with low-thoughted care 
 Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being, 
 Unmindful of the crown that virtue gives." 
 
 Trench, Archbishop of Dublin, supplies us with a sort 
 of diaeresis, or separation, when he uses, with fine effect, 
 "not ever" for ever: 
 
 " In palaces are hearts that ask, 
 
 In discontent and pride, 
 Why life is such a dreary task, 
 
 And all things good denied. 
 And hearts, in poorest huts, admire 
 
 How Love has, in their aid 
 Love that not ever seems to tire 
 
 Such rich provision made." 
 
 XL Tmesis, Diacope, or Cutting, let us next illustrate, 
 led to it by the last example, each part split off being a 
 complete word; as "to us ward" for toward us. The 
 poem on " Curiosity," by Charles Sprague, is full of good 
 sense and keen satire : 
 
 " In the pleased infant see this power expand, 
 When first the coral fills his little hand. 
 Throned in its mother's lap, it dries each tear 
 When her sweet legend falls upon his ear. 
 Next it assails him in his top's strange hum, 
 Breathes in his whistle, echoes in his drum ; 
 And when the waning hour to bed ward bids, 
 While gentle sleep sits waiting on his lids, 
 How winningly he pleads, to gain you o'er, 
 That he may read one little story more." 
 
 In a renowned passage of the Rev. Richard Hooker's 
 " Ecclesiastical Polity," in defense of the Church of En- 
 gland, a cutting occurs in the expression " what condi- 
 tion soever:" 
 
 " Of Law there can be no less acknowledged than that her 
 
Figures of Etymology. 87 
 
 seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world. 
 All things in heaven and earth do her homage: the least as 
 feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her 
 power; both angels and creatures of what condition soever, 
 each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, 
 admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy." 
 
 Hooker's " Ecclesiastical Polity " is the earliest great 
 prose work in English, published about 1600; Sir Walter 
 Raleigh's " History of the World " was the second. In 
 literature, prose composition is usually later than poetry. 
 The above famous quotation suggests the remark that it 
 is a good sample of the long complex sentence, moulded 
 on that Latin style by which the prose of Hooker and 
 Milton is much marked a grand orotund diction, where 
 the resounding phraseology reminds us of a long rever- 
 berating peal of thunder, or of the far sweep of a mount- 
 ainous billow ; and is powerfully suggestive of profundity 
 of thought and grandeur of conception ; but its drawback 
 being that it is apt quickly to weary the ear. A grand, 
 long-rolling sentence, however, would be a pleasant, noble 
 variety now and then among the short sentences of our 
 modern prose. Study Macaulay for powerful short sen- 
 tences, Ruskin for powerful long ones. Be daring enough 
 to try a long one, now and then, from the pulpit. 
 
 XII. Metathesis next claims attention, or Twisting, usu- 
 ally at the bidding of humor, of the letters of a word into 
 some different order of arrangement. You will detect it in 
 the following four pathetic lines by Tom Moore, the Irish 
 bard, wherein he bemoans his destiny, which all of us have 
 shared, in being caught in a heavy shower umbrellaless: 
 
 " O ever thus, from childhood's hour, 
 
 Has chilling fate upon me fell ; 
 There always comes a soaking shower 
 When I hain't got an umberell." 
 
 It is not a bad guess of Dr. William Smith, that " Shake- 
 speare seems to have formed the name Caliban, by me- 
 tathesis, from Canibal." 
 
88 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Few more amusing books have appeared for many a 
 day than the " Life and Sayings of Mrs. Partington." 
 The humor mainly lies in quaint liberties with the spell- 
 ing of words: a branch of art in which American humor- 
 ists have traded very extensively. Let us sit down by 
 the ancient lady, and hear a remark or two from her wise 
 lips. She says that 
 
 "Ike has got a horse so spirituous that it always goes off in 
 a decanter." "Don't you regard snuff-taking as a sin?" we 
 asked of her. " If it is," she replied, " it is so small a one ; and, 
 besides, my oilfactories would miss it so." 
 
 Dr. Holmes spells widow " widdah." One of his char- 
 acters tells us what his experience had been at the din- 
 ner-table while boarding with a lady of that profession : 
 
 "It ain't the feed; it's the old woman's looks when a fellah 
 lays it in too strong at meal-time. The feed's well. enough. 
 After geese get tough, and green pease are so big and hard 
 they'd be dangerous if you fired 'em out of a revolver, we get 
 hold then of all them delicacies of the season. But it's too 
 much like feedin' on live folks and devourin' widdah's sub- 
 stance to lay yourself out in the eatin' way, when a fellah's as 
 hungry as the chap that said a turkey was too much for one 
 'n not enough for two. I can't help at dinner-table lookin' at 
 the old woman. Corned-beef days she's tolerable calm. Roast- 
 in' days she worries some, 'n keeps a sharp eye on the chap 
 that carves. But when there's any thing in the poultry line, it 
 seems to hurt her feelings so, to see the knife goin' into the 
 breast, and joints comin' to pieces, that there's no comfort in 
 eatin'. When I cut up an old fowl, and help the boarders, I 
 always feel as if I ought to say not ' Won't you have a slice 
 of chicken?' but 'Won't you venture on a slice of widdah?'" 
 
 The cutting away the front of " and," so that it gets 
 dwarfed into 'n, is a good case of the rare figure crasis, 
 the. word before " and " ending with a vowel. 
 
 But if metathesis be twisting, the word must consist 
 still of the same letters. In " Sketches from Life," pub- 
 
Figures of Etymology. 89 
 
 lished by the American Tract Society, we have two pre- 
 cise examples : 
 
 " In a railway car a stormy debate broke out between a zeal- 
 ous clergyman and an infidel. This debate was carried on 
 very loudly till long after midnight, vastly to the annoyance of 
 the other passengers, who would have greatly preferred sleep 
 to theology. The self-dubbed philosopher avowed that man is 
 like a pig : when he dies there's an end of him. On this a 
 red-faced Irishwoman sprang up, the natural redness of her 
 face glowing more intensely red with feeling, the light of the 
 lamp glaring directly on it. She cried to the clergyman, in a 
 rich brogue : ' Arrah, now, your riverence, will you not let the 
 baste alone ? Sure, now, has he not tould you he's a pig ? And 
 the more you pull a pig by the hind leg, the louder he'll 
 squale !' " 
 
 Here baste and squale have precisely the identical let- 
 ters with beast and squeal, only their sounds are twisted 
 out of their proper place. Bridget hath therefore helped 
 us to most scientific instances. 
 
 XIII. Consequently, another name is needed to com- 
 prehend all varieties of change of letters in the spelling ; 
 rhetors must insert in their catalogue a new and hith- 
 erto unnamed figure, which we call " Intentional Mis- 
 spelling." In a poem by Fielding, the celebrated novel- 
 ist " The Author and the Politician " occur these lines : 
 
 "While I, like the Mogul in Indo, 
 /Am never seen but at my window." 
 
 Heniyi'Kirke White, whose name is a synonym for 
 youthful genius cut down in its bud whose name tends 
 to make us connect over-study and consumption, has 
 these two lines, containing a change of spelling not un- 
 usual, y for ia at the close : 
 
 "Whom starry Science in her cradle rock'd, 
 And Castaly enchastened with its dews." 
 
 -In " Legends from Fairyland," a delightful Christmas 
 
9O Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 book for children, we read of the country of the Too- 
 meniaitches ; the exploits are spoken of as done by the 
 mighty Tuf-long-bo on his journey to the happy land of 
 that happy people, whom all children envy the Apple- 
 pivi. There is a New York periodical whose very name 
 is marked tyy intentional misspelling; it is called the 
 Phunny Phellow. In like manner, Thackeray, whose fun 
 and frolic often broke out in ways that might be called 
 rampageous, delighted in transferring a lisp to paper, as 
 thus, in a rhyming letter of his: 
 
 "I pray each month may increathe my thmall account with 
 J. G. King, that all the thipth which croth the theath good tid- 
 ingth of my girlth may bring." 
 
 To pass at a bound from the ridiculous to the noble, 
 consult P. L., L, 353, where you will find an example of 
 that consecrated diction set apart to poetic purposes in 
 which Milton was so great an inventor, and the very 
 sound of which excites lofty associations, or carries away 
 to bosky dell or river's bank. 
 
 In the renowned Scottish song of "Tullochgorum," by 
 the Rev. John Skinner, there is an effective misspell in 
 the last word : 
 
 " Shall we sae sour and sulky sit 
 Sour and sulky, sour and sulky; 
 Shall we sae sour and sulky sit, 
 Like auld Philosophorum ?" 
 
 * Also P. L., vi., 365. So in William Congreve's justly 
 k celebrated character of Ben, in " Love for Love," this oc- 
 curs, on the lips of Ben, the sailor: 
 
 
 
 "Marry thee! Oons! I'll marry a Lapland witch as soon, 
 and live by selling contrary winds and wrecked vessels." 
 
 XIV. A figure used solely for prosodical purposes 
 claims to be registered the full syllabification of the 
 termination " ed " in the past of verbs, a mark being put 
 
Figures of Etymology. 91 
 
 over the e, thus : loved ; for instance, by Shakespeare, 
 imparting a charming variety : 
 
 " The shepherd's homely curds, 
 His wonted sleep under a fresh tree's shade, 
 Is far beyond a prince's delicates; 
 His viands sparkling in a golden cup, 
 His body couched in a curious bed, 
 When Care, Mistrust, and Treason wait upon him." 
 
 XV. Dialect, when presented for the mere sake of let- 
 ting it be known what the dialect may be, is, of course, 
 no figure; but it is a figure when used for rhetorical 
 ends, as when William Barnes gives us the Dorset dia- 
 lect, very sweetly. We include not the Scottish, which 
 deserves a high and separate place as our classical Doric : 
 
 " Of all the housen o' the pliace 
 
 There's oone wher I da like to call, 
 By day ar night, the best ov all, 
 To zee my Fanny's smilen fiace; 
 An dere the stiately trees da grow, 
 A-rockin' as the win' da blow, 
 While she da sweetly sleep below, 
 In the stillness o' the night." 
 
 XVI. The Alphabetic is a figure newly invented by 
 the London Punch, which designates it as " poetry on a 
 new principle." It defies description ; you will perhaps 
 understand it by reading it. It rhymes on the final letter 
 of each alternate line, as thus, it being spelled by you : 
 
 " On going forth last night a friend to see, 
 I met a man by trade a s-n-o-b. 
 Reeling along he held his tipsy way. 
 'Ho! ho!' quoth I, 'he's d-r-u-n-k.' 
 Then thus to him : ' Were it not better far 
 You were a little s-o-b-e-r ? 
 'Twere happier for your family, I guess, 
 Than playing off such rum r-i-g-s. 
 Besides, all drunkards, when policemen see 'em, 
 Are taken up at once by t-h-e-m. ' ' 
 
92 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 XVII. Combination is another etymological figure for 
 the first time discovered, when two or more words are 
 joined into one, usually to produce a fantastic effect. A 
 Scotchman enjoys Sir Walter Scott's name for the hotel 
 of that matchless cook, Mrs. Meg Dodds, at St. Ronan's 
 Well," the Cleek-um-inn ;" and perceives the propriety of 
 locating the Great Unknown, as he for a number of years 
 was called, the long-concealed author of Waverley still 
 unsurpassed as a novelist in the romantic clachan, that 
 is, village, of Ken-na-quhair. Many a papa, who has sent 
 his boy to an unprincipled boarding-school, characterized 
 by much starvation and a plentiful lack of instruction, un- 
 derstands why Dickens, in his masterly " Nicholas Nickle- 
 by," celebrates the Yorkshire seminary of Mr. Squeers 
 as " Do-the-boys Hall ;" for there the boys were done, 
 it being a standing rule of that delectable seat of learn- 
 ing that the boys all got a large dose of treacle and brim- 
 stone once a week, administered out of an immense bowl, 
 in a vast wooden spoon, from the maternal paws of the 
 frightful Mrs. Squeers, who herself was the brimstone 
 minus the treacle a dose given to the boys in order to 
 cleanse their blood, and lessen their appetites. 
 
 It is Charles Lamb who tells us of a rollicking person- 
 age, whose manners were of the " How-do-ye-do-George- 
 my-boy " sort of style. In New England they talk, with 
 profound respect, of a " Go-to-meetin' coat." Occasion- 
 ally we come on good-natured young men, whose good- 
 nature arises from want of firm principle ; who have not 
 grit enough to say " No," but who belong to the feeble 
 " O-yes" class. Addison speaks of one who came rushing 
 along "in a helter-skelter-ding-dong-horse-and-foot" 
 style. Joseph Addison contributed to the Tatler and to 
 the Spectator, two periodicals of the time. When he was 
 Secretary of State, he broke down in a speech he tried 
 to make in the House of Commons ; and from the same 
 cause, excessive diffidence, he often sat silent in large 
 parties. But with one or two select friends his conver- 
 
Figures of Etymology. 93 
 
 sational powers were of the highest order, and he enjoyed 
 nothing more thoroughly than an animated debate with 
 a determined opponent. With Temple Stanyan, one of 
 his fellow-contributors to the Spectator, he used to have 
 many such mental tournaments. At length this gentle- 
 man borrowed some money from him ; after which he 
 assented to every thing Addison said. One evening a 
 subject was broached on which the two had often op- 
 posed each other, but still the borrower was too com- 
 plaisant to say a word in opposition to his creditor's re- 
 marks. This the great essayist would stand no longer; 
 he started to his feet, and cried, " Contradict me, sir, or 
 pay me my money." Knowing his unfitness for general 
 conversation, and yet what great work he could do, he 
 used to say of himself: " I can draw a bill for a thousand 
 pounds, though I have not a shilling of ready change in 
 my pocket." If you would write a style easy, natural, 
 elegant, eminently graceful, buy a copy of the Spectator, 
 and read Addison's papers fifty times. 
 
 XVIII. Not having any precisely correct place for it, 
 we are compelle^l to put in here, as a figure of consider- 
 able importance, Accentuation. Thus, in P. L., vi., 81 : 
 '" Far in th' horizon to the north, appear'd 
 Of battalious aspect." 
 
 See P. L., vi., 841 ; vii., 4. 
 
 So Shakespeare speaks of " Epicurean cooks ;" and 
 
 soon after 
 
 " How the fear of us 
 
 May cement our divisions, we not know." 
 
 S., " Cymbeline," act iv., scene v., Cornelius, /th speech, 
 line i; "Romeo and Juliet," act i., scene v., 1st Capu- 
 let's speech, line 4. He has also "persever," "character," 
 " importune," " contract." But no wonder the critics take 
 offense at Dante Gabriel Rosetti's venture (he, a true 
 poet): 
 
 " Every where, be it dry or wet, 
 And market-night in the Haymarket." 
 
94 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 These Lectures, we trust, are beginning already to fos- 
 ter a wide and generous catholicity of taste. A main 
 object with us will be quoting from a rich variety of 
 authors, to widen your intellectual sympathies, so that 
 you shall enjoy good writers, to what school of style so- 
 ever they may belong. Not long since a contributor 
 to Putnam s Monthly tried to prove, with Professor Ay- 
 toun, of Edinburgh, that ballad poetry alone is poetry. 
 .There are many, too, who insist that Pope, and writers 
 such as he, who dwell chiefly on the social interests and 
 the elegancies of refined life, are no poets at all. Such 
 ideas are as narrow and sectarian as his would be who 
 should maintain, because the garden -rose is not the 
 mountain-heath, that therefore the rose belongs not at 
 all to the fair sisterhood of flowers. The man who can 
 partake with relish of but one dish has conspired suc- 
 cessfully against his own enjoyment. Let it be part of 
 our philosophy of life and of criticism to cultivate a quick 
 eye for all varieties of excellence : let us .love the mount- 
 ain-oak that braves the storm, the violet that peeps 
 through the moss, and even the mignon^te that breathes 
 its tiny fragrance from the window-sill. On the same 
 principle let us read with delight the stern, keen satire ; 
 the polished verses of society ; the high meditations 
 of Wordsworth ; the simple lark - song of Burns ; the 
 harsh daguerreotyping of Crabbe ; the tragic terrors of 
 Shakespeare ; the thunder-notes of Milton. There are, 
 whose affectation it is to despise Pope. How is it pos- 
 sible for any one to do so who has actually read him? 
 Is there one who can despise the following, addressed to 
 a friend in reference to the poet's aged and infirm mother : 
 
 " O friend, may each domestic bliss be thine ! 
 Be no unpleasing melancholy mine ! 
 Me let the tender office long engage 
 To rock the cradle of declining age; 
 With lenient arts extend a mother's breath, 
 Make languor smile and smooth the bed of death; 
 
Figures of Etymology. 95 
 
 Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, 
 And keep at least one parent from the sky." 
 
 " Joanna Baillie," says Mrs. Jamieson, " had a great ad- 
 miration of Macaulay's Roman ballads." " But," said 
 some one, "do you really account them poetry?" She 
 replied, "They are poetry, if the sounds of the war- 
 trumpet be music." 
 
 The Rev. William Lisle Bowles is still remembered by 
 a petite volume of sonnets, only fourteen in number, 
 highly finished, but possessing little force. His edition 
 of Pope led him to argue that 
 
 "All images drawn from what is beautiful or sublime in the 
 works of nature are more beautiful or sublime than any images 
 drawn from art." 
 
 Byron replied that a ship in the wind, with all sail set, is 
 a more poetical object than a hog in the wind ; though 
 the hog is all nature, and the ship is all art. Beware of 
 being narrow or sectarian in your taste in literature. 
 
96 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 FIGURES OF SYNTAX. 
 
 PART FIRST. 
 Ellipsis. Asyndeton, or Lack of " Ands" 
 
 HAVING discussed eighteen figures of Etymology, fig- 
 ures of Syntax we reach next, deviations from the ordi- 
 nary construction of words. We have now attained a 
 higher round of the ladder. But for such deviations, 
 style would be tame and monotonous; grammar would 
 fetter too closely the free movements of the mind, flash- 
 ing forth its fire and electric glow. For figures are struck 
 out, not by the whim or at the prompting of rhetoricians, 
 but at the bidding of the soul. In classifying figures we 
 are recording, not inventing, phenomena ; and these, phe- 
 nomena at once of language and of mind of mind yearn- 
 ing to move freely and variously; a yearning strong in 
 proportion to the degree of mental life ; as the fir, in the 
 joy and vigor of its young existence, strikes its roots in 
 every direction, in the cliff and through its Alpine crev- 
 ices, and tosses its defiant head, varying every instant in 
 the breeze. 
 
 But, on the other hand, the mind, in itc depth and 
 grandeur, recognizes, also, the claims of order and law ; 
 bows before these claims with inborn reverence ; feels 
 that through obedience to them its strength will be 
 mightily increased. Hence came Grammar ; hence it hap- 
 pens that \hz permitted figures of syntax, or licenses of 
 construction, are limited, ascertainable, can be classified. 
 In studying the legitimate vagaries of language and its 
 great laws, we are studying the mind of man in its deep- 
 est recesses ; we have entered on the sublime domain of 
 
Figures of Syntax. 97 
 
 psychology, or the strength and beauty of the soul. Mark 
 this axiom carefully : All genuine study of language car- 
 ries you into the study of mind ; and is in affinity with 
 the Deathless, the Immutable, the Divine. 
 
 XIX. Omission, or Ellipsis, is one of the most com- 
 mon usages of speech, and is so numerous in its varieties 
 as to deserve a volume to itself; we utter few sentences 
 without it ; the omission of a word or words necessary 
 to complete the grammatical construction, though not 
 necessary to make the meaning precise. Cumbrous would 
 style be without this ; it is demanded by the free soul's 
 thirst for free movement, so that style may be wings, 
 not chains. It is an approach to disembodied spirit, and 
 hints a longing in that way. 
 
 You detect ellipsis in Fontenelle's saying : 
 
 " Women are the opposite of clocks : the clocks serve to re- 
 mind us of the hours j the women, to make us forget them." 
 
 There were few words in the retort which Pope once 
 provoked. He had taunted a young officer with his ig- 
 norance. The poet was small and crooked : 
 
 " Could you so much as tell me what a point of interroga- 
 tion is ?" 
 
 Not so much as a verb in the reply. With a wave of his 
 hand toward the poet, the youth answered 
 
 " A little crooked thing that asks questions." 
 
 In almost all short repartees the force and effect are a 
 good deal owing to ellipsis. A dull writer was remark- 
 ing that he and the distinguished Frenchman, Guizot, 
 rowed in the same boat, both being writers of history : 
 
 " You row in the same boat," Douglas Jerrold replied, " but 
 not with the same sculls." 
 
 Foote, the comedian and farce-writer, passing one day 
 along a humble London street, noticed an odd elliptical 
 inscription over the door of a mean-looking barber's shop : 
 
 G 
 
98 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Here lives Jemmy Wright 
 Shaves as well as any man in England; 
 Almost, not quite." 
 
 Most of the windows had paper in them instead of glass, 
 Foote determined to see the author of such original lines ; 
 he popped his head fairly through a paper pane, and 
 shouted inside 
 
 " Is Jemmy Wright at home ?" 
 
 Jemmy, with the greatest good -humor in the world, 
 popped his head through the adjoining pane, which was 
 of paper too, and exclaimed 
 
 " No, sir ! He's just popped out." 
 
 In Punch's " Poetical Cookery Book " is the following 
 recipe for boiling chicken, a parody on Moore's " Dorah 
 Creina :" 
 
 " Lesbia hath a fowl to cook, 
 
 But being anxious not to spoil it, 
 Searches carefully our book 
 
 For how to roast and how to boil it. 
 Sweet it is to dine upon, 
 
 Quite alone when small its size is ; 
 And when cleverly 'tis done, 
 
 Its delicacy much surprises. 
 
 my tender pullet dear, 
 
 My boil'd, not roasted, tender chicken; 
 
 1 can wish no other dish, 
 
 With thee supplied, my tender chicken !" 
 
 Your author presumes to intrude on you an instance, 
 and more than one : 
 
 " Hast ne'er beheld, while spring's fresh winds were sighing, 
 When from a nest all ruffled by the blast, 
 
 One of the brood was cast, 
 The mother-bird with patient labor trying 
 To lift it back ? So God thee to his breast 
 
 That softest, safest nest." 
 
Figures of Syntax. 99 
 
 In advertisements or telegrams, where every word has 
 to be paid for, one learns right speedily to value high 
 the market worth of ellipses. In the following anecdote 
 the advertising style is mimicked. During the last years 
 of his life McDonald Clark, known in New York as the 
 mad poet, was made free of the Astor House table. Ev- 
 ery one knew him by sight, and one day, while quietly 
 taking his dinner, two persons, seating themselves oppo- 
 site, began a conversation intended for his ears. One 
 said: 
 
 " ' Well, I have been in New York two months, and have seen 
 all I wish to see with one exception.' 'What is that?' said 
 the other. ' McDonald Clark, the great poet,' responded Num- 
 ber One, with solemn emphasis. Clark raised his eyes slowly 
 from his plate, and seeing the attention of the table was on 
 him, stood up, placing his hand over his heart, and bowing 
 with great gravity to the two, said, 'I am McDonald Clark, 
 the great poet.' The two started in mock surprise, gazed at 
 him in silence for a few moments, and then, amid an audible 
 titter of the company, one of them drew from his pocket a 
 quarter dollar, and, laying it before Clark, still looked at him 
 without a smile. Clark lifted the coin in silence and dignity; 
 put it in his pocket, drew thence a shilling, which he deposited 
 before the man, with these words * Children, half price.' The 
 titter changed into loud laughter, and the two disappeared in 
 shame." 
 
 In Dr. Johnson's best poem, " The Vanity of Human 
 Wishes," repeated ellipses occur in his spirited picture 
 of Charles XII. of Sweden : 
 
 " A frame of adamant, a soul of fire, 
 No dangers fright him and no labors tire; 
 O'er love, o'er fear, extends his wide domain 
 Unconquer'd lord of pleasure and of pain. 
 The march begins in military state, 
 And nations on his eye suspended wait. 
 Stern Famine guards the solitary coast, 
 And Winter barricades the realms of frost. 
 
ioo Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 He comes; nor want nor cold his course delay! 
 
 Hide, blushing Glory ! hide Pultowa's day ! 
 
 His fall was destined to a barren strand, 
 
 A petty fortress, and a dubious hand. 
 
 He left the name at which the world grew pale, 
 
 To point a moral, or adorn a tale." 
 
 Look we, for a moment, to the highest region. The 
 grand, massive Hebrew of the Old Testament, in its 
 many poetic passages, is full of this figure. Take an 
 instance from Habakkuk. The translation is by Pro- 
 fessor B. B. Edwards, and is a good specimen of that 
 thorough version which the churches are beginning to 
 long for: 
 
 "Jehovah looketh forth and maketh the nations tremble! 
 
 Broken to pieces are the everlasting mountains; 
 
 Sank down the eternal hills. 
 
 His ways are everlasting. 
 
 Saw Thee, and quaked the mountains ! 
 
 Uttered the Deep His voice ! 
 
 High lifted He his hands ! 
 
 Sun, Moon, stood in their tent 
 
 At the splendor of the lightning of Thy spear: 
 
 Thou didst trample on the sea with Thy horses, 
 
 On the foaming of the mighty waters." 
 
 The common version, though it brings out the main 
 truths of the vast original, yet does not bring out one 
 thousandth part of its sublimity, power, beauty, poesy, 
 and matchless precision. Shame on those feuds that 
 make it still difficult to bring together the churches, so 
 as to make a new version possible. How in the original 
 Hebrew the grand thoughts, ablaze with God their sun- 
 rise, often stand out in impressive isolation, like mount- 
 ain-peaks apart, Sierra-like ; a style reappearing in the cry 
 of Advent : " Glory to God in the highest ! on earth, 
 peace! toward man, good-will!" How admirably ellip- 
 ses suit this kind of mental scenery of Alpine abrupt- 
 ness ! How deep and solemn the sources of such rhetoric 
 
Figures of Syntax: 
 
 as this ! How false and mean the modern notion of the 
 rhetorical ! 
 
 In ellipsis even the verb is sometimes left out a char- 
 acteristic of the Roman Sallust, in his two masterpieces, 
 the " Catiline " and the " Jugurtha." This gives the feel- 
 ing of a rapid heaping up of circumstances ; or of a hor- 
 ror or a triumph too big for utterance. Bishop Doane, 
 in 1855, preached a sermon on a frightful railway colli- 
 sion on the Camden and Amboy Railroad. He thus pro- 
 ceeded : 
 
 " There needs no preacher to bring this mournful providence 
 home to your heart of hearts. Those nearing trains ! The 
 crash ! Car rushing into the midst of car ! The cloud of dust ! 
 The storm of splinters ! The groans ! The shrieks ! The 
 wounded ! The crushed ! The torn asunder ! The buried 
 alive ! The dying ! The dead ! Our public hall a receiving- 
 vault for unknown corpses !" 
 
 Edgar A. Poe, in the " Raven," a poem that thrills 
 with irresistible power all whom the wild and mystic en- 
 thrall, has a happy instance, and many a one, of ellipsis 
 of the verb : 
 
 "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and 
 
 weary 
 
 Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, 
 While I nodded nearly napping, suddenly there came a tap- 
 
 As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door : 
 Only this, and nothing more." 
 
 Dr. Snodgrass, a doctor who attended Poe during his 
 last illness, communicated some years since to a temper- 
 ance journal an affecting account of the close of his life: 
 
 "On a chilly and wet November evening I received a note 
 stating that a man answering to the name of Edgar Allan Poe, 
 who claimed to know me, was at a drinking-saloon in Lombard 
 Street, in Baltimore, in a state of deep intoxication and great 
 destitution. I repaired immediately to the spot. It was an 
 
Might cmd Mirth of Literature. 
 
 election day. When I entered the bar-room of the house, I 
 instantly recognized the face of one whom I had often seen 
 and knew well, although it wore an aspect of vacant stupidity 
 that made me shudder. The intellectual flash of his eye had 
 vanished, or rather had been quenched in the bowl, bilt the 
 broad, capacious forehead of the author of the " Raven " was 
 still there, with width in the region of ideality such as few men 
 ever possessed. He was so utterly stupefied with liquor that 
 I thought it best not to seek recognition or conversation, es- 
 pecially as he was surrounded by a crowd of gentlemen actu- 
 ated by idle curiosity rather than sympathy. I immediately 
 ordered a room for him, where he could be comfortable until 
 I got word to his relatives, for there were several in Baltimore. 
 Just at that moment one or two of the persons referred to, get- 
 ting information, arrived at the spot. They declined to take 
 private care of him, for the reason that he had been very abu- 
 sive and ungrateful on all occasions when drunk, and advised 
 that he be sent to a hospital. He was accordingly placed in 
 a coach, and conveyed to the Washington College Hospital. 
 So insensible was he that we had to carry him to a carriage as 
 if a corpse. The muscles of articulation seemed paralyzed to 
 speechlessness, and mere incoherent mutterings were all that 
 were heard. 
 
 " He died in the hospital after some three or four days, dur- 
 ing which time he enjoyed only occasional and fitful seasons 
 of consciousness. His disease was mania a potu : a disease 
 whose finale is always fearful in its maniacal manifestations. 
 In one of his more lucid moments, when asked by the physi- 
 cian whether he would like to see his friends, he exclaimed: 
 ' Friends ! my best friend would be he who would take a pistol 
 and blow my brains out, and thus relieve me of my agony.' 
 These were among his last words." 
 
 Few poems do we possess nobler than Akenside's 
 " Pleasures of the Imagination." In the close of his 
 famous lines on Brutus's slaughter of Caesar, a fine 
 ellipsis occurs : 
 
 " For lo ! the tyrant prostrate in the dust, 
 And Rome again is free." 
 
Figures of Syntax. 103 
 
 Or from a sermon by the wonderful Christmas Evans, 
 we take a scene in a grave-yard : 
 
 " At this moment Justice appeared, as if to watch the gate ; 
 for it is the grave-yard of fallen humanity. The angels asked, 
 ' Why wilt thou not suffer Mercy to enter ?' He sternly replied, 
 ' The law is broken, and it must be honored. Die they, or Jus- 
 tice must.' " 
 
 Mark how inversion and ellipsis unite to make the last 
 sentence like a rapier's thrust. 
 
 In Andrew Cherry's admirable sea-song, " The Bay of 
 Biscay, O," mark the fine effect of the omission of the 
 verb: 
 
 " The night both drear and dark 
 Our poor devoted bark ! 
 Till next day, there she lay 
 In the Bay of Biscay, O." 
 
 Alfred B. Street paints with much vigor the gray forest 
 eagle and its haunts. There is no want of ellipses here : 
 
 " With storm-daring pinion and sun-gazing eye 
 The gray forest eagle is king of the sky. 
 O little he loves the green valley of flowers, 
 Where sunshine and song cheer the bright summer hours; 
 But the dark, gloomy gorge where down plunges the foam 
 Of the fierce rock-lashed torrent he claims as his home. 
 There he blends his keen shriek with the roar of the flood, 
 And the many-voiced sounds of the blast-smitten wood." 
 
 How long, how deeply have the glories of war be- 
 witched mankind ! From W. H. C. Hosmer we take these 
 nobly conceived, classically expressed lines, occurring in 
 the seventh canto of his " Yonnondio :" 
 
 " Thou phantom, Military Fame ! 
 How long will Genius laud thy name ! 
 And curtain features from the sight 
 
 More foul than those Khorassan's seer 
 Hid behind veil of silver bright, 
 
 Tempting his victim to draw near. 
 
IO4 Might and Mirth of Liter atiire. 
 
 How long will thy misleading lamp 
 
 Through regions wrapped in smoke and fire 
 
 To Slaughter's cavern, red and damp, 
 
 Guide beardless boy and gray-hair'd sire ! 
 
 Up ! fearless battlers for the Right ! 
 
 And flood old groaning earth with light. 
 
 Bid nations ponder well, and pause 
 
 When blade corrupt Ambition draws ! 
 
 O teach the world that Conquest wears 
 
 A darker brand than felon bears; 
 
 Prolific fount, from earliest time, 
 
 Of Murder, Orphanage, and Crime." 
 
 To thoroughly understand many points in English 
 grammar, many a usage in English speech, we need to 
 study the Anglo-Saxon, the mother-tongue of our moth- 
 er-tongue, and so our venerable grandmother-tongue. 
 For instance, the articles were often left out by the Sax- 
 on bards ; hence a main source of that obscurity which 
 not seldom marks the old Saxon verse, which abounds 
 to excess in ellipses, so as to seem, too often, a collection 
 of broken hints and ejaculations. King Alfred, noblest 
 of English monarchs, wrote thus in prose : 
 
 " So doth the moon with his pale light, that the bright stars 
 he obscureth in the heavens." 
 
 But in poetry he expresses himself thus, obscurity being 
 guarded against by some very emphatic delivery, and by 
 the accompaniment of the harp : 
 
 "With pale light, 
 Bright stars 
 Moon lesseneth." 
 
 So venerable is ellipsis in our speech, especially in poetry. 
 We have already introduced to you Ben Jonson, 
 Shakespeare's contemporary. When a common soldier, 
 he accepted the defiance of a gigantic foe, and slew him 
 in front of the two armies. Bred in the Church of En- 
 
Figures of Syntax. 105 
 
 gland, he became for a time a Roman Catholic ; and 
 when, in advanced life, he joined the Church of England 
 again, he quaffed off a whole gobletful of wine handed 
 to him in the sacrament, to testify, he averred, how heart- 
 ily he returned to his first fold. On his death-bed he 
 left directions to bury him standing on his feet ; the coffin 
 was to be placed on end in the grave, that he might be 
 ready to start at the resurrection. Mark in the follow- 
 ing piece by him the elastic, pellucid elegance of his 
 diction: 
 
 " Have you seen but a bright lily grow 
 
 Before rude hands have touch'd it ? 
 Have you mark'd but the fall of the snow 
 
 Before the soil hath smutch'd it ? 
 Have you felt the wool of the beaver, 
 Or swan's-down ever ? 
 
 Or smelt o' the brier, 
 
 Or the nard in the fire ? 
 Or tasted the bag of the bee ? 
 O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she !" 
 
 Lord Craven, in the reign of James I., was anxious to 
 see Ben Jonson, who bears in English literature the two 
 epithets of " Stout " and " Rare/' When the dramatist 
 went to his lordship's mansion, the porter refused to ad- 
 mit him, his dress was so shabby. Rough language, in 
 which Ben excelled, passed between the two. His lord- 
 ship heard the din, and came to the door: 
 
 "I understood your lordship wished to see me." "You, 
 friend ! Why, who may you be ?" " I am Ben Jonson." " No, 
 no ! You can not be the great author who wrote ' The Silent 
 Woman.' You look as if you could not say * Bo' to a goose." 
 The poetiooked straight in the nobleman's face, with a com- 
 ical air, and cried, " Bo !" " I am now convinced," said the 
 nobleman, " that you are Ben Jonson." 
 
 There are what we may call Ellipses Complimentary; 
 as when a letter was sent to the illustrious Newton, ad- 
 
io6 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 dressed " Mr. Newton, Europe/' which came safely to the 
 Unequaled. A young officer, invited to dine with Gen- 
 eral Wolfe, him who fell at Quebec, was saying, with a 
 strut, to a friend : 
 
 " I dine with Wolfe to-day." Wolfe happened to hear this, 
 and said to him : " You might say ' General Wolfe ;' that would 
 be more respectful." "Pardon me, sir," was the quick- reply; 
 "but we never say General Caesar, General Alexander." 
 
 Richard Lovelace, whose style is very elegant, gives 
 us a noble sentiment : 
 
 "Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind; 
 
 That from the nunnery 
 Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind 
 
 To war and arms I flee. 
 Yet this inconstancy is such 
 
 As you, too, should adore ; 
 I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
 
 Loved I not honor more." 
 
 Take note of the omission of " if" in the last line. 
 
 From Matthew Prior comes this, in a different strain : 
 
 " On his death-bed poor Lubin lies ; 
 
 His spouse is in despair; 
 With frequent sobs and mutual sighs 
 
 They both express their care. 
 * A different cause/ says Parson Sly, 
 
 ' The same effects may give 
 Poor Lubin fears that he may die, 
 
 His wife that he may live.' " 
 
 We here wish you to remark that as ellipsis is more 
 freely permitted to the poet than to the our language 
 wants a word prosist, therefore a master of long can 
 condense more meaning into smaller space in verse than 
 he could in prose ; so inexcusable are the writers of un- 
 meaning lines. Never be satisfied with poetry unless it 
 run over with meaning. 
 
Figures of Syntax. 107 
 
 It is in good part owing to fine omissions of single 
 words, and, what is finer still, to skillful omission of cir- 
 cumstances, which the reader can supply, that there is 
 such a charm of rapid narrative in Leigh Hunt's ballad 
 " The Glove." King Francis, of France, with his lords 
 and ladies, was looking at the king's lions sporting: 
 
 "Romped and roared the lions with horrid laughing jaws; 
 They bit; they glared; gave blows like beams; a wind went 
 
 with their paws ; 
 With wallowing might and stifled roar they rolled, on one 
 
 another ; 
 Till all the pit, with sand and mane, was in a thundering 
 
 smother. 
 The bloody foam above the bars came whisking through the 
 
 air; 
 Said Francis then, ' Troth, gentlemen, we're better here than 
 
 there.' " 
 
 Inasmuch as the P. L. incomparably the greatest 
 poem, not dramatic, ever written by man, a production 
 which we owe to Christianity owes much of its force to 
 ellipsis, it is well to bring in here Sir Egerton Brydges's 
 general summary of Milton's style : 
 
 "The condensed collocation of Milton's language is peculiar 
 to himself. Its breaks, its bursts ; the strong, the rough, and 
 the flowing; the concise and the gigantic, are mingled, with a 
 surprising skill, and eloquence, and magic. It is easy to find 
 single gems in other authors the galaxy is the wonder. Mil- 
 ton's splendor, when it began to rise, did not stop till it blazed." 
 
 To read not only, but to study the P. L., is not merely 
 a delight and a privilege, but a sacred duty. Avail your- 
 self of the invaluable helps which are afforded by Boyd's 
 " Notes." 
 
 The chief reason of the heap of unnecessary words, 
 or rubbish, which we too often use, is the not having a 
 precise idea of the thing we are depicting; consequently, 
 we keep talking about it and about it, in a jumble of 
 
io8 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 verbiage. It is a misfortune, also, not to know the very 
 term, usually but one, that best suits the place ; for sel- 
 dom are there two words exactly synonymous. Abun- 
 dant translating of Latin and Greek into English gives, 
 better than aught else in the world, training on the sec- 
 ond point here specified ; on the first point, exact infor- 
 mation must be poured into the mind. Ponder Remark 
 First, page xlix. A French gentleman, who knew that 
 Dr. Samuel Johnson had written a periodical called the 
 Rambler, said to him when dining with him : 
 
 " May I have the plaisir of to drink the vine with you, Mr. 
 Vagabond." 
 
 As this point of ellipsis is one, fully to attend to which 
 will much aid toward a deep acquaintance with English, 
 we proceed to minute details ; by no means attempting 
 a complete list of ellipses, yet specifying a few. We 
 give a table of twenty-nine varieties. It is asserted that 
 there are six hundred varieties of snow-flakes ; we have 
 no doubt there are as many varieties of ellipsis. Let 
 the reader of this volume, who is wise enough to strive 
 to be a student of it, give at least a fortnight to classi- 
 fying, two hundred different sorts of ellipses from Milton 
 and from Shakespeare. The result will astound him. 
 Meanwhile we collect, with microscopic gaze, the smaller 
 number of twenty-nine. 
 
 1. The antecedent pronoun is omitted, as by Dana 
 
 " Who has no inward beauty, none perceives, 
 Though all around be beautiful." 
 
 This omission of the antecedent pronoun is very com- 
 mon in Caesar and in the Greek and Latin classics. See 
 the first sentence of the " Commentaries " " qui," for ii 
 qui. We may state here that Dana's " Household Book 
 of Poetry " is one of the best collections of our shorter 
 poems ; as also is Bryant's " Library of Song. " 
 
 2. The particle "there." A faithful old African gave 
 
Figures of Syntax. 109 
 
 good advice to a clergyman who, having received calls 
 to several congregations, did not know which to close 
 with : 
 
 "Go, massa, where is de most devil." 
 
 See P. L., v., 348. 
 
 3. The relative pronoun "who," "which," or "that" 
 is very often left out, as in the last lines of Lord Roches- 
 ter's extempore epitaph on Charles II. The king tal- 
 ented, idle, unprincipled, good-natured insisted that 
 Rochester should on the spot write his, the king's, epi- 
 taph. Rochester favored him with this : 
 
 " Here lies our sovereign lord the king, 
 
 Whose word no man relied on; 
 Who never said a foolish thing, 
 And never did a wise one." 
 
 4. The connecting word " namely," its place being 
 supplied by a semicolon or a pause, as in this ill-natured 
 saying by Bayle, author of a famous work, " The Critical 
 Dictionary:" 
 
 "There is only one secret a woman can keep her age." 
 
 5. "Of," as in Milton: 
 
 " His ponderous shield. 
 Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round." 
 
 6. The sign of the infinitive. Phineas Fletcher writes : 
 "With that a thundering noise seem'd shake the sky." 
 
 7. A preposition : a form of the figure that covers hun- 
 dreds of cases, as in " The Midsummer-Night's Dream," 
 by Shakespeare ; who is very partial to this usage, and 
 handles it most deftly: 
 
 " Steal forth thy father's house to-night." 
 
 In P. L., i., 722 
 
 " The ascending pile, 
 Stood fixed her stately height.'? 
 
no Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Or open the " Rienzi " of the very able Miss Mitford: 
 
 " Ask Orient gems, 
 
 Diamonds, and sapphires ; sigh for rarest birds 
 Of farthest Ind, like winged flowers to flit 
 Around thy stately bower; and at thy wish 
 The precious toys shall wait fhee." 
 
 Or Goethe, in -his noble Christian drama, " Iphigenia 
 in Tauris" study it by all means: 
 
 " Ah ! woe is him who leads a lonely life." 
 
 " Me seems it" we meet with in Gary's "Dante." How 
 bold and beautiful is this variety ! 
 
 8. " If;" as in this statuesque group by Chaucer very 
 marvelous : 
 
 " The statue of Mars upon a carte stood, 
 Armed and looking grim, as he were wud (mad); 
 A wolf there stood beforne him at his feet, 
 With eyen red; and of a man he ete." 
 
 9. The nominative to the verb very often, as in Pick- 
 ering to the song-sparrow : 
 
 " Did the green isles 
 
 Detain thee long ? Or 'mid the palmy groves 
 Of the bright South, where Nature ever smiles, 
 Didst sing thy loves ?" 
 
 *P. L., vi., 430; S., " Coriolanus," act iv., scene iv., line 12. 
 
 10. The relative is omitted, while the antecedent is re- 
 tained, the opposite usage to No. I ; figures going usu- 
 ally, as you have noticed, in contrasted pairs, like two 
 arms to strike with, right and left. Thus said a sen- 
 ator: 
 
 " Are we a degenerate race who have not the manhood to 
 preserve that their fathers won ?" 
 
 This usage is eminently neat and classical. S., "Julius 
 Caesar," act i., scene iii., Caesar's I2th speech. 
 
Figures of Syntax. 1 1 1 
 
 11. " It is" and " that it is." As in Goethe's " Iphi- 
 genia in Tauris :" 
 
 " But woman's happiness how narrow'd in."' 
 
 S., " Julius Caesar," act ii., line 3. 
 
 12. More widely, the. verb " to be" in some part of 
 it, together with the demonstrative adverb " there ;" as 
 in Marvell's well-known ode ; of the great Cromwell he 
 says: 
 
 "What field in all our civil wars, 
 Where his were not the chiefest scars ?" 
 
 13. "Able to." When the author of the "Seasons" 
 was told that a certain learned Londoner, Glover, was 
 writing " Leonidas," an epic poem, he cried : 
 
 " He write an epic poem ! It is impossible. He never saw 
 a mountain in his life !" 
 
 James Thomson was born and John Dryden died in the 
 same year, 1700. It is plain that when Thomson uttered 
 that exclamation the artificial age of English poetry 
 was nearly gone ; star and waterfall were again to be in- 
 voked ; Burns and Cowper were at the door. 
 
 14. A verb which in strict grammar should be repeat- 
 ed. Two city men, very smart as they thought, travel- 
 ing in a remote district in the Highlands of Aberdeen- 
 shire, not far from the Queen's autumn residence at Bal- 
 moral not a French locality, Balmoral came on an 
 aged shepherd : 
 
 "You have a wide view from these mountains," said they. 
 " Yes, that's true," said the shepherd. " You can see," said 
 they, "America from here." " Muckle farrer than that," he 
 replied. " Ah, how can that be?" " Whan the mist drives aff, 
 ye can see the mune." 
 
 15. "Merciful" is used for Merciful One; " Holiest" 
 for Holiest One, and the like ; as by Milman : 
 
1 1 2 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Thou knowest, Merciful, 
 That knowest all things ! Thou didst come, 
 O Holiest, to this world of sin and gloom." 
 
 P. L., vi., 131. S., " As You Like It," act v., Duke's 
 speech, line 7, Senior Duke. 
 
 16. A negative, or more than one. John A. Shea thus 
 addresses the Ocean : 
 
 " Fleets, tempests, nor nations 
 
 Thy glory can bow ; 
 As the stars first beheld thee, 
 Still stainless art thou." 
 
 17. The article. P. L.,xii., 533. S., " Antony and Cleo- 
 patra," act ii., scene ii., Antony's 1 3th speech. This omis- 
 sion of " the " has many a fine effect in the Hebrew. 
 As in Psalm lv., 8 : 
 
 " I will hasten my escape from rushing wind, from tempest." 
 
 It has long been fashionable to denounce the heavy te- 
 diousness of Milton ; how he burdens his pages with that 
 dreadful thing, creed. Milton was right ; his theology 
 is indestructible. Truth will make his poesy deathless ; 
 whereas poesy alone will never make poetry immortal. 
 The poets of the day should bethink them of what need 
 there is to link their pretty thoughts with enduring 
 truths, or with some enduring cause or heart-shaking 
 tale, as Virgil his " ^Eneid " with the birth and fortunes 
 of Rome, and Homer his two epics with " Hellas." Ever 
 and again Milton's theology will bring his poetry into 
 prominence. It will be pondered for instruction and 
 guidance. The poetry that aspires to live must be a 
 means even more than an end. Well said Addison of 
 " Paradise Lost :" 
 
 "This work is more useful and instructive than any other 
 poem in any language." 
 
 1 8. Ellipses, nobler and bolder, use words as mere 
 
Figures of Syntax. 113 
 
 hints, letting many expressions be guessed at from the 
 context. This may be carried to the excess of obscu- 
 rity ; but it is often exceedingly grand. Milton has 
 much of it, yet is seldom or never obscure xii., 600 : 
 
 " The great deliverance by her seed to come 
 (For by the woman's seed) on all mankind." 
 
 19. The verb of questioning and the verb of reply ; as 
 in Tennyson's poem " The Princess :" 
 
 " And, stand ! who goes ? Two from the palace." 
 
 S., " Romeo and Juliet," act iii., scene v., Capulet's ist 
 speech, line 4. 
 
 20. Other verbs. S., " Coriolanus," act iv., scene vi. : 
 
 " Shall us to the Capitol ?" 
 
 " Cymbeline," act iv., scene ii., Belarius's 2ist speech, 5th 
 line. 
 
 21. " Do ;" as Shakespeare : 
 
 "What they do delay, they not deny." 
 
 22. " Such ;" as Shakespeare : 
 
 " Those arts they have as I 
 Could put into them." 
 
 23. " Same;" by Shakespeare: 
 
 " I am made of that self, as my sister." 
 
 24. A whole clause, with fine effect ; as suiting the per- 
 turbation of the mind. Thus Shakespeare, in " Lear," 
 when Cordelia says 
 
 " If for I lack that glib and oily art 
 To speak and purpose not." 
 
 The full expression would be : " If you cast me off, for 
 this reason, as is likely, that I lack " 
 
 H 
 
ii4 Might and Mirtk of Literature. 
 
 25. "Those of;" as by Shakespeare: 
 
 " What with loathsome smells 
 And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth." 
 
 26. "As for;" thus Shakespeare: 
 
 " Me, poor man, my library 
 Was dukedom large enough." 
 
 27. " Every " is used for " every one of;" as by Shakes- 
 peare : 
 
 " I'll resolve you 
 Of every these happen'd accidents." 
 
 28. " For which;" see Shakespeare: 
 
 "We thank you both; yet one but flatters us, 
 As well appeareth by the cause you come." 
 
 29. The first " as." Thus by Thomas Buchanan Read : 
 
 "The mother who conceals her grief 
 
 While to her breast her son she presses, 
 Then breathes a few brave words and brief, 
 
 Kissing the patriot brow she blesses, 
 With no one but her secret God 
 
 To know the pain that weighs upon her, 
 Sheds holy blood as e'er the sod 
 
 Received on Freedom's field of honor." 
 
 This designedly incomplete list of ellipses is sufficient 
 to show that to conceive of figurative language as nec- 
 essarily artificial is a most shallow and despicable notion. 
 Not to use figures would often be the artificial thing. 
 Burns was asked to say grace before dinner. At the 
 spur of the moment he gave the following, in which are 
 ellipses, how natural : 
 
 "There's some hae meat, but canna eat; 
 
 And some would eat but want it; 
 But we hae meat, and we can eat, 
 And sae the Lord be thanked." 
 
Figures of Syntax. 115 
 
 * 
 
 As eager argument can scarce stay for words, we may 
 be sure that Demosthenes will abound in omissions. He 
 does ; yet how free from obscurity. Thus he cries, in 
 his First against Philip : 
 
 " Of a criminal, it is the part to die, sentenced by law ; but 
 of a general righting with his country's foes." 
 
 A specimen of the noble axioms with which his speeches 
 are interspersed. 
 
 Let us now take at random a few ellipses ; as this from 
 Henry Peacham, on the flowers of the field : 
 
 " Withal, as in some rare limned book, we see 
 Here painted lectures of God's sacred will: 
 The daisy teacheth lowliness of mind ; 
 The camomile, we should be patient still ; 
 The rue, our hate of vice's poison ill; 
 The woodbine, that we should our friendship hold; 
 Our hope, the savory, in the bitterest cold." 
 
 The anecdote of Dr. Samuel Johnson and the sign- 
 board shows to what extreme lengths ellipses may be 
 pushed. A person consulted him as to what to put on 
 his sign-board, proposing "John Williams: boots and 
 shoes sold here." Dr. Johnson began to criticise it : 
 
 " What's the use of ' here ' ? Is not your shop seen to be 
 here and not at the North Pole ?" [The word " here " went out] 
 " ' Sold.' Does any one expect to get them for nothing ? ' Sold ' 
 is an insult; you hint to your customers that they are idiots who 
 expect to get boots for nothing." [Out went "sold."] "'John 
 Williams' ah! What care I whether John Williams or John 
 Gumpus sells them ?" [" John Williams " went out.] " ' Boots 
 and shoes !' But suppose a man passes who can't read ? His 
 money is as good as that of the most learned professor ? Pray 
 off with ' boots and shoes,' and paint on the board a boot and 
 a shoe." 
 
 The student of this very commonplace figure will dis- 
 cover a thousand capabilities of language that he never 
 
1 1 6 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 j? 
 
 dreamed of before, small, indeed, like the dew-drop, but 
 as lovely. In Shakespeare especially he will meet with 
 the most tiny beauties united with massive grandeur, as 
 when the leaf of the birch twinkles in sunlight over Al- 
 pine rocks. Read " Coriolanus," " Lear," " Macbeth," 
 "The Tempest," "Julius Csesar," "Hamlet," "Antony 
 and Cleopatra," " Midsummer-Night's Dream," " Cym- 
 beline," " Merchant of Venice," "Winter's Tale," "Hen- 
 ry VIII." Almost superhuman are they. Read each 
 ten times ; study each as a whole, yet go so close as to 
 master the ellipses. 
 
 Sydney Smith yields a large crop. A medical adviser 
 counseled him to rise earlier, and walk a mile every morn- 
 ing on an empty stomach : 
 
 "Very willing to do so; but on whose stomach?" 
 
 A warning, carried too far, against the omission of the 
 relative occurs in a criticism by David Hume, the rather 
 untrustworthy historian of England, in a letter of his to 
 Dr. William Robertson, the historian : 
 
 " I do not like this sentence of yours, ' This step was taken 
 in consequence of the treaties Wolsey had concluded with the 
 emperor at Brussels, and which had hitherto been kept secret.' 
 Certainly it had been better to have said, l which Wolsey,' etc. 
 That relative ought very seldom to be omitted, and is here 
 requisite to preserve symmetry between the two members of 
 the sentence. You omit the relative too often, which is l a col- 
 loquial barbarism,' as Dr. Johnson calls it." 
 
 On the other hand, we protest against being always 
 tied up by such insertion. We demand to breathe at 
 times more freely. Far more daring omissions than this 
 are used with the best effect. We are impudent enough 
 to claim that we have led you into a much deeper study 
 of ellipsis than ever Hume undertook. 
 
 Let us add the statement a truth often forgotten by 
 or unknown to students of Latin and Greek, and unno- 
 ticed by even Latin and Greek grammars that neither 
 
Figures of Syntax. 1 1 7 
 
 in Latin or Greek can there be an ellipsis of the personal 
 pronoun from the verb ; for this reason that these per- 
 sonal pronouns form the personal inflections of the verb, 
 as in some cases is still very evident ; thus Amavi is 
 three words run into one, " Am-have I." When Ego is 
 expressed, it is emphatic : " I have loved, I." On the 
 other hand, it is the common Greek usage to omit the 
 apodosis ; thus, in Luke xi., 49, where our translation 
 reads, " Lord, shall we smite with the sword ?" The 
 original has it : " If we shall smite with the sword ?" that 
 is, " If we shall smite with the sword, will it please thee?" 
 So, in Acts i., 6, the disciples say to their Master, not, 
 " Lord, wiltthou at this time restore again the kingdom 
 to Israel ?" but, " Lord, if thou art restoring the kingdom 
 to Israel at this time ;" where the conclusion or apodosis 
 is wholly omitted. 
 
 The great painter, Hogarth, had been employed by a 
 very plain-featured lord to make his portrait, and did so 
 with such unflattering truth that his lordship would not 
 pay for it. On this Hogarth wrote to him as follows : 
 
 "Mr. H.'s dutiful respects to Lord L. Finding that his lord- 
 ship does not n\ean to have the picture, is informed again of 
 Mr. H.'s necessity for the money. If his lordship does not 
 send for it in three days, it will be disposed of, with the addi- 
 tion of a tail, to Mr. Hare, the famous wild-beast man, for an ex- 
 hibition-painting, when it is thought it will make an excellent 
 monkey." 
 
 Fear of the metamorphosis brought in the cash forth- 
 with. 
 
 XX. Asyndeton, Lack of Ands, a special form of 
 this great figure, falls to be treated along with it. The 
 birth-shout of a nation occurs in Exodus xv. a poem 
 of liberty ; for the earliest republic ever born on earth 
 was inspired into being by miracle by Jehovah, Patron- 
 God of human freedom, and in express preference to 
 monarchy. No son of Moses mounted an hereditary 
 
n8 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 throne. Pure Judaism frowned alike on monarchy and 
 on priestcraft. This poem is the oldest lyric in exist- 
 ence; its very antiquity should make it venerable; its 
 occasion should make it dear to all who hate despotism : 
 
 " The enemy said : I will pursue ; I will overtake ; I will di- 
 vide the spoil ; I will draw my sword ; my hand shall destroy 
 them. Thou didst blow with thy wind ; the sea covered them ; 
 they sank like lead in the mighty waters." 
 
 How much of force and hurrying rapidity would be 
 lost by putting in the " ands." This is true to the heart, 
 for Passion occupies itself with great prominent causes 
 and large effects; it is for cold Reason to link them to- 
 gether. Yet too much of this gives an artificial and 
 forced air ; as in the writings, powerful but strained, of 
 Seneca among the Romans, of which one said that Sen- 
 eca's sentences were " sand without lime." Unaffected 
 ease is a far higher attainment in style than labored at- 
 tempts at strength. The style of the Spectator is utterly 
 unconscious of itself, as is the wave curving on the beach, 
 which it animates with movement and song. Luke xvii., 
 27, 28; Ezek. xxxiii., 15, 16; S., " Cymbeline," act v., 
 scene v., Posthumius's 1st speech, lines 4, 5. 
 
 Lamartine enriches us with an example of the judi- 
 cious use of asyndeton in the close of the following sen- 
 tence from his delightful " Travels in the East." He 
 speaks of the All-pervading: 
 
 " This great Divine Figure, which man from his infancy is 
 ever striving to reach and to imprison in his structures built 
 by hands, forever enlarges and spreads forth; it outsteps the 
 narrow limits of temples, and leaves the altars to crumble into 
 dust; and calls man to seek for it where alone it resides in 
 thought, in intelligence, in virtue, in nature, in infinity." 
 
 Let us now gaze on a Dutch landscape, painted to the 
 life by the masterly pen of the justly famous American, 
 John Lothrop Motley, whose historical works deserve a 
 
Figures of Syntax. 1 1 9 
 
 place in the highest rank. We quote his description of 
 Zutphen (South Fen), in his " History of the United 
 Netherlands:" 
 
 " Long rows of poplars marking the straight highways, clumps 
 of pollard willows scattered around the little meres; snug farm- 
 houses, with kitchen-gardens and brilliant flower-patches, dot- 
 ting the level plain; verdant pastures sweeping off into seem- 
 ingly infinite distance, where the innumerable cattle seemed 
 to swarm like insects; windmills swinging their arms in all di- 
 rections, like protective giants, to save the country from inun- 
 dation ; the lagging sail of market-boats shining through rows 
 
 ;ij of orchard trees all gave to the environs of Zutphen a tran- 
 
 !j quil and domestic charm." 
 
 The seemingly infinite sweep like that of the sea, which 
 is not more level than those plains are, will be recognized 
 by the traveler in Holland as very characteristic. 
 
 The speech of Henry IV. of France to his troops be- 
 fore a battle is a spirited instance of the leaving out of 
 all conjunctions, and of the circumstances and feelings 
 that prompt men to do so : 
 
 "I am your king. You are Frenchmen. Behold the en- 
 emy." 
 
 T^ake another example from Mrs. Osgood ; the young 
 men will see before them somebody, the unparalleled : 
 
 " Her laugh is like a fairy's laugh, 
 
 So musical, so sweet; 
 Her foot is like a fairy's foot, 
 
 So dainty and so fleet; 
 Her smile is fitful sunshine, 
 
 Her hand is dimpled snow; 
 Her lip a very rosebud 
 
 In sweetness and in glow." 
 
 What a number of the grandest aims to aim at does 
 Mrs. Jameson present to you in the following: 
 
1 20 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 "To trust religiously, to hope humbly, to desire nobly, to 
 think rationally, to will resolutely, to work earnestly may this 
 be mine !" 
 
 We are ardent admirers of many of Dr. Bushnell's 
 works. We have read lately his volume entitled " Chris- 
 tian Culture," a book of the utmost profundity, truth, 
 and beauty. It is far the ablest book on the subject that 
 we ever read the godly upbringing of children. Hear 
 what he says of a true Christian home, and take note of 
 the asyndeton : 
 
 " What scene of family dignity is more to be admired ? The 
 highest splendors of wealth and show have but a feeble glow- 
 worm look in the comparison a pale, faint glimmer of light, 
 a phosphorescent halo, enveloping what is only a worm. Even 
 the poor laboring man, thanking God at his table for the food 
 he earned by the toil of yesterday ; singing still each morning in 
 his family hymn of the glorious rest at hand ; moving on thith- 
 erward with his children by single day's journeys of prayer 
 and praise ; teaching them, even as the eagles do their young, 
 to spread their wings with him and rise this man, I say, is the 
 prince of God in his house ; and the poor garb in which he 
 kneels outshines the robes of palaces. Religion leads in the 
 day as the dawn leads in the morning. It blends a heavenly- 
 gratitude with the joys of the table ; it breathes a cheerful sense 
 of God into all the works and tempers of the house ; it softens 
 the pillow for rest when the day is done. Home and religion 
 are sacred words names both of love and reverence : home, 
 because it is the seat of religion; religion, because it is the 
 sacred element of home." 
 
Figures of Syntax. 121 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 FIGURES OF SYNTAX. 
 
 PART SECOND. 
 
 Polysyndeton. Zeugma. Syllepsis. Paradiastole. Ple- 
 onasm. Me-ism. Hypallage. Hysteron-proteron, or 
 Putting the Cart before the Horse. 
 
 XXI. Polysyndeton is our next figure, or Superfluity 
 of Ands. All birds have two wings, so has the mind 
 figures in contrasted pairs. Asyndeton assures us of 
 polysyndeton a proof and illustration, running through 
 our whole wide theme, that we are studying the habits 
 of a creature that soars. See Luke vii., 38 ; x., 27 ; xii., 
 46, 58 ; xv., 22, 23. Gen. viii., 22. 
 
 In the following beautiful tradition about our Master 
 you find a superfluity of "ands:" 
 
 " Jesus arrived one evening at the gates of a certain city, 
 and sent his disciples on to prepare a frugal supper ; while he 
 himself, intent on doing good, walked weary through the streets 
 into the market-place. 
 
 " And he saw at the corner of the market some people gath- 
 ered together, looking at an object on the ground; and he drew 
 near to see what it might be. It was a dead dog, with a halter 
 around its neck, by which he appeared to have been dragged 
 through the mire; and a viler, a more abject, a more unclean 
 thing never met the eyes of man. 
 
 " And those who stood by looked on with abhorrence. 
 
 " ' Faugh !' said one, stopping his nose, ' it pollutes the air.' 
 1 How long/ said another, 'shall this foul beast offend our 
 sight?' 'Look at his torn hide,' said a third; 'one could not 
 
122 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 cut even a shoe-tie out of it.' ' And his ears,' said a fourth, ' all 
 draggled and bleeding.' 'No doubt,' cried a fifth, 'he hath 
 been hanged for thieving.' 
 
 " And Jesus heard them, and looking down compassionately 
 on the dead creature, he said : ' Pearls are not equal to the 
 whiteness of his teeth.' 
 
 "And the people turned toward him with amazement, and said 
 among themselves, ' Who is this ? This must be Jesus of Naz- 
 areth, for only he could find something to pity and praise even 
 in a dead dog.' And, being ashamed, they bowed their heads 
 before him, and went each on his way. Be ours that gentle 
 judging; that quickness, that tendency to detect some good in 
 even the vilest; and immeasurable capabilities. Turn we our 
 severity on ourselves, our gentleness on others." 
 
 By keeping the mind tarrying on each circumstance ; 
 by the frequent recurrence of the particle of addition 
 "and," we have left on us the feeling that the circum- 
 stances must indeed be numerous. To Nathaniel Lee 
 let us look for an example, quoting from one of the best 
 of his eleven tragedies. A master of genuine passion 
 and tenderness, he sometimes degenerates into bombast. 
 Death is his theme. His tragedy of Lucius Junius Bru- 
 tus is open before us : 
 
 " Groans, and convulsions, and discolor'd faces ; 
 Friends weeping round us; plumes and obsequies; 
 Make it a dreadful thing to die. The pomp of death 
 Is far more terrible than death itself." 
 
 This gifted man had to be kept in an asylum for the 
 insane from 1684 to 1688; and his death was occasioned 
 by injuries received in a drunken night-frolic. Mark how 
 shallow his sentiment in the passage just quoted. Not 
 death's circumstantials, but death's essence the solemn 
 close of our probation ; the entrance on dawn or mid- 
 night ; the reaping as we know we must have sowed ; 
 these be what make death sublime and dread. How 
 
Figures of Syntax. 123 
 
 much deeper philosophy, how much fitter for even poesy, 
 Paul's plain yet profound statement 
 
 " The sting of death is sin." 
 
 What digs deepest, strikes out the deepest founts for the 
 Muses to drink of. 
 
 Many instances of the repetition of " ands " occur in 
 Demosthenes matchless model of orators. One of our 
 main objects is to make you familiar with him much 
 spoken of, little read, never worthily translated. The 
 passages we shall quote from him, translated by us for 
 this work, will, we hope, deepen in your minds the con- 
 viction that he merits all his fame as one of God's great- 
 est miracles of eloquence ; in whom, too, eloquence is 
 ever simple, natural, life-like, thoroughly unaffected ; and 
 a great lesson for all future orators, especially in the po- 
 litical arena, where the eloquence is sustained in its power 
 by noble virtues breathing through it ; such as forgetful- 
 ness of himself, disinterested enthusiasm for his country, 
 for independence, for the master axioms that are the food 
 and soul of private and public worth axioms announced 
 by him, ever and anon, in words few but all of fire ; and 
 where, with the undaunted boldness of a man willing to 
 die at any hour a martyr for truth, liberty, and duty, he 
 denounces, in every form of sarcasm, detestation, and pro- 
 found sorrow, the ruling vices of that great Athenian 
 people whom he sought to convince and rescue, and in 
 whose hand his life was. He as bold an orator as Elijah 
 a prophet. In the First against Philip, near the close, 
 we meet this instance of many " ands:" 
 
 " These things let us thoroughly know that the man is our 
 enemy, and has spoiled us of our dominions, and for a length 
 of time has insulted us, and that all things whatever which at 
 any time we hoped others would do for us are found against 
 us ; and that all the things which remain must be found in our 
 own very selves ; and that if we will not to fight him there, here 
 it is likely we may be forced to fight him." 
 
124 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 This is a fair sample of the kind of words Demosthenes 
 uses. You will find no dandyish poetical or semi-poet- 
 ical phraseology in him ; nor one speck of self-conceit as 
 tainted the eloquence of Cicero ; nor a single instance 
 of a passage foisted in for the mere sake of ornament. 
 He uses not at all either fuss or feathers. He puts an 
 immense force into the plainest, shortest words ; as in 
 the above passage into "there" and "here." Intent he 
 on carrying his point ; not on fine ornaments, of which 
 he has not one. Yet the ancients said of him truly 
 'that in every sentence of his there is some figure; for 
 burning earnestness rushes into figures by the hundred. 
 
 We can not turn from Demosthenes without taking 
 this opportunity of urging on you two lessons to us 
 they seem great gathered from a prolonged study of 
 this wondrous man. We lay before you the concluding 
 sentence of that mighty oration, " On the Crown :" 
 
 " O all ye gods, I pray to you all in one prayer, that not one 
 of you may favor these feelings and desires so hostile to Athens; 
 but O do ye infuse this is my most earnest prayer infuse 
 even into these traitors to their country a better mind and bet- 
 ter sentiments; yet, if it be certain that they are incorrigible, 
 then O pursue them, man by man of them, with ruin and de- 
 struction, by sea and by land; and on the rest of us O do ye 
 bestow the speediest possible deliverance from these overhang- 
 ing terrors, and grant us a national salvation that can not be 
 shaken." 
 
 First, this reflection forces itself on us we by no means 
 go in search of it : Many can not endure the imprecatory 
 they love to call them the cursing prayers in the 
 Psalms of David ; in which, though they are for the most 
 part predictions, the Psalmist perhaps once or twice in- 
 vokes a curse on sworn oppressors and shedders of blood. 
 Yet all the best educated minds for centuries have laud- 
 ed with a just enthusiasm this oration about the Crown ; 
 and not least the close of it. Justice is done to the won- 
 
Figures of Syntax. 125 
 
 drous Greek ; inexpressibly less than justice to the Bible. 
 To invoke from heaven Heaven's best blessing, even a 
 change of heart, on rancorous persecutors and murderers 
 of women and children ; and then, if it be certain that 
 they are to wax fiercer and fiercer, to implore God to re- 
 move them from the earth, is a prayer worthy of the 
 noblest and most merciful soul in its noblest hour. Da- 
 vid's foes were immeasurably worse than the enemies 
 of Demosthenes. It is easy talking for us, who are in 
 safety ; but if you saw a fiend in human shape tossing 
 infants into the flames, you might be glad, if you be- 
 lieved if you really believed that the Most High alone 
 could or would help you you might be right glad to 
 implore him to interfere to give the human fiend a right 
 heart, or, if not, to remove him from the earth. 
 
 The second lesson from Demosthenes : Some imagine 
 that the human mind can reach its highest, unaided by 
 any use of or any reference to religious truths. Let it 
 be known not half widely enough is it known that 
 while the closing sentence of this greatest oration is 
 what we have quoted, a solemn prayer, not a little Da- 
 vidic and Puritanic in its tone, the opening sentence 
 begins in these words: 
 
 " First of all, men of Athens, to all the Powers of heaven do 
 I make my petition !" 
 
 This double fact moves us deeply. The glorious Greek 
 began and closed with prayer the world's greatest ora- 
 tion ; and ever and again he mingles prayer with his 
 burning argument, as he proceeds. This most astound- 
 ing and decisive example convinces us more and more 
 that the highest flights of the intellect can not, in any 
 kind of literature, be attained, if unaided by the re- 
 ligious element ; especially if unaided by this thing 
 eager prayer, which some wither and annihilate by their 
 scorn. 
 
 A third very remarkable fact, on which, hastening on 
 
126 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 in our theme, we can not tarry, are those extraordinary 
 resemblances that burst out between the style of Paul 
 in its depths, and the style of Demosthenes. Any com- 
 petent Greek scholar, following out this hint minutely, 
 would be rewarded by valuable discoveries. You see in 
 the mighty Athenian the word, terror, destruction, sal- 
 vation ; and the doctrine of the inhabitation of man by 
 God. Would that Paul were thoroughly translated. The 
 Church allows the sword of this foremost fighter to have 
 some rust on its steel. 
 
 Without earnest piety and stern virtue the Athenian 
 whom we honor so deeply could never have been the 
 miracle of eloquence he was. Simple in his style as the 
 naked heavens ; free from all affectation and vanity ; dis- 
 interested, patriotic, panting for his country's liberty and 
 greatness ; as undaunted as Elijah himself, so as contin- 
 ually to remind us of Elijah and of Paul. Two charges 
 against him : He fled in battle ; but only in a universal 
 rout, and in circumstances such that his countrymen, 
 though smarting under defeat, never blamed him for re- 
 treating with the rest. He was accused of taking a bribe ; 
 wonderful to say, in such a day of fiery faction, on only 
 one solitary occasion. His enemies never proved it; the 
 closest examination discredits it. Says Grote, in his mas- 
 terly " History of Greece :" 
 
 " Reviewing the facts known to us, we find them all tending 
 to refute the charge against Demosthenes." 
 
 Therefore let him, in this republic blushing for its polit- 
 ical men, be one chief model. 
 
 In the following account of Solferino, written by Rus- 
 sell of the London Times, are fine examples of lack of 
 "ands" and of many " ands." He writes of June 24, 
 1859: 
 
 " Since the three days of Leipsic, now six-and-forty years ago, 
 so great a battle has never been fought in Europe as that which 
 only seventy hours since cumbered the plains of Lombardy with 
 
Figures of Syntax. 127 
 
 dead. Imagination toils in vain to realize the story of more 
 than three hundred thousand men engaged in mortal conflict, 
 over an area the front of which extended twelve miles. The 
 common incidents of a battle the plunging cannon-shot, the de- 
 vouring grape, the advance of long-drawn columns, the resist- 
 ance of dense masses, the furious charges of cavalry, the sud- 
 den deploy into lines lengthening in long vistas and meeting 
 in stern and furious collision, bayonet to bayonet are all, in 
 such a mighty battle as this, multiplied to indistinctness. After 
 sixteen hours of thundering sounds, and dense smoke, and shrill 
 death-shrieks, and the rush of squadrons shaking the earth, and 
 the measured tramp of many thousands marching to death, and 
 the shouts of multitudes in wild excitement, we are told that, 
 upon one side alone, thirty-five thousand killed and wounded 
 are stretched on the plain." 
 
 Polysyndeton is a figure not seldom abused, as by Dr. 
 Chalmers ; who often used it, however, with great effect ; 
 and in that invaluable work, Kent's " Commentaries on 
 American Law," as in vol. i., p. 391 : 
 
 "I shall consider the jurisdiction of the District Court as a 
 Court of Common Law, and clothed also with special powers." 
 
 The " and " had better be away. 
 
 XXII. Zeugma, Junction, is a figure not frequently 
 occurring ; where the same verb is related to two clauses 
 that strictly would require two different verbs, as in 
 Homer: 
 
 "Thetis leaped down into the sea; but Zeus, to his halls." 
 
 Or as when Curran, of an erring lady, cried : 
 " Send her back to her husband, to her children to herself." 
 
 This figure occurs when two nouns or two infinitives 
 are united to a verb, which verb is applicable to only one 
 of them ; as when Sallust describes a ruler as 
 
 " Waging peace and war." 
 
128 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Under this figure may be ranged, too, the employment 
 of a noun, or any other word with two references, as in 
 the expression : 
 
 "A country crowded with rebels and with anarchy." 
 
 It shows how multitudinous are the forms which are 
 assumed by language that miracle of organs and of 
 thought, whereto no creature but man makes any ap- 
 proach to mark the distinction of zeugma, pun, and 
 double meaning. In zeugma one of the applications of 
 the verb is improper; in pun the words are different, 
 though similar in sound ; in double meaning the words 
 are used in two senses, both of which are proper. 
 
 XXIII. Syllepsis is that figure in which a word is con- 
 strued syntactically according to its meaning or import, 
 not according to its mere narrow grammatical charac- 
 teristics. It is also termed synesis, or synthesis : " The 
 adapting of the construction to the sense of a word, 
 rather than to its gender or number," as when the Saviour 
 is spoken of as " the Rock on whom we trust," instead of 
 " in which." Similarly, we heard a clergyman say lately: 
 
 "Let us recognize every where the Hand who sways the 
 universe." 
 
 On his mind, perhaps, unconsciously lay the influence 
 of Dr. Philip Doddridge's verse : 
 
 "While Providence supports, 
 Let saints securely dwell ; 
 That Hand which bears all Nature up, 
 Shall guide his children well." 
 
 XXIV. Paradiastole, or Neithers and Nors. Multi- 
 plicity of neithers and nors, when invested with a clas- 
 sical title, goes by the alarming name of Paradiastole : 
 a putting together disjunctively a putting together so 
 as to keep asunder ; as when a bar of iron has a globe 
 fixed at either end of the bar. The two globes are then 
 at once joined and separated, and we perceive that a dis- 
 
Figures of Syntax. 129 
 
 junctive conjunction is the most possible thing in the 
 world. Thus speaks Cicero against Verres : 
 
 " Shall neither the cries of innocence expiring in agony; nor 
 the tears of pitying spectators; nor the majesty of the Roman 
 commonwealth ; nor the fears of the justice of his country, 
 restrain the licentious cruelty of a monster who, in the confi- 
 dence of his riches, strikes at the root of liberty, and sets man- 
 kind at defiance ?" 
 
 See Luke xviii., 29. 
 
 XXV. Pleonasm, or Superfluity, is our next figure, the 
 using of more words than would convey the idea. Thus 
 says Dr. Stephen Olin : 
 
 " It is a still and dark domain, that of death." 
 
 This is usually one of the grossest vices of style. The 
 plays of James Thomson were very inferior to his " Sea- 
 sons " a poem that every well-read person has perused. 
 In one of his tragedies, the heroine is thus addressed by 
 her lover, in sonorous blank verse : 
 
 " O Sophonisba ! Sophonisba, O !" 
 A wag in the gallery bawled out 
 
 " O Jamie Thomson ! Jamie Thomson, O !" 
 
 The consequence was, the tragedy was laughed off the 
 stage. 
 
 A celebrated hymn by Addison opens by a weak ple- 
 onasm : 
 
 " The spacious firmament on high, 
 With all the blue ethereal sky." 
 
 It needs an astronomy very keen-eyed to see any differ- 
 ence between these two things. 
 
 Yet so greatly discrepant is a skillful and an unskillful , 
 use of language that, in a dextrous hand, this very figure 
 is capable of producing an exquisite effect. In the more 
 modern edition of the renowned ballad of" Chevy Chace," 
 one brave knight is thus spoken of: 
 
 I 
 
130 " Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " There, too, the gallant Widrington 
 
 He was in doleful dumps ; 
 For when his legs were smitten off, 
 He fought upon his stumps." 
 
 But how noble and simple a picture is the original, 
 given in that valuable collection, " Percy's Reliques," 
 which by all means read : 
 
 " For Witheryngton my harte was wo, 
 
 That ever he slayne shulde be; 
 For when both his legs were hewyne in to, 
 He knyled and fought on hys kne." 
 
 Mary Howitt favors us with an example of how an 
 elegant pleonasm can be made : 
 
 " The Spring, she is a blessed thing, 
 She is the mother of the flowers." 
 
 In a well-known piece of Thomas Hood, the lamen- 
 tation of a certain little husband domineered over by a 
 large wife, pleonasm can be detected in the second line : 
 
 " And when I speak, my voice is weak ; 
 
 But hers, she makes a gong of it : 
 For I am small and she is tall, 
 
 And that's the short and long of it." 
 
 An epic in prose we introduce to you, one of the most 
 impressive works that the human mind has produced 
 Carlyle's " French Revolution :" 
 
 "For kings and beggars, for the justly doomed and the un- 
 justly, it is a hard thing to die. Pity them all. Thy utmost 
 pity, with all aids and appliances, and throne and scaffold con- 
 trast, how far short is it of ' the thing pitied.' " 
 
 Read and ponder Carlyle by all means ; but by no means 
 imitate him. His " Past and Present" is a very noble 
 book every book he has written is noble; abandon 
 

 Figures of Syntax. 131 
 
 your soul to it ; but make not yourself ridiculous by 
 mimicking his style. . 
 
 The orator may rivet his argument by a judicious use 
 of this figure ; for it employs the style of passion, which 
 loves to dwell on and reiterate its theme. Thus Daniel 
 Webster, exhorting his countrymen to preserve the 
 Union, shouted : 
 
 " The blood of our fathers, let it not have been shed in vain ; 
 the great hope of posterity, let it not be blasted." 
 
 And as the uneducated turn over and over again the 
 same idea, so we often meet with pleonasm in the rudest 
 form of the ballad ; as thus, in a strain beyond the reach 
 of the sublime : 
 
 "Come all ye brave Kentuckians, 
 
 I'd have ye for to know, 
 That we against the enemy 
 Are going for to go." 
 
 A slight flavor of pleonasm strengthens the humorous; 
 as in Saxe's merry little versicles " On the Rail." How 
 dancingly the measure goes ! How the sparks are flying 
 from the engine ! 
 
 " Ancient maiden lady, 
 
 She nervously remarks 
 That there must be danger 
 
 'Mong so many sparks. 
 Roguish-looking fellow, 
 
 Whispers to a stranger 
 That in his opinion 
 
 She is out of danger." 
 
 You can scarcely have failed to notice a certain ple- 
 onastic use of " it," which may have a perceptible charm ; 
 as thus by Mrs. Browning. Study her " Aurora Leigh." 
 
 "The world goes riding it fair and grand, 
 While the truth is bought and sold." 
 
132 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Burns's ballad, " Duncan Grey," narrates the ups and 
 downs of a courtship. Ailsa Craig, mentioned in it, is a 
 noted rock that shoots up in the entrance of the Firth 
 of Clyde. At first Meg was as deaf to his plaint as Ailsa 
 Craig. Then he pretended to be love-proof; whereupon 
 Meg gives way: 
 
 " How it comes let doctors tell, 
 
 Ha, ha, the wooin' o't ! 
 Meg grew sick as he grew well, 
 
 Ha, ha, the wooin' o't ! 
 Something in her bosom rings, 
 For relief a sigh she brings, 
 And oh her e'en they spak sic things 
 
 Ha, ha, the wooin' o't !" 
 
 How charming, too, this by Dennis Florence Mac- 
 Carthy : 
 
 "Dance light, for my heart it lies under your feet, love." 
 
 There is another form of pleonasm, indefensible, though 
 common the oath. Sydney Smith exposed well the 
 silliness of this would-be-smart practice. In a stage- 
 coach he was annoyed by a youth who dealt largely in 
 these blasphemies. After bearing with this for a while, 
 the wit asked the company's permission to tell them a 
 story: 
 
 " Once on a time," said he, " there was a king (boots, sugar- 
 tongs, and tinder-boxes !), who, at a grand ball (boots, sugar- 
 tongs, and tinder-boxes !), picked up the Countess of Shrews- 
 bury's garter (boots, sugar-tongs, and tinder-boxes), and said, 
 ' Honi soit qui mal y pense' (boots, sugar-tongs, and tinder- 
 boxes)." " Rather old that story," said the youth, " but what 
 * * * have boots, sugar-tongs, or tinder-boxes to do with it ?" 
 " I will tell you, my young friend," replied Sydney, " when you 
 tell me what your oaths have to do with your conversation. In 
 the mean time, allow me to say that that is my style of swearing." 
 
Figures of Syntax. 133 
 
 XXVI. Me -ism. Happy linguistic effects may be 
 produced by that special form of pleonasm which sup- 
 plies " me " to verbs usually not followed by " me," as in 
 Sir John Falstaff's encomium on sack : 
 
 " A good sherris sack hath a twofold operation in it. It as- 
 cends me into the brain ; dries me there all the foolish, dull, 
 crudy vapors which environ it; and then the vital commoners 
 muster me all to their captain the heart." 
 
 Lear, act ii., scene iv., Lear's 2Qth speech, lines 6-9. 
 
 XXVII. Hypallage, an interchange of construction, 
 is seen in Shakespeare when Cassius says of Julius 
 Caesar 
 
 " His coward lips did from their color fly ;" 
 
 instead of " the color did fly from his coward lips." From 
 the long pedantic Greek names which cumber our sub- 
 ject we are in this instance rescued by the celebrated 
 " Tristram Shandy," in the shape of an out-and-out Sax- 
 on definition : 
 
 "'You can scarce,' said he, 'combine two ideas together 
 upon it, Brother Toby, without an hypallage.' 'What's that?' 
 cried my Uncle Toby. ' The cart before the horse,' said my 
 father." 
 
 It is high time it was called no longer hysteron-proteron, 
 putting the first last ; as in Virgil, who for once was au- 
 thor of an Irish bull: 
 
 ' Let us die, and rush into the heart of the fight." 
 
 The hypallage ascribed to Cicero was plainly an inten- 
 tional one a good-humored jest on the small stature of 
 his son-in-law, who was strutting about with a long sword 
 stuck to his side. Cried the orator : 
 
 "Who is it that has tied my son to that sword?" 
 
 In the 37th Ode of Horace's First Book, he says of 
 Cleopatra that 
 
 "The queen was preparing frenzied ruins for the Roman 
 Capitol." 
 
1 34 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 So Caesar speaks of Lake Leman flowing into the 
 Rhone. 
 
 In Virgil's 3d Georgic, line 251, he says 
 
 "If but the smell has brought the well-known breezes;" 
 
 instead of, " If but the breezes have brought the well- 
 known smell." Again, he tells us of an abundance of 
 large milk iii., 308 ; and of a snow-white gift of wool 
 iii., 391. 
 
 But hypallage arises generally from confusion of mind, 
 rather than from seeking literary effects, as when a Car- 
 melite friar mentioned in a sermon what a wise Prov- 
 idence it was that so often made a river run through a 
 large town ; or as when, on its being urged as an objec- 
 tion to Homer that he made Vulcan take nine whole 
 days to fall from heaven to earth, the defender of Homer 
 replied that it was according to nature that Vulcan, be- 
 ing feme, could not fall so fast as another. A lofty place, 
 too, belongs to the sagacious remark of the Lowland gar- 
 dener in Scotland, who treated the potency of the weath- 
 er-glass with the utmost contempt : 
 
 " 'Deed, sir, I never saw the glass hae muckle effec' on the 
 weather in these pairts." 
 
 In closing this chapter a great truth let us urge upon 
 you : the study of words is admirably fitted to lead to 
 the discovery of the most important moral and religious 
 truths. Take a fine instance from " Outlines of Theol- 
 ogy" -compiled from the writings of Alexander Vinet, 
 a great Swiss divine : 
 
 " Remorse marvelous word ! It is fortunate that our fathers 
 should have invented it, for it is by no means sure that we 
 should find it now. Remorse ! The repeated morsure, or biting 
 or gnawing; perpetual, incessant, again and again, of the out- 
 raged law; its anticipated vengeance; a wound always open, 
 or rather always opening; a cruel tooth, which does not remain 
 where it first fastened, but at its pleasure leaves the gash for a 
 
Figures of Syntax. 135 
 
 while, to gnaw into it again; so that in every sense and in all 
 directions it may bite and bite again into the heart of the crim- 
 inal. Do not believe the indifferent or lofty air some persons 
 put on ; they disguise from you the terrors which perhaps their 
 death-bed will too plainly reveal ; but even supposing they have 
 succeeded in freeing themselves from the fears felt by the ma- 
 jority, still they have had to free themselves. And how have 
 they done this ? By avoiding the thought of them. They are, 
 you imagine, not alarmed at what terrifies you; but they are 
 afraid of being afraid, which is much the same thing; and the 
 very word eternity sounds like thunder in their ears." 
 
 Having now completed our discussion of Figures of 
 Spelling and Figures of Syntax, it is the proper place to 
 insert the true historic view of our English speech the 
 view which is now triumphant among scholars. Once 
 or twice in the above pages we have not hesitated to 
 talk of the Saxon or Anglo-Saxon tongue ; we have even 
 called the English our mother tongue, and the Anglo- 
 Saxon our grandmother tongue ; but, in strict accuracy, 
 these two, English and Anglo-Saxon, are one language 
 essentially one ; nay, before the Saxon pirates had left 
 the shores of the Baltic, and when as yet there was no 
 England, still there was English. As Sir F. Palgrave ex- 
 presses it, the terms Anglo-Saxon and Semi-Saxon con- 
 vey (at least, if we are not greatly on our guard) " a most 
 false idea of our civil history. They disguise the con- 
 tinuity of affairs, and substitute the appearance of a new 
 formation (of a language) in the place of a progress- 
 ive evolution " of what is essentially one and the same 
 language. Accordingly, King Alfred has these decisive 
 words : 
 
 " Aelfred Kyning waes wealh stod thisse bee, and hie of 
 boclaedene on'Englisc wende." 
 
 " Alfred, King, was commentator of this book, and it 
 from book-language into English turned." Besides, our 
 weary plodding in Gower has been repaid by our obtain- 
 
136 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 ing for ourselves the sweeping conviction that as early 
 as 1300 English was in full currency, and could not have 
 sprung into recent birth. No ; you will find English in 
 the great epic lay of Beowulf, uttered ere the Angles had 
 left Schleswig on the Baltic ; in Caedmon, inspired cow- 
 herd and monk of Whitby, who died about 680, and gave 
 Milton, it is likely, a hint of " Paradise Lost ;" and in the 
 " Brunanburh War Song," descriptive of the great bat- 
 tle at Brunanburgh in 937. There was Old English 
 down to 1154; Middle English from 1154 to about 1500, 
 when it was ridding itself of its inflections, and adopting 
 words from many quarters, especially from the French ; 
 and Modern English, from about 1500 till now. Most 
 glorious and very ancient speech, wherein to this hour 
 we hear the roar of the northern seas, the thunder of the 
 polar storms, the battle-cries of heroes, whose race, spite 
 of Dane and Norman, has only grown nobler under even 
 the training of the worst catastrophes. 
 
Figures of Syntax. 137 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 FIGURES OF SYNTAX. 
 PART THIRD AND LAST. 
 
 Enallage or Exchange. Antemeria. Antiptosis> Hetero-. 
 sis. Metastasis. Hyperbaton or Inversion. A ntis- 
 trophe. 
 
 WE trust that by this time you have fully adopted 
 the opinion no other enters more deeply into the phi- 
 losophy of our subject that figures of speech are not 
 tawdry things called into existence artificially by rhetors, 
 but beautiful and necessary phenomena produced by 
 Nature, according to certain fundamental laws of men- 
 tality, acting on language that next to miraculous in- 
 strument or incarnation of thought, and which is God's 
 open proclamation that man hath the divine in him, and 
 is of an order of being altogether superior to the brutes. 
 The laws of the epic poem, for instance, came from Ho- 
 mer, the bard and man of feeling, to Aristotle, the rhetor, 
 who collected and analyzed hundreds of years after the 
 blind old "Maker;" assuredly they did not pass from 
 Aristotle to Homer. Figures are as natural to the mind 
 as breathing to the lungs. The prismatic colors of heav- 
 en's rainbow were not called into existence by Newton's 
 analysis of the sun-ray ; these colors can not but be 
 painted by the day-beam on the rain-cloud ; and so rain- 
 bows glistened long before a philosophy was construct- 
 ed. In like manner figures have existed wherever Fancy 
 has playfully sported, or Passion cataract-like has rushed ; 
 the Indian shouts them in his forest ; Bridget screams 
 
138 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 them from the kitchen, as when she cries : " Misthress, 
 dear, the kittle's boiling ;" for no kettle ever boiled or 
 ever will, but only the water in it. 
 
 XXVIII. Enallage is the figure we proceed with of 
 very great value ; the use of one part of speech, or of 
 one modification of a part of speech, for another. We 
 lay before you twenty-six varieties, each deserving to 
 rank as a separate figure. Judge sternly for yourself 
 if they lead you not deep, and with a Venus-like hand, 
 into the inmost recesses of this vast forest which we call 
 language. The following is the fullest account of Enal- 
 lage that ever has appeared. Gather out of Scripture 
 two hundred varieties a feast of strawberries for your 
 own private eating ; and then a hundred individual cases 
 of each sort. 
 
 i. Noun for adjective. In Henry Taylor's powerful 
 tragedy, " Philip Van Artevelde," are these lines: 
 
 " Forgiveness may be spoken with the tongue 
 Forgiveness may be written with the pen ; 
 But think not that the parchment and mouth-pardon 
 Will e'er eject old hatreds from the heart." 
 
 Often the noun used like " mouth " in the above is 
 joined to the noun it modifies by a hyphen. Thus John 
 Mardley wrote : 
 
 " Thy mercy-gates are open wide 
 To them that mourn their sin." 
 
 Francis Turner Palgrave gives us this : 
 
 " Star of morn and even, 
 Shine on us from heaven 
 From thy glory-throne 
 Hear thy very own." 
 
 So Shakespeare has " Carthage -queen " for Cartha- 
 ginian queen. Very common in the Hebrew, as " sacri- 
 fices of righteousness " for righteous sacrifices. 
 
Figures of Syntax. 139 
 
 In the following, very admirable, from Isaac Williams, 
 you have "seraph-sound" and " shepherd-crowd:" 
 
 " In the depth of night profound, 
 There breaks a seraph-sound 
 
 Of never-ending morn 
 
 The Lord of Glory born, 
 Within a holy grot on this our sullen ground. 
 
 " Now with that shepherd-crowd, 
 If it might be allowed, 
 
 We fain would enter there ; 
 With awful hastening fear; 
 And kiss that cradle chaste, in reverend worship bowed. 
 
 44 Within us, Babe divine, 
 Be born and make us thine; 
 Be born, and make our hearts thy cradle and thy shrine." 
 
 This figure, altogether, is so elegant and so racy that 
 it is in the very frequent use of it that many of the com- 
 ing improvements of English will be found. S., " Rich- 
 ard II., act iv., scene i., Richard's 3d speech, lines 7-9. 
 
 2. A- phrase for a noun, as in Burns 
 
 "But Downa do's come o'er me now, 
 i And oh I find it sairly, O." 
 
 3. The use or misuse of the nominative for the object- 
 ive. In a story told us by Sydney Smith, we have a 
 rough case of it in " I " for " me." That witty divine, 
 whose works are such a feast of wit and wisdom, went 
 to a cumbrous dinner-party in the country. Every thing 
 
 was very ostentatious ; very ill-managed ; the would-be- 
 fine dishes ill-cooked ; the lady of the house, and Betty 
 the cook, and the overtasked servants were in a perfect 
 broil and pother. In the solemn pause between course 
 No. I and course No. 2, when every body felt awkward, 
 suddenly the door was slammed open, and in rushed the 
 
 servant-boy of all work, exclaiming, in piteous tones 
 
 
 " Meester, meester ! has Betty any right to lather I ? " 
 
140 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 This use of one case for another struts about in the lit- 
 erary realm by no less a name than, XXIX., Antiptosis. 
 What dignity doth a Greek word of four syllables give 
 to the matter ! By no means was that boy beslapped 
 aware what a classical antiptosian way of speaking was 
 his. So we are inforrried by the rhetors that XXX., An- 
 temeria, is the use of one part of speech for another ; 
 while the use of one form of a noun, pronoun, or verb for 
 another is XXXI., Heterosis! 
 
 4. Beautiful examples may be found of the adverb em- 
 ployed as a noun, as when, in the closing words of that 
 pure and sweet poem, Longfellow's " Hiawatha," Hia- 
 watha is described as setting forth on his journey 
 
 " To the land of the Hereafter." 
 
 Or, as in T. S. Arthur's instructive tale, " What can Wom- 
 an Do ?" in the beginning of Chapter XXXIV., the ex- 
 pression occurs : 
 
 " The old love that won and warmed his heart in the long- 
 ago was in her eyes." 
 
 In Shakespeare we meet with this : 
 
 "Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind; 
 Thou losest here, a better Where to find." 
 
 5. Not deep has he gone in the English tongue who 
 has not discovered how beautiful an enallage is the use 
 of nouns for verbs ; a usage springing from the depths 
 of our speech, inasmuch as in Saxon almost all verbs 
 are derived from nouns ; thus bier is a carriage for the 
 dead (bear) ; bearan is to carry. Shakespeare peculiarly, 
 and with an indescribable beauty, abounds in instances. 
 Thus Perdita cries : 
 
 " I'll queen it no inch farther, 
 But herd my ewes and weep." 
 
 Belarius, in " Cymbeline," fears lest they learn at 
 court 
 
 "That such as we cave in the rock." 
 
Figures of Syntax. 141 
 
 By the very frequent use of nouns for verbs our lan- 
 guage may be greatly benefited. By prefixing the Saxon 
 prefix en or be, this may be riWh more extensively ac- 
 complished, as if we, in a line for the occasion, were to 
 exclaim 
 
 O Christ, rise on us, and bed awn our sky. 
 
 The prose of old Fuller is very valuable from his bold 
 use of striking forms of enallage. Thus he writes : 
 
 " The hyssop doth tree it in Judea." 
 
 Yet we find, from the lips of Goold Brown, than whom 
 no more popular writer of grammars for schools prevails, 
 the following: 
 
 " This figure borders closely upon solecism ; and for the sta- 
 bility of the language it should be sparingly indulged." 
 
 He, with ease, finds other grammarians who support 
 him in putting this brand on enallage a fair sample of 
 the treatment which at present figures receive. Our re- 
 ply is this: Go to Shakespeare; study merely this fifth 
 variety of enallage ; collect one hundred cases of this 
 fifth variety alone we pledge ourselves that no collector 
 but will be astonished and enraptured with the amount 
 of beauty, in thought and expression, which he will meet 
 with. All our best writers use it often ; con over this 
 choice line of Henry Vaughan, referring to a June path- 
 way : 
 
 " Crimson'd with flowers, and dark with leafy shade." 
 
 Alexander Smith, who was a master of some of the 
 most hidden beauties of our not as yet half-developed 
 language, and which will never be done justice to so long 
 as the present run of school grammars hold mastery over 
 the young, has especially many instances of nouns used 
 as verbs ; and Dr. Dwight speaks of a village " Edened 
 round ;" while Thomas Adams, the old preacher, says of 
 a benevolent rich man that he 
 
 " Furs himself warm with poor men's hearts." 
 
142 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 6. A powerful effect may be produced by using a prop- 
 er noun as an adjective, as when the eloquent Ruskin, 
 in his " Modern Painters "- a work for every one to buy 
 terms the idea of those who value such things only^as 
 minister to the body's wants 
 
 "A Nebuchadnezzar curse that sends us to grass like oxen ; 
 whereas man's use and function is to be the witness of the 
 glory of God ; and whatsoever enables us to fulfill this func- 
 tion is, in the pure and first sense of the word, useful to us." 
 
 See P. L., i., 306. 
 
 7. The employment of an intransitive verb as a tran- 
 sitive verb we find in Burns's " Tarn O'Shanter," a per- 
 fect poem. He is describing a youthful witch : 
 
 "Lang after kenned on Carrick shore; 
 For mony a beast to dead she shot, 
 And perish'd mony a bonnie boat." 
 
 [ P. L., xii., 487 a remarkable instance. 
 
 8. Adjective for noun we find in Percival's "Apostro- 
 phe to the Sun:" 
 
 "Thy path is high in heaven; we can not gaze 
 On the intense of light that girds thy car." 
 
 S., " Lear," act iii., scene vii., Gloster's 8th speech, line 10. 
 
 9. Adjectives for verbs. Giles Fletcher, whose poems 
 richly reward perusal, speaking of grief, says : 
 
 " It lanks the cheek, and pales the freshest sight." 
 From Shakespeare we have this : 
 
 "This day will gentle his condition." 
 
 Greatly admired deserves to be Campbell's expression 
 of the Normans as to their effect on our Saxon and on 
 our Celtic blood : 
 
 " They high-mettled the blood in our veins." 
 
 10. A tenth variety is to compare, by er and est, ad- 
 jectives usually compared by more and most ; or the op- 
 posite, the comparison by more and most of adjectives 
 that usually have er or est annexed. Spenser, in that 
 
Figures of Syntax. 143 
 
 
 
 fine poem, the " Epithalamium," calls his bridal heroine 
 his " beautifulest bride." Mrs. Browning, in her lines to 
 the " Seraphim," uses " most sweet :" 
 
 " I, too, may haply smile another day 
 At the far recollection of this lay, 
 When God may call me in your midst to dwell, 
 To hear your most sweet music's miracle." 
 
 11. The plural for the singular, a kind of hyperbole, 
 abounds in the original Hebrew of the Old Testament. 
 In the first verse of Psalm xxxii., which in our version 
 reads 
 
 " Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven," 
 
 the original, vastly more energetic, expresses an irresist- 
 ible outburst of surprise, gratitude, happiness, at God's 
 forgiveness of the monstrous congeries of sins in the 
 matter of Uriah the Hittite 
 
 " Blessednesses ! Transgression forgiven ! Sin covered !" 
 
 12. A noun for an adverb the opposite of No. 4. In 
 the original Greek of the New Testament, where our 
 version reads of Peter 
 
 " He went out and wept bitterly," 
 the real expression is 
 
 " He went out and wept bitterness." 
 
 13. An adjective for an adverb is common, as in the 
 last line of the subjoined, the well-known opening of the 
 "Vision of (concerning) Piers the Plowman," an opening 
 much admired for its exquisite naturalness. The study 
 of this ancient poem would make you familiar with many 
 Old English usages of speech, which we all should some- 
 what labor to revive (see page 84) : 
 
 " In a summer season, 
 When soft was the sun, 
 t shaped me into shrouds (clothes), 
 As I shep (shepherd) were; 
 
144 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 In habit as an hermit, 
 
 Unholy of works, 
 
 Went wide in this world, 
 
 Wonders to hear. 
 
 And on a May morwening, 
 
 On Malvern hills, 
 
 Me befell a ferly (marvel); 
 
 Of fairie, methought. 
 
 I was weary for wandered, 
 
 And went me to rest, 
 
 Under a broad bank, 
 
 By a bourne's side; 
 
 And as I lay and leaned, 
 
 And looked on the waters, 
 
 I slumber'd into a sleeping, 
 
 It swayed so merry." 
 
 How wild and unkempt the woods here how fresh, 
 sweet, untamed were the breezes of that long-ago May 
 what a green on the hills what music of poesy in the 
 cadence of those dear waters, that " swayed so merry!" 
 
 14. XXXII., Metastasises the change of the tenses, as 
 when, every wh^errrCsesar's " Commentaries," the pres- 
 ent is used for' the past ; and thus we feel carried back 
 to the occasion, -and spears shiver once more, and war- 
 cars gleam by, and the trumpet sounds the charge, as 
 the Rhone or the Rhine or the Arar sweep on. How 
 deep a source in the heart this variety has ! We delight 
 to banish the monotony of our common life by being 
 present at great events ; we travel great distances to 
 gratify this longing. Literature, with its pleasant witch- 
 eries, gratifies it for us, without asking us to leave our 
 own hearthstone ; literature is the fairy carpet that bears 
 us whither we will. 
 
 Let our friend Sam Slick supply us with a metastasis, 
 or change of tense. His subject, how great a one wid- 
 
 dahs: 
 
 
 
 ' "Widows are the very mischief! There's nothing like 'em. 
 
Figures of Syntax. 145 
 
 If they make up their minds to marry, it's done. I knew one 
 that was terribly afraid of thunder and lightning, and every 
 time a storm came on she runs into Mr. Smith's house (Mr. 
 Smith was a widower), and clasps her little hands, and flies 
 around like a hen with her head cut off, till the man was half 
 distracted for fear she would be killed ; and the consequence 
 was, she was Mrs. John Smith before three thunder-storms had 
 rattled over her head. How many thunder-storms they had 
 after that, I don't exactly know." 
 
 15. The use of I for He in the report of speeches; 
 that is, the giving a speech in the first person instead of 
 in the third person. Caesar has made himself the undy- 
 ing beacon who warns us never to give an account of a 
 speech in the third person. Without reading more than 
 the first book, what instances of obscurity arise in the 
 speeches he sets before us, in even that opening book, 
 when the mighty founder of empire, or Divitiacus, or 
 Ariovistus, discourses ; whose speeches are so obscure, 
 owing to the historian putting them always in the third 
 person. What liveliness would be obtained in the pul- 
 pit by occasionally couching a speech by Death or Pomp 
 or Wealth or Sin in the first person ! Nay, do it often, 
 O pastor ! 
 
 1 6. Another form of enallage, very deft, is to use a 
 noun and a preposition, for an adjective, as in the ex- 
 pression "a thing of joy "for " a joyous thing." Thus 
 Chaucer in the Book of the " Duchesse :" 
 
 "Was never heard so sweet a steven (sound), 
 But it had be a thing of Heven." 
 
 We now find out where the exquisite poet Keats had 
 suggested to him his never-to-decay household words: 
 
 " A thing of beauty is a joy forever." 
 
 But see S., " Cymbeline," act v., scene iv., line 47 ; " Lear," 
 act i., scene iv., Lear's 4ist speech, line 10. 
 
 17. The form of the past tense is used for the past 
 
 K 
 
146 Might and Mirth of Literature* 
 
 participle. Let the grammarians, who would margin a 
 living lake by the most rigidly straight lines, say what 
 they choose, yet there is a beauty in this ; for you thus 
 often obtain a monosyllable for a dissyllable, which in 
 poetry is a great point. It is common with Shakespeare, 
 and is ever a charm ; as thus, " broke " for broken : 
 
 "Fellestfoes, 
 Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep." 
 
 " Coriolanus," act iv., scene v., Aufidius's 6th speech, 
 lines 2, 8. 
 
 1 8. A preposition is used as an adjective. " Impossi- 
 ble !" says one, who has little knowledge of the free ed- 
 dyings in which glorious language disports itself. Yet 
 Shakespeare thus writes, " Coriolanus," act iv., scene v. : 
 
 " I will fight 
 
 Against my canker'd country, with the spleen 
 Of all the under fiends." 
 
 19. An adverb for a pronoun ; as "where" for which; 
 thus Shakespeare : 
 
 "Where against, 
 My grained ash a hundred times hath broke." 
 
 20. A preposition for a noun ; as in Shakespeare : 
 
 " Thou long'st for me to see thy lord ; thou long'st, 
 But in a fainter kind. O not like me, 
 For mine's beyond Beyond." 
 
 21. A very curious variety is to compare a verb as an 
 adjective is compared. Here, too, who but would cry 
 Impossible ! Yet Shakespeare says : 
 
 " Obey you, love you, and most honor you." 
 
 22. A verb and preposition in place of a preposition ; 
 thus in Shakespeare : 
 
 " For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines 
 Lag of a brother." 
 
Figures of Syntax. 147 
 
 23. A verb is used for a noun contrast to No. 5 ; as in 
 Shakespeare : 
 
 "With every gale and vary of their masters." 
 
 24. An adjective is used for a participle, as in S. : 
 
 " Let the bloat king tempt you." 
 
 25. Usages similar to "methinks" might well be mul- 
 tiplied. From James Clarence Mangan we cull this very 
 fine one : 
 
 " Medreams I feel as though I 
 Should have slight regrets." 
 
 This is slippery ice, on which few have courage enough 
 to skate; not remembering that the more slippery the 
 ice the nobler skating it makes. 
 So by Dante Gabriel Rosetti : 
 
 " Here seemed she scarce had been a day 
 One of God's choristers." 
 
 26. Instead of " by," a classical archaic touch may be 
 imparted through using " of," as by old John Still : 
 
 " I am so wrapt, and thoroughly lapt 
 Of jolly good ale and old." 
 
 Your author inflicts on you, to conclude, an instance 
 of No. I, in Planet-soul : 
 
 How vast is He who makes the planets roll; 
 How greater far who built thy planet-soul ! 
 Haste, prove thyself an orb of that strange kind 
 That waxeth ever larger through all Aeons, 
 From asteroid to star ; from star to sun ; 
 Pervaded by the power of Godward growth, 
 Wherein all deathless radiance hath abode, 
 Thy soul epitome and hint of God. 
 
 XXXIII. Inversion, Transposition, or Hyperbaton, is 
 the arranging of words in an inverted order. This is one 
 
148 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 of the most important capabilities of speech, imparting to 
 Greek and Latin much of their sonorous force and har- 
 mony ; much of their power to keep up attention ; for 
 when the verb is put at the end of the sentence, the 
 hearer has nothing for it but to listen to the close, else 
 he will lose the meaning of the whole. In English po- 
 etry this figure abounds so much as to be one of its chief 
 characteristics. In Milton's prose is more of it than in 
 any other great prose writer; but while it adds to the 
 cathedral grandeur of his majestic style, still his sentences 
 soon tire, much inversion long kept up at a time being 
 contrary {o the genius of English prose. But in poetry, 
 English is capable of far more inversion than is usually 
 thought ; as by James Smith : 
 
 " In England rivers all are males, 
 
 For instance, Father Thames; 
 Whoever in Columbia sails 
 
 Finds them mamselles or dames. 
 Yes, there the softer sex presides 
 
 Aquatic, I assure you j 
 And Mrs. Sippy rolls her tides 
 
 Responsive to Miss Souri." 
 
 A more emphatic example take from Giles Fletcher, 
 a finished piece of writing, on the remorse of Judas: 
 
 " For him, a waking blood-hound, yelling loud, 
 That in his bosom long had sleeping lain, 
 A guilty Conscience, barking after blood, 
 Pursued eagerly." 
 
 Bulwer, in his " Rise and Fall of Athens," has this : 
 
 " The lonians were susceptible, flexile, more characterized 
 by the generosity of modern knighthood than the sternness 
 of ancient heroism. Them, not the past, but the future, 
 charmed." 
 
 Mark the powerful effect produced by Byron's arrange- 
 ment: 
 
Figures of Syntax. 149 
 
 " The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar, 
 And shrieks the wild seamew." 
 
 Fanny Fern (Mrs. Parton) introduces a married lady 
 endeavoring to be literary, but every minute interrupted 
 by inexorable household cares : 
 
 " Let me see where did I leave off? The setting sun, with 
 ray resplendent, was gilding [' Mamma, mamma I want some 
 bread and molasses, mamma!'] of Inverness the church steeple, 
 when [' Where's my Sunday waistcoat do you know ?'] when 
 was seen approaching a horseman [' Mistress, I'm bothered en- 
 tirely. The potatoes are all out; there's ne'er a one for din- 
 ner'], and shouting, ' Liberty or death!' ['I'm the butcher, ma'am, 
 and I wants to know whether you're for sausages or mutton- 
 chops']." At which crisis the harassed lady throws down her 
 pen, exclaiming, " I see it's in vain for a married woman to try 
 to cultivate her intellect !" 
 
 No biography in the world is more intensely interest- 
 ing than Boswell's " Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson" one 
 of the books to be bought. Peter Pindar puts the sub- 
 joined into Boswell's lips Johnson's style was too swell- 
 ing and inverted : 
 
 " We said, which charmed the Doctor much, no doubt, 
 His mind was like of elephant's the snout : 
 That could pick pins up, yet possess'd the vigor 
 For trimming well the jacket of a tiger." 
 
 From beginning to end of " Paradise Lost " inversions 
 are numerous, the opening being a noted example : 
 
 " Of man's first disobedience and the fruit 
 Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
 Brought death into the world and all our woe, 
 Sing, heavenly Muse." 
 
 The following is the opening sentence of a famous 
 book in defense of Episcopacy, " Hooker's Ecclesias- 
 
150 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 tical Polity." Mark the air of grandeur which inversion 
 gives: 
 
 " Though for no other cause, yet for this, that posterity may 
 know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to 
 pass away as in a dream, there shall be for men's information 
 extant this much concerning the present state of the Church 
 of God established among us, and their careful endeavors that 
 would uphold the same." 
 
 The grandeur connected with inversion is strongly 
 proved by the fact that all the great epics open with it. 
 Homer's opening line is 
 
 "War-wrath sing thou, O Goddess, of Peleidean Achilles !" 
 
 We thus place it before you in the only way in which it 
 ought to be given, in that splendid measure, the same 
 as his hexameter verse. Virgil begins the "^Eneid" 
 thus: 
 
 "Arms and the Hero I sing, who first from the shores of Ilium, 
 Exiled, fate-driven, came to Italy and to Lavinium." 
 
 Tasso commences his "Gerusalemme Liberata" a 
 poem of no great power, but sweet and elegant with 
 these two lines, which we render thus : 
 
 " I sing the arms religious and the man 
 Who the great sepulchre set free of Christ." 
 
 The " Divina Commedia," Dante's stern, sublime, deep- 
 ly meditative epic, opens with words which we thus 
 turn : 
 
 " In the midway of this our mortal life 
 I found me in a gloomy wood, astray 
 Gone from the path direct." 
 
 From Worsley's Homer's "Odyssey" a translation 
 which is a fine poem, not in the Homeric measure, but 
 
Figures of Syntax. 1 5 1 
 
 in the Spenserian stanza we select the parting words 
 to the island nymph Calypso, of Odysseus : 
 
 " To whom the wise Odysseus answering spake : 
 
 O nymph Calypso, much revered, cease now 
 From anger ; nor be wroth for my wife's sake. 
 
 All this I know, and do myself avow ; 
 
 Well may Penelope, in form and brow 
 And stature, seem inferior far to thee; 
 
 For she is mortal, and immortal thou. 
 Yet even thus, 'tis very dear to me 
 My long-desired return and ancient home to see." 
 
 XXXIV. Anastrophe is the name of a certain very 
 strong Hyperbaton. In the following, Tennyson uses 
 the descriptive or adjective first, the possessive second, 
 the noun third ; or you may illustrate " a strong hyper- 
 baton" by the Latin Saxa per et scopulos "Rocks 
 through and cliffs:" 
 
 " Rose a nurse of ninety years, 
 
 Set his child upon his knee; 
 Like summer tempest came her tears: 
 * Sweet, my child, I live for thee !' " 
 
 At this point, again, as we did with ellipsis and enal- 
 lage, we strongly urge you to draw out a lengthy table 
 of inversions, as found specially in Milton at least a 
 hundred from him. We give specimens to make clear 
 our meaning. 
 
 1. Between the adverb and its verb a noun and its ad- 
 jective intervenes, as by Gray, that poet of such classic 
 finish -. 
 
 "Fain would I pay thee with eternity; 
 But ill my genius answers my desires." 
 
 2. The verb is put before its nominative ; a form often 
 employed, as in Scott's graphic poetical novel of " Mar- 
 mion:" 
 
 " Burns Marmion's swarthy cheek like fire." 
 
152 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 (3. Not only the adjective is after its noun, but one or 
 more words come between. In Cowper's " Homer," more 
 faithful than Pope's, which, however, is a delightful poem, 
 Hector's death is thus depicted : 
 
 "He ceased; and death involved him dark around." 
 
 4. In Hooker, in whose grave style we come every now 
 and then on touches of exquisite music, we often find a 
 Latinism, according to which the participle in the com- 
 
 I pound tenses, or the adjective, precedes the nominative, 
 as "able we are not to deny;" " dangerous it were;" 
 " brought already we are." Artificial though this may ap- 
 pear, yet there are impassioned moods of oratory in which 
 it will sound on the ear of the hearer as the most natural 
 diction the speaker can use ; just as there are strong con- 
 tortions of wind and wave and cloud natural to certain 
 vehement writhings of the storm. Is it always that the 
 snow-wreaths lie smooth in the gusty nooks of the hills? 
 Knows little of language he who will deny that words 
 can be whirled even more wildly than snow-flakes; to 
 which, indeed, in the old epic time, Homer, for good rea- 
 sons, likened them. 
 
 5. A word or words are placed between " to," the sign 
 of the infinitive, and its verb ; as by Byron 
 
 "To slowly trace the forest's shady scene." 
 
 As to hyperbaton, remember, generally, that every new 
 mode gives you another way of making your sentence 
 emphatic or musical. And so we read of Plato experi- 
 menting out his wondrous style by arranging a sentence 
 in six different ways, and Ariosto in ten. Nay, on the 
 part of a truly great writer or speaker, the music that is 
 in his soul will spontaneously invent for itself arrange- 
 ments of wondrous variety. Yet a very great deal can 
 be done of skillful design, working in accordance with 
 nature. Hyperbaton is one of the most prominent ways 
 
Figures of Syntax. 153 
 
 in which euphony and force are to be obtained; study 
 this figure very minutely and at great length. 
 
 6. The objective is put before the governing verb 
 with fine effect, as by Wordsworth, the greatest English 
 meditative poet : 
 
 "Me didst thou constitute a priest of thine." 
 
 7. Two parts of a sentence grammatically connected 
 are disjoined by a clause thrown between. Thus can 
 very fine effects be produced; as in Queen Catharine's 
 reproaches of Wolsey in Shakespeare's " Henry VIII.:" 
 
 " He was never, 
 But where he meant to ruin, pitiful." 
 
 8. Beautifully, the preposition is put first, the parti- 
 ciple follows ; as by Milton : 
 
 " Into what pit thou seest, 
 From what height fallen." 
 
 9. The thing possessing, with its preposition " of," is 
 placed before the thing possessed ; thus in Byron's 
 " Manfred :" 
 
 " Of distant sentinels the fitful song 
 Began and died upon the gentle wind." 
 
 10. The preposition is put after the noun it governs, 
 as by Shakespeare : 
 
 " It only stands 
 Our lives upon, to use our strongest hands." 
 
 Or in that unsurpassable " Lament," written by Lady 
 Ann Bothwell: 
 
 " I canna chuse, but ever will 
 Be luving to thy faither still; 
 In weil or wae whare'er he gae, 
 Mine heart can ne'er depairt him frae." 
 
154 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 ii. The possessive adjective is put by Lady Ann after 
 the other adjective, which usually it precedes: 
 
 " But do not, do not, prettie mine, 
 To faynings false thine heart incline." 
 
 In taking leave of Figures of Syntax, we have just 
 found ourselves admirably sustained by Profesor Bascom 
 in our grappling with those who, like Macaulay, main- 
 tain that poesy is dying out, and with others of more 
 degraded views, that Christianity is departing, and should 
 depart : 
 
 " Many are ready to insist that the passions in the outset 
 move us only the more strongly from the murky intellectual 
 medium in which their subjects are presented, and the great 
 predominance of sensible over intelligible objects. We would 
 rather say that in its early periods emotion is more rude and 
 demonstrative, not more strong, than in its later periods. While 
 the movement of mind, though substantial, is yet crude and in- 
 complete, it may tend to render both poetry and oratory some- 
 what formal and barren, to restrict them to its own didactic 
 method; but when culture becomes deep, rich, and productive, 
 its emotional products will be more profoundly passionate than 
 those of any previous period; more just and symmetrical, they 
 will also be more thoroughly vital. Not till the mind has 
 worked its way through the periods of skepticism and destruc- 
 tion into those of belief and construction, out from uncertainty 
 and doubt into hearty faith and advocacy, will the emotions 
 claim and fulfill their highest part in the progress of man. The 
 stream of human life does not run shallow as we advance. The 
 most profoundly emotional truths committed to the mind, like 
 morning stars, appear late above its horizon. In the fullest 
 discipline of the human mind, therefore, we seem to return to 
 the order first presented, in which a delicately, broadly, pro- 
 foundly apprehensive Intellect stands at the threshold of hu- 
 man faculties." 
 
 In harmony with all which, our fond hope is that the 
 Christian pulpit is on the eve of vindicating its potency 
 more than ever yet it has done ; is to aid in binding the 
 
Figures of Syntax. 155 
 
 nations together; is to be the chief popularizer of sci- 
 ence to the common people ; is to set Christ forth, more 
 than ever, as the grand specific for time and for eternity ; 
 is to study him as the prime model of oratory, and to 
 point to him as the pole-star in morals and in religion. 
 
 The full treatment of this great figure, Inversion, re- 
 quires that mention be made of the Periodic Sentence. 
 Every periodic sentence has as its essence the suspension 
 of the meaning till the close of the sentence : 
 
 " Ape-born, not God-born, is what the Atheists say of man," 
 
 is our example. This structure excites anticipation, and 
 keeps up curiosity till the denouement. The key-word, 
 " man," is at the end of the sentence. It is evident, there- 
 fore, that the periodic structure implies inversion. Be 
 much on your guard against making such sentences 
 lengthy, if you wish to avoid tiring your readers or hear- 
 ers. Hooker, Sir Thomas Browne, Dr. Samuel Johnson, 
 De Quincey, are periodic writers of eminence. The early 
 writers tend too much to long sentences. Practice the 
 mixture of short and long; and also Dean Swift's defini- 
 tion: 
 
 " Proper words in proper places is the true definition of a 
 style;" 
 
 which, if it be so, shows us how important must inver- 
 sion be ; as see in Archbishop Whately's example of the 
 periodic formation: 
 
 " One of the most celebrated of men, for wisdom and for 
 prosperity, was Solomon." 
 
156 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 PART FIRST. 
 
 Simile. 
 
 WE rejoice that the most important division of our 
 theme is at last before us Figures of Rhetoric. Indig- 
 nantly do we protest against the common definition of 
 a rhetorical figure: "An intentional deviation from the 
 ordinary or literal application of words." What deviation 
 from ordinary or literal application in the cry of David ? 
 
 "O my son, Absalom; my son, my son Absalom! Would 
 God I had died for thee, O Absalom ! my son, my son !" 
 
 an accumulation of figures bursting from the heart ; a 
 cry that has re-echoed century after century in the sym- 
 pathizing soul of every reader. The common definition 
 needs to be greatly widened ; it is the result of unworthy 
 ideas of rhetoric long prevalent, and greatly aids to up- 
 hold these ideas on the throne. Such a definition as 
 the following is demanded : 
 
 " A figure of rhetoric is a deviation from the literal or from 
 the more ordinary application of words; or it is some turn of 
 expression prompted by the mind in intense action." 
 
 Figures are thus at once vindicated, as by a magic 
 stroke, from the usual charge of surfaceness. They must 
 often be among the simplest forms of speech ; they are 
 seen to well up from the deepest inward fountains. We 
 become convinced that the study of them on sound prin- 
 ciples must form one of the most important departments 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 157 
 
 of criticism ; must bring us into connection with the 
 grandeur and versatility of language and of mind ; nay, 
 with His glories of whom speech is the proclamation, 
 and mind the image; while these figures are the war- 
 gear of the orator wherewith he is to conquer the world. 
 We defend the new definition proposed, by the au- 
 thority of one of the soundest thinkers of our time, The- 
 remin, in his great work, " Eloquence a Virtue :" 
 
 " This change in the position and movements of the orator, 
 peculiar to moral activity of all sorts, can be perceived in the 
 case of the activity of the orator only in the thoughts and the 
 words, and in their constantly varying turns ; since the orator 
 makes use of thoughts and words only in order to the realiza- 
 tion of his idea. These turns are the so-called rhetorical fig- 
 ures ; an expression which must not be taken to denote mere 
 ornaments coldly and artificially contrived to set off the dis- 
 course (to which the expression might lead), but lively move- 
 ments in thought and language, prompted by the imagination 
 under the guidance of rhetorical affection." 
 
 In admirable agreement with this profounder view is 
 the fact that, although Demosthenes despised the showy, 
 the merely ornamental, and has a style the farthest pos- 
 sible from poetical flourishes, yet the ancients boasted 
 that he never brought forward a thought that did not 
 throw his language into some figure. 
 
 Of figures of rhetoric it has been usual to say that 
 there are two kinds : figures of words and figures of 
 things a distinction worse than useless. The true doc- 
 trine is that all rhetorical figures show us some new 
 moulding of words in accordance with some actual rela- 
 tion between things outward one to another ; or between 
 an outward and a mental thing ; or at the bidding of some 
 emotion or inward thing ; or between two or more men- 
 tal things ; so that every figure of rhetoric is at once a 
 figure of words and a figure of things. Even alliteration, 
 wherein two or more words placed near each other be- 
 
158 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 gin with the same letter, produces a reality, a delicate 
 rhyme at the beginning of words instead of at the end ; 
 as in Pope, of a pedant : 
 
 " A bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, 
 With loads of learned lumber in his head." 
 
 So, too, the pun is more than mere words ; for in it 
 there must be a difference of sense, and not merely a 
 similarity of sound. Voltaire and Lord Chesterfield met 
 at a gay party in Paris, where shone several French la- 
 dies with cheeks artificially radiant : 
 
 " My lord," said Voltaire, " what think you of our French 
 beauties ?" 
 
 Replied Chesterfield: 
 
 " I am no judge of paintings." 
 
 Some time after, in London, an English lady, outra- 
 geously rouged, was paying the French wit great atten- 
 tion. Whispered Chesterfield to him : 
 
 " Take care you be not captivated." " No fear," replied the 
 lively Frenchman ; " I shall not allow myself to be taken by 
 an English craft under French colors." 
 
 Even in Gay's new song of " New Similes," points of 
 resemblance, fantastic yet real, are caught at : 
 
 "My passion is as mustard strong; 
 
 I sit all sober sad ; 
 Drunk as a piper all day long, 
 Or like a March hare mad." 
 
 Many a false and bloody dogma has been bolstered up 
 by misinterpreting figures ; how important, then, to un- 
 derstand the laws by which they should be interpreted. 
 When the literal meaning of an expression is incompati- 
 ble with plain human experience of the nature of things, 
 common-sense compels us to receive the expression as 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 159 
 
 figurative, if the Figurative lies at the door. We meet 
 in the Bible this : 
 
 "The little hills leap on every side." 
 
 We know that the hills can not leap ; we have no diffi- 
 culty in seeing that they leap figuratively. In another 
 place we find 
 
 " I am the door." 
 
 Our knowledge of things tells us that the Great, Lowly 
 One never was a plank of wood used as a door ; we be- 
 think us of a point of resemblance between Him and a 
 door: both give entrance. We know how metaphors 
 abound in Holy Writ. We have recourse to metaphor 
 when one says, pointing to a portrait on the wall : 
 
 " This is Washington." 
 
 There is no riddle; " is "very frequently means "repre- 
 sents ;" that usage is very common in the Bible. When 
 we read, 
 
 "This is my body," 
 
 we trample on the laws of Nature, on the laws of lan- 
 guage, especially on the laws of Bible language, when we 
 force these very plain, words to tell us that dough hath 
 become God. Many excellent people have fallen into 
 that opinion. Yet in the Scripture the word " is " never 
 means " becomes," or " is changed into ;" but very often 
 it signifies " represents." The scientific, the common- 
 sense interpretation of one figurative utterance would 
 sweep from the earth much of religious error. 
 
 To be true to Nature and to matter of fact is, then, 
 one of the first excellences of a writer. Mrs. Dunlop, 
 the early patroness of Burns, had an old housekeeper 
 who was astonished at the attentions her mistress paid 
 to a plowman. To remove this prejudice, Mrs. D. made 
 her read a MS. copy of that perfect poem, " The Cotter's 
 
160 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Saturday Night," in which Burns described family wor- 
 ship in a peasant's cot. Mrs. D. asked the old woman 
 what she thought of the piece. She replied with indif- 
 ference : 
 
 "The like of you Quality may see a vast in't; but I was aye 
 used to the very same as a' that in my ain faither's house, and 
 I dinna ken how he could hae described it ony ither way." 
 
 She was full of the notion that fine poetry must be op- 
 posite or superior to nature. Burns, when told of the 
 old woman's criticism, said that he never had received a 
 higher compliment. 
 
 The conception, very common, that there must be, in 
 figurative passages, something vague, conjectural, unde- 
 termined, is another base view. Figures are governed by 
 fixed, thoroughly ascertained laws, they are the very op- 
 posite of new inventions ; under careful study have they 
 been for many ages. For example, we have been aided 
 in our treatment of them by reading Quintilian's Ninth 
 Book, written some sixteen hundred years ago ; and the 
 subject was a very old one in his time. The right mode 
 of interpreting them can not but have been long since 
 defined with precision. By every honest writer they are 
 employed, not to make his meaning obscure, but with 
 the set purpose of rendering it brilliantly distinct ; very 
 often they are absolutely indispensable to an accurate 
 statement of the truth. Let us never again be so weak 
 as to utter the idiotic cry over a Scripture passage, " Oh, 
 this is figurative," arid to cradle ourselves in the opinion 
 that, if figurative, it must needs be vague and obscure. 
 
 XXXV. Simile is the rhetorical figure that comes first 
 before us. Of this, it is an express law that the names of 
 the things compared are employed in their literal sense. 
 A simile is a comparison distinctly stated ; marked by 
 some such word as " like " or " as." When it is said, 
 " The wicked are like the troubled sea," both of the 
 terms, " wicked " and " sea," are taken in their usual 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 161 
 
 sense. Turn to William Wordsworth, greatest medita- 
 tive poet the world has ever seen ; sometimes prosy, ser- 
 monizing, but rich in the noblest moral truths nobly ex- 
 pressed ; sympathizing most deeply with Nature, read- 
 ing in her mountains, rivers, and lonely tarns or lakes 
 deep among the hills, glorious hints of God and duty ; 
 and in these clouds, every where lovely, islanding the sky 
 with charm. Of a calm evening he says, as one might 
 of Wordsworth's own muse which it precisely suits: 
 
 " It is a beauteous evening, calm and still. 
 The holy time as quiet as a nun 
 Breathless with adoration." 
 
 All honor to him, were it but for the homage he paid 
 to man's true nobility, in his selecting as the hero of the 
 " Excursion," his most labored work, not baron or knight, 
 but a Scotch peddler, whose knighthood came direct 
 from God. 
 
 Turn back in the years to Thomas Lodge, the drama- 
 tist, who died of the plague in 1623. Note the Bible 
 spirit that dictates his thought ; may it imbue you with 
 the feeling that every thought which breathes a Bible 
 spirit is sure to be noble, and to contain in it the ele- 
 ments of poesy: 
 
 " Aye, but the milder passions show the man ; 
 For as the leaf doth beautify the tree, 
 And pleasant flowers bedeck the painted spring, 
 Even so in men of greatest reach and power 
 A mild and piteous thought augments renown." 
 
 Bible influence reigns, the strongest impulse on his 
 mind, in the opinions of the next writer from whom we 
 quote, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the profound- 
 est thinkers, one of the most imaginative poets, one of 
 the most philosophical critics in our literature ; unhappy 
 in his being so desultory in his mental exertions ; who, 
 
 L 
 
1 62 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 if he had proposed to take you from Boston to New 
 York, would have gone round by Cuba, the Sandwich 
 Islands, and California, and likely would not have got to 
 New York after all : 
 
 " Human experience," said he, " like the stern lights of a ship 
 at sea, too often illuminates only the path we have passed over." 
 
 Lord Bacon, father of our modern Philosophy of Ex- 
 periment, condescends to give us this: 
 
 "Tall men, like tall houses, are usually ill furnished in the 
 upper story." 
 
 Or let a simile convey to you a criticism, in part just, on 
 the style of Gibbon, whose " History of the Decline and 
 Fall of the Roman Empire " is a most splendid master- 
 piece. Said of him the eminent Greek scholar, Professor 
 Porson : 
 
 "Gibbon's style is too uniform; he writes in the same flow- 
 ery and pompous style on every subject. He is like Christie, 
 the auctioneer who says as much in praise of a ribbon as of a 
 Raphael." 
 
 Or hasten to Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down and Con- 
 nor, the great pulpit poet of England, the Spenser of 
 theology, whose similes at times are over-rich, carrying 
 him away from his subject to themselves. He thus com- 
 pares the good man's prayers, that have to struggle their 
 way to heaven through many a cross-wind of tempta- 
 tion, to the sinking, soaring, and singing of a lark: 
 
 " So have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and 
 soaring upward, singing as he rises; and he hopes to get to 
 heaven, and to climb above the clouds ; but the poor bird was 
 beateft^back by the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his 
 motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at 
 every breath of the tempest than it could recover by the libra- 
 tion and frequent weighing of its wings, till the little creature 
 was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was 
 over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and rose and sang, 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 163 
 
 as if it had learned music and motion from an angel as he 
 passed sometime through the air about his ministries here be- 
 low. So is the prayer of a good man." 
 
 A simile that is over-rich ; but how sweet a poem. 
 
 Spurgeon has found, as will every man of power and 
 fervor, that the bare Gospel, impetuously preached, is 
 stronger to make a sensation than artistic ceremonial, 
 o*r pretty adornments hung in gaudy festoons around 
 the portals of bliss and woe. Take this from him : 
 
 " God puts our prayers like rose-leaves between the leaves 
 of his book of remembrance, and when the volume is opened 
 at last, there shall be a precious fragrance springing from 
 them." 
 
 Every sin against fact is a sin against taste. Skelton, 
 a satirical poet of Henry the Eighth's day, thus writes: 
 
 " Merry Margaret, 
 
 As midsummer flower; 
 Gentle as falcon, 
 
 Or hawk of the tower." 
 
 Our idea of falcon and hawk is such that we would 
 rather be excused from wedding a lady of that ravenous 
 class. This simile, we fear, was predictive of sharp nails 
 after marriage. Yet, though a daring simile, natural 
 enough was Sydney Smith's, when, speaking of Daniel 
 Webster, he said 
 
 " He struck me as much like a steam-engine in trousers." 
 
 There are two modes of treating a simile : one by 
 simply affirming one thing to be like another; and one 
 by not merely affirming a resemblance, but pointing out 
 the nature and details of that resemblance. Sir Walter 
 Scott, the Shakespeare of the North, says : 
 
 " The tear down childhood's cheek that flows 
 Is like the dew-drop on the rose." 
 
 If he had stopped there, we would have had a simile. 
 
164 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 treated in the first way; but how much more effective 
 when he expands : 
 
 " When next the summer breeze comes by, * 
 
 And shakes the bush, the flower is dry." 
 
 Oliver Goldsmith contributes to us next. Vain as a 
 peacock, guileless as a child; liberality itself; giving 
 away his last waistcoat or last penny to the distressed, 
 yet overflowing with a certain wondrous sagacity which 
 he seemed incapable of using in his own affairs ; master 
 of a style admirably elegant, simple, easy; who in poetry, 
 novel, comedy, essay, has left us masterpieces. Open his 
 fine poem the " Traveler ;" this passage is justly cele- 
 brated of the Swiss mountaineer he speaks : 
 
 "Dear is that shed to which his soul conforms, 
 And dear that hill which lifts him to the storms; 
 And as a child, when scaring sounds molest, 
 Clings close and closer to the mother's breast, 
 So the loud torrent and the whirlwind's roar, 
 But bind him to his native mountains more." 
 
 In Moore's " Life of George Gordon, Lord Byron," the 
 biographer in his beautiful prose declares of the gifted 
 but licentious nobleman : 
 
 " Like the chestnut-tree, that grows best in volcanic soils, he 
 luxuriates most where the conflagration of passion has left its 
 mark." 
 
 You will observe here how botanical knowledge supplies 
 a happy illustration ; and the same can not but be true 
 of all kinds of science and knowledge. To be quick in 
 seeing likenesses between many things, you need to know 
 many things. An ignorant, unobservant man is very un- 
 likely to originate good similes, which to be good need 
 to be true to nature and to fact. If you would write 
 a style richly illustrated, heap up facts in your mind. 
 Hence it is that some whose style was bare and dry in 
 youth, when their knowledge was very limited, have 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 165 
 
 written with animation and brilliancy in advanced life, 
 when their memory teemed with information, with sug- 
 gestive facts. The extract from Moore teaches you 
 to form a habit, especially, of marking with quick eye 
 the modes of life in animals and plants ; the poet-biog- 
 rapher had seen and taken good note of the majestic 
 chestnuts that grow from the lava-soil of Vesuvius, or he 
 had read of the circumstance, and it had been stored in 
 his recollection. But if you try at similes before you 
 have knowledge, or while your eye is dull or your heart 
 uninterested, your similes will be worn-out tinsel, bor- 
 rowed at second-hand from others. Commit to mem- 
 ory this priceless maxim: No one can be a fine writer 
 merely by wishing to be so, or by directly putting forth 
 an effort to be so ; you will succeed better by working at 
 it indirectly ; by filling your mind with facts, especially 
 if these be obtained direct from nature rather than from 
 books ; then similes will come " at their own sweet will." 
 We enforce this most significant law by a simile from 
 Dr. Campbell's admirable u Philosophy of Rhetoric :" 
 
 " As when the rays of the sun are collected into the focus of 
 a burning-glass, the smaller the spot is which receives them, 
 compared with the surface of the glass, the greater is the splen- 
 dor so in exhibiting our sentiments by speaking, the narrower 
 the compass of words is wherein the thought is comprised, the 
 more energetic is the expression." 
 
 A quotation this, proving, what Macaulay and others 
 deny, that science is admirably fitted to give majestic 
 contributions to poesy. Macaulay argues very strenu- 
 ously that as science extends, imagination must wither, 
 and poesy forsake the earth ; just as a loud-voiced band 
 are proclaiming that science will scare God off the field; 
 but it lies plain before you here that science supplied Dr. 
 Campbell with his illustration a highly poetical one, 
 yet no illusion. 
 
 Hear, farther, the Rev. Dr. Caird. He is maintaining 
 
1 66 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 that attention to the claims of Heaven and to the claims 
 of earth should and easily may go together. It is sci- 
 ence that gives him his illustration : 
 
 " The planets in the heavens have a twofold motion in their 
 orbits and on their axes; the one motion not interfering, but 
 carried on in perfect harmony with the other. So must it be 
 that man's twofold activities, round the heavenly and the earth- 
 ly centre, disturb not, nor jar with, each other." 
 
 4 
 
 Or from the same author take this : 
 
 " Reason is to faith as the eye to the telescope." 
 
 How finely these few words illustrate the invaluable 
 principle that reason and faith never contradict each 
 other; that faith may pierce beyond human reason, be- 
 cause faith avails itself of the reason of God, the tele- 
 scope it looks through. 
 
 "The Wagoner," by Thomas Buchanan Reid, opens 
 with a crowd of similes, as the hero dashes into a Phila- 
 delphia inn : 
 
 " The latch went up, the door was thrown 
 Awide, as by a tempest blown ; 
 While bold as an embodied storm, 
 Strode in a dark and stalwart form." 
 
 For Bible similes, see Matt, vii., 24-27 ; ix., 37 ; Ezek. xv. 
 The sources of simile, how deep they lie ! David Mac- 
 beth Moir, on the death of his son, gives an example of 
 one of the most overflowing sources the heart. How 
 the heart gives us to see the outward through emotion 
 through those we love ! Casa Wappy was the child's 
 love-name : 
 
 "We mourn for thee when blind, blank night 
 
 The chamber fills; 
 
 We pine for thee when morn's first light 
 Reddens the hills. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 167 
 
 The sun, the moon, the stars, the sea 
 All, to the wall-flower and wild pea 
 Are changed : we saw the world through thee, 
 Casa Wappy." 
 
 Very pleasant to luxuriate among similes, gentlest 
 births of the Muse ; too deliberate and calm for passion 
 in its stormiest ; blossoming forth when meditation or 
 fancy breathe their placid summer breezes over the lake- 
 like mind. Oratory and tragedy shun them. Cicero, 
 over-ornamental though he be, has scarcely one ; when 
 Shakespeare in any crisis of emotion introduces them, 
 they are exceedingly short and simple, as when over the 
 sleeping body of Desdemona Othello whispers, more, 
 however, in meditative sadness than in wrath 
 
 "Yet I'll not shed her blood, 
 Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, 
 And smooth as monumental alabaster." 
 
 Still, the range of this figure is far from narrow, for it 
 may glisten with tears or dimple with laughter. Paul- 
 ding, in " Salmagundi," describes a young lady, very cor- 
 pulent, yet very tight-laced : 
 
 " She was like an apple-pudding tied in the middle." 
 
 Sir Thomas Overbury, an old writer of delightful es- 
 says, who was treacherously assassinated in 1631, says: 
 
 " The man who has not any thing to boast of but his illus- 
 trious ancestors is like a potato the only good belonging to 
 him is under ground." 
 
 Youthful composers are more apt to go to excess in 
 this figure than in any other. Dr. Anthon assures them 
 that Homer has not one simile in the whole First Book 
 of the " Iliad." But at line 47, of the Sun-god coming 
 in wrath to send pest on the Achaians, it is said : 
 
 "He came like Night." 
 
1 68 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Very unlike to the usual Homeric simile, which gener- 
 ally is a comet, a small nucleus with a long tail. The 
 old king of song having once started the illustrative 
 image, often indulges in a lengthened description at 
 times very homely. Ajax, pommeled in vain by Trojan 
 swords, is compared to an obstinate ass cudgeled by a 
 dozen shepherds, yet refusing to budge an inch ; and the 
 mind of Odysseus, restless in a fierce struggle of indig- 
 nation against self-control, is compared to a haggis kept 
 bobbing around in a boiling caldron. However, many of 
 his similes are admirable : brief, vivid, breathing the very 
 spirit of the heroic age ; as when of the Myrmidons 
 
 " They rushed to battle like thirsty wolves to a spring." 
 
 From Dr. Bushnell let us now strengthen our position 
 that the rhetorical is not necessarily the unreal. After 
 mentioning that all words descriptive of mind were orig- 
 inally descriptive of matter, he thus proceeds: 
 
 "It is not perceived that when a word rises out of fact in 
 the physical range to be the fixed name, by figure, of something 
 in the range of thought and spirit, it obtains a meaning as much 
 fuller and more solid as it is closer akin to mind. Is good 
 taste nothing, because it is not the literal tasting faculty of the 
 mouth ? Is a good heart nothing, because it is not the pump- 
 ing organ of the body, but only a figure derived from it ? Is 
 rectitude nothing, because it is only a figurative straightness, 
 and not a literal straight line ? Is integrity nothing, because 
 it is only a moral wholeness, and not the veritable integer of 
 arithmetic ? How visibly does the figure, as figure, rise to a 
 nobler and more real meaning in all such examples; and when 
 we find that human language is underlaid all through, in this 
 manner, with physical images, observing their wondrous fitness 
 to serve as a wording for all that mind can think or wish to 
 express, we are half disposed to believe that they were set into 
 nature for this purpose. They become even more REAL as fig- 
 ures than they are as facts; and there is no so great victory 
 for any truth or subject of intelligence, as when it has obtained 
 some fit figure of the true to be its interpreter." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 169 
 
 To be witty or 'humorous you must use figures, ex- 
 pressed or implied. Let the Rev. Dr. Emmons prove it. 
 A pompous young preacher once asked him how he liked 
 his sermon. The Doctor, then ninety years of age, rose 
 from his chair, protruded his cheeks, inflated his chest, 
 gave a significant puff, and sat down without saying a 
 word. To another youth he said : 
 
 "Your sermon was too much like Seekonk Plain long and 
 level." 
 
 We have mentioned that Homer's similes are often 
 short poems, far expanded beyond the point of resem- 
 blance. Such, too, the habit of Milton ; which has been 
 defended by Addison, the' critic who, earlier than any 
 other, brought Milton into view of the British world: 
 
 " When Milton alludes either to things or persons, he never 
 quits his simile till it rises to some very great idea, which is 
 often foreign to the occasion that gave it birth. The simile 
 does not perhaps occupy above a line or two, but the poet runs 
 on with the hint until he has raised out of it some brilliant 
 image or sentiment adapted to inflame the mind of the reader, 
 and to give it that sublime kind of entertainment which is suit- 
 able to the nature of a heroic poem.'"' 
 
 In short, though you never are to imitate them, regard 
 such similes as brief episodes; and, instead of grumbling, 
 be thankful that copious Heaven hath sent you a mind 
 who sins on the side of over-wealth. 
 
1 70 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 
 PART SECOND. 
 
 Simile. 
 
 WITH many the conception is deep-rooted that poesy 
 is necessarily at war with sound common-sense. It is 
 one main object of this work to disabuse you of so incon- 
 siderate a prejudice. In Shakespeare's beautiful drama, 
 " The Tempest," study his conceptions, so contrasted 
 Ariel and Caliban. Supposing such beings to exist, 
 Shakespeare's genius shows itself, its balance and wis- 
 dom, by his making them each play a part in perfect 
 consistence with the supposed nature of each. Imagina- 
 tion created them, but common-sense, judgment exqui- 
 sitely accurate, filled in the details ; if not, both would 
 have been ridiculous to every cultured mind. 
 
 Accordingly, a simile that runs counter to any clear 
 perception jars on the intellect. Robert Montgomery 
 contributes the subjoined. From his poem on " Satan " 
 he is ycleped " Satan Montgomery :" 
 
 " Lo ! the bright dew-bead on the bramble lies, 
 Like liquid rapture upon Beauty's eyes." 
 
 Very well to compare the dew-bead to the pity of a beau- 
 tiful eye, but .the ladies are entitled to object to liken- 
 ing their eyes to brambles. William Habington, who 
 often wrote elegant and choice English, is chiefly re- 
 membered nowadays by an absurd simile. Blackfriars 
 is a street in London abounding in candy-stores ; and 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 171 
 
 so of a feast so rich that Heaven must have rained down 
 sweetmeats, he exclaims : 
 
 " It seem'd as though Heaven were 
 Blackfriars, and each star a confectioner." 
 
 Our very admiration of Mrs. Barrett Browning, queen 
 of all poetesses, makes us more willing to aid in ridicul- 
 ing her conceits and her husband's unendurable obscuri- 
 ties ; as thus : 
 
 " Then the bitter sea 
 Inexorably pushed between us both ; 
 And sweeping up the ship with my despair, 
 Threw us out as a pasture to the stars." 
 
 Saith Bayne: 
 
 "No Ossianic juvenile ever perpetrated purer nonsense. 
 What possible resemblance there can be between a ship and a 
 pasture; why and when stars go out to grass; and wherefore 
 having so gone they should feed on ships and young ladies 
 these are questions of insoluble mystery." 
 
 But to admire is pleasanter than to carp. In " Festus " 
 is this : 
 
 "I'll not wish for stars; but I could love 
 Some peaceful spot, where we might dwell unknown 
 Where home-born joys might nestle round our hearts 
 As swallows round our roofs." 
 
 Passing into the domain of eloquence, let us mark, we 
 can not do it but with delight, how Lord Chatham rises 
 from a casual expression, almost beneath the dignity of 
 the occasion in the House of Lords, into a magnificent 
 image, enforced by a sublime classic quotation : 
 
 " I would not touch a feather of the prerogative. The ex- 
 pression perhaps is too light; but since I have made use of it, 
 let me add that the entire command and power of directing the 
 local disposition of the army is to the royal prerogative as the 
 
172 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 master-feather in the eagle's wing; and if 'I were permitted to 
 carry the allusion a little farther, I would say that they have 
 disarmed the imperial bird the ministrum fulminis alitem (the 
 winged minister of the thunder). The army is the thunder of 
 the crown." 
 
 This was spoken January 22d, 1770. A few months 
 after, Junius wrote what is considered his finest image: 
 
 " The king's honor is that of his people. The feather that 
 adorns the royal bird supports its flight. Strip him of his 
 plumage, and you fix him to the earth." 
 
 The proof from handwriting seems to have proved, quite 
 recently (1871), Junius to have been Sir Philip Francis. 
 
 Mr. Mudie, the author of some popular works on " The 
 Seasons," was originally a teacher in Dundee. He hap- 
 pened to be one of a tea-party at the house of the Rev. 
 Dr. M. The Doctor was renowned for the suavity of 
 his manners, and his especial politeness toward the fair 
 sex. Handing a dish of honey to one of the ladies, he 
 said, in his wonted manner 
 
 ^ " Do take a little honey, Miss , 'tis so sweet so like 
 
 yourself." 
 
 Mr. Mudie could not restrain his native tendency to 
 humor; so, handing the butter-dish to the host, he ex- 
 claimed 
 
 * "Do take a little butter, Doctor; 'tis so like yourself." 
 
 A circumstance recorded in Mitford's " Life," of the 
 poet Gray, is a striking example of how much a good 
 simile improves a passage. . Thomson, author of " The 
 Seasons," had written thus his picture of Lavinia, in his 
 "Autumn:" 
 
 "Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self, 
 Recluse among the woods; if city dames 
 Will deign their faith. And thus she went, compell'd 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 173 
 
 By strong necessity, with as serene 
 
 And pleased a look as Patience e'er put on, 
 
 To glean Palemon's fields." 
 
 Thomson laid this passage before Pope, then in the 
 zenith of his fame. Pope drew his pen through it, and 
 wrote thus: 
 
 " Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self, 
 Recluse among the close embowering woods ; 
 As in the hollow breast of Apennine, 
 Beneath the shelter of encircling hills, 
 A myrtle rises, far from human eyes, 
 And breathes its balmy fragrance on the wild ; 
 So flourished, blooming and unseen by all, 
 The sweet Lavinia." 
 
 John Locke, whose brief treatise on the " Conduct of 
 the Understanding" is invaluable (let every young per- 
 son buy it, and read it fifty times), a writer who uses a 
 very plain style, very seldom giving way to the poetic, 
 gives us, in endeavoring to explain the faculty of mem- 
 ory more accurately, this fine instance of a simile natu- 
 rally suggested : 
 
 "The ideas as well as the children of our youth often die 
 before us, and our minds represent to us those tombs to which 
 we are approaching, where, though the brass and the marble 
 remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery 
 is mouldered away." 
 
 If he had compared the aged mind to a canvas from 
 which the painting had faded, the comparison would 
 have been less beautiful far; because old age by no 
 means so naturally suggests the thought of a picture as 
 it does the thought of the sepulchre, to which the tot- 
 tering step of Eld is so inevitably drawing near. But 
 lay it to heart nothing in a figure charms more than 
 naturalness. 
 
 Avoiding all we can the cant of the falsely Puritanic, 
 
1 74 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 we must maintain that poesy is marred by mean views 
 of first principles. Pope tells us of angels wondering at 
 the intellect of Newton : 
 
 " Superior beings, when of late they saw 
 A mortal man unfold all Nature's law, 
 Admired such wisdom in an earthly shape, 
 And showed a Newton as we show an ape." 
 
 Holy Writ, though revealing to us our hideous down- 
 ward tendencies, insists on, rejoices in our priceless fac- 
 ulties, our capabilities of repenting and of soaring. Pope 
 imbibed whatever of meanness there was in his philoso- 
 phy from his shallow teacher, Lord Bolingbroke. You 
 mark how the above lines are degraded by infidel views of 
 man ; till man dwindles down into a " pampered goose," 
 or to an ape as, long before Darwin, Lord Monboddo 
 made our species out to be. Holy Writ would repre- 
 sent a Newton as an embodied eternity. The gifted 
 Poe makes the worm greatly man's superior, when he 
 says of human life 
 
 "The play is the tragedy man; 
 And the hero, the conqueror worm." 
 
 Infidelity is the mean, crawling, and unintellectual 
 thing which leads quick to the reign of the commune 
 in our cities of the groveling in our literature. 
 
 Once more, truth is necessary to every good simile in 
 this, that it must be born from some real glow of soul ; 
 not from false fervors artificially wrought up. Go to the 
 "Annus Mirabilis" of Dryden, Pope's immediate prede- 
 cessor. He is describing a sea-fight between the Dutch 
 and English, he knowing nothing of the sea save at sec- 
 ond-hand from books: 
 
 " Sometimes from fighting squadrons of each fleet, 
 
 Deceived themselves or to preserve a friend, 
 Two grappling ^Etnas on the ocean meet, 
 
 And English fires with Belgian flames contend." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 175 
 
 Compare, if you choose, two war-ships to two 
 but for two ^Etnas to throw out grappling-irons at each 
 other is equally offensive to common-sense and to the 
 Muse, who is a much more sensible woman than people 
 give her credit for: 
 
 " Then at each tack our little fleet grows less, 
 
 And like maim'd fowl swim lagging on the main ; 
 Their greater loss their numbers scarce confess, 
 While they lose cheaper than the English gain." 
 
 Of a sudden the grappling ^Etnas have dwindled into 
 maimed fowl ducks, or other water-fowl ; while the gen- 
 eral diction is hard and ungenial, as appears in the words 
 "tack," "lagging," "scarce," "cheaper;" and the degra- 
 dation of the subject is completed by the mercantile ac- 
 count of profit and loss in the closing line ; and all this 
 because Dryden, great in prose and in poesy, is trying 
 here to lash himself up into the sublime, the genuine sea- 
 enthusiasm being wholly absent. Better one epithet of 
 Dibdin, in his justly famous sea-songs; when, old salt as 
 he was, in heart at least, he speaks of his ship as she 
 goes spanking through the water, dashing the foam from 
 her bows, as 
 
 " The saucy Arethusa." 
 
 Be honest ; be in downright earnest ; if you would be 
 great in speaking or in writing. 
 
 The critical essays of Talfourd are valuable. We bring 
 before you his not simile, but comparison, of Mackenzie 
 (author of the " Man of Feeling" and of "Julia de Rou- 
 bigne") and Lawrence Sterne, in order to introduce to 
 you the assertion that comparison must be catalogued 
 as quite distinct from simile, as you will see at once: 
 comparison admitting of dissimilitudes as well as simili- 
 tudes: 
 
 " Sterne's pathos is, indeed, most genuine while it lasts, but 
 the soul is not suffered to cherish the feeling which it awakens. 
 
1 76 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 He does not shed, like Mackenzie, one mild light on the path 
 of life, but scatters on it wild coruscations of ever-shifting bright- 
 ness, which, while they sometimes disclose spots of inimitable 
 beauty, often do but fantastically play over objects dreary and 
 revolting. All in Mackenzie is calm, gentle, harmonious. No 
 play of mistimed wit, no flourish of rhetoric, no train of philo- 
 sophical speculation for a moment diverts our sympathy. Each 
 of his best works is like one deep thought, and the impression 
 which it leaves is soft, sweet, and undivided, as the summer 
 evening's holiest sigh." 
 
 In a choice simile, James Montgomery (carefully to be 
 distinguished from Robert Montgomery) sets forth the 
 additional charm which rhythm gives to poesy: 
 
 " How much the power of poetry depends upon the nice in- 
 flections of rhythm alone, may be proved by taking the finest 
 passages of Milton or Shakespeare, and merely putting them 
 into prose, with the least possible variation of the words them- 
 selves. The attempt would be like gathering up dew-drops, 
 which appear jewels and pearls on the grass, but run into water 
 in the hands; the essence and the elements remain, but the 
 grace, the sparkle, and the form are gone." 
 
 Being about to refer once more to Addison, fix in your 
 mind these facts as to his great work the Spectator : a 
 daily paper of one article, printed in London every morn- 
 ing from March I, 1710, till December 6, 1712, and re- 
 sumed in 1714 for other 80 numbers, of which Addison 
 wrote, out of the whole 635, 274. It was collected into 
 eight volumes ; in which form the circulation rose to ten 
 thousand. 
 
 Three famous similes, often referred to, let us now 
 place before you. The first is well known from its being 
 the boldest figure in all the tame poetry of the graceful 
 Addison. It occurs in his poem "The Campaign," just- 
 ly characterized as a gazette in rhyme : 
 
 " 'Twas then great Marlborough's mighty soul was proved, 
 That in the shock of charging hosts, unmoved 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 177 
 
 Amid confusion, horror, and despair, 
 Examined all the dreadful scenes of war. 
 In peaceful thought the field of death stirvey'd, 
 To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid. 
 So when an angel, by divine command, 
 $ With rising tempests shakes a guilty land, 
 
 And, pleased the Almighty's orders to perform, 
 Rides on the whirlwind, and directs the storm." 
 
 Another simile of historic celebrity is Cowley's on 
 Lord Bacon, founder of what is the philosophy of ex- 
 periment, not of Darwinian ape-honoring guesswork : 
 
 " From these and all long-errors of the way 
 In which our wandering predecessors went, 
 
 And like old Hebrews many years did stray 
 In deserts but of small extent, 
 
 Bacon like Moses led us forth at last; 
 
 The barren wilderness he passed ; 
 
 Did on the very borders stand 
 
 Of the blest promised land ; 
 
 And from the mountain-top of his exalted wit, 
 
 Saw it himself, and showed us it." 
 
 A third that has become familiar occupies the four 
 last lines of Sir John Denham's " Cooper's Hill." Of the 
 River Thames he speaks thus : 
 
 " O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream 
 My great example as it is my theme: 
 Though deep yet clear; though gentle yet not dull; 
 Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full." 
 
 We pointed out the distinction between simile and 
 comparison. Mark that between simile and allegory. 
 In simile, both objects must be named the thing repre- 
 sented, and the thing that represents or resembles it. In 
 allegory, whose name means " another discourse," and 
 which as a discourse may be extended to a volume, as in 
 Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress," the representing object 
 alone is set before the reader. Compare two passages 
 
 M 
 
178 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 very similar in their meaning. The first is Shakespeare's 
 simile of the. career of a dissipated youth, likened to the 
 fortunes of a gay ship destined to hurricane : 
 
 " How like a younger or a prodigal 
 The scarfed bark puts from her native bay, 
 Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet-wind ; 
 How like the prodigal doth she return, 
 With over-weather'd sides and ragged sails- 
 Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet-wind." 
 
 Here you have Shakespeare naming in so many words 
 both the objects the prodigal and the gay ship. This, 
 then, is a simile. But con next Gray's depicting of the 
 wretched fate of King Richard II. of England. It is an 
 allegory. The king himself, the object represented, is 
 not named but only the object representing: 
 
 " Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows, 
 
 While proudly riding o'er the azure realm, 
 In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, 
 Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm; 
 Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway, 
 That, hush'd in grim repose, expects his evening prey." 
 
 As the sight is the most lively and distinct of the 
 senses; as it includes, too, so wide and varied a range 
 of objects fair and magnificent, you will soon discover 
 that many of the best similes are drawn from objects of 
 sight. As, too, it is, generally speaking, easier to appre- 
 hend what is outward and visible than what is inward 
 and unseen, hence material things are usually brought 
 to illustrate the things of the mind. Happy instances, 
 however, can be quoted of things outward illustrated by 
 things inward. Thus Scott, of Loch Katrine, in his ex- 
 quisite " Lady of the Lake :" 
 
 " The mountain shadows on her breast 
 Were neither broken nor at rest; 
 In bright uncertainty they lie, 
 Like future joys to Fancy's eye." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 1 79 
 
 So Tennyson, of mists from mountain torrents : 
 
 " Those thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke, 
 That like a broken purpose waste in air." 
 
 Or from the often too dim, dreamy, metaphysical 
 Shelley: 
 
 " Our boat is asleep on Terchio's stream ; 
 Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream." 
 
 Similarly, in Mrs. Osgood's " Daughter of Herodias," 
 Herod's banqueting-room is thus described: 
 
 " The vast and magnificent banqueting-room 
 Was of marble, Egyptian in form and in gloom, 
 And around wild and dark as a demon's dread thought." 
 
 Charles Dudley Warner, in his principal work, " Back- 
 log Studies," contributes another, when he says that a 
 great wood-fire in a wide kitchen-chimney, with all the 
 pots boiling and bubbling, and a roasting-spit turning 
 in front of it 
 
 " Makes a person as hungry as does one of Scott's novels. 5 ' 
 
 This sort of simile is apt to be dim to common people. 
 Mark how numerous Henry Ward Beecher's are of the 
 other sort; how he obtains them by the hundred from 
 objects commoner than common ; how level they are to 
 the unlearned. Such suit the pulpit best; what a de- 
 lightful surprise to find the noblest and most beautiful in 
 the most prosaic haunts. Would that our preachers cul- 
 tivated the art and power of illustration by similitudes, 
 especially from homely things. A single bunch, from 
 loftier sources, by Burns : 
 
 " Ah, pleasures are like poppies spread 
 You seize the flower, the bloom is shed ; 
 Or like the borealis race, 
 That flit ere you can point their place; 
 
180 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Or like the snow falls in the river, 
 A moment white then dark forever; 
 Or like the rainbow's lovely form, 
 Evanishing amid the storm." 
 
 The distinguished Greek critic, Longinus, who writes 
 so sublimely of the sublime, couches his opinion of the 
 " Odyssey" in two noble similitudes: 
 
 " In the ' Odyssey' Homer may be likened to the setting sun, 
 whose grandeur 'still remains, though his beams have lost their 
 meridian heat." 
 
 After a little he adds 
 
 " Like the ocean, whose shores when deserted by the tide 
 mark out the extent to which it sometimes flows, so Homer's 
 genius, when ebbing into the fables of the ' Odyssey,' plainly 
 discovers how vast it once must have been." 
 
 What an unexpected stroke of originality we meet 
 with in Jean Paul Richter: 
 
 "The smallest children are nearest to God, as the smallest 
 planets are nearest the sun." 
 
 Mrs. Radcliffe, who was never out of England, in Chap- 
 ter XVI. of her famous " Mysteries of Udolfo," thus de- 
 scribes, with an accuracy that has been wondered at, the 
 appearance of Venice: 
 
 " Its terraces, crowded with airy yet majestic fabrics, touched 
 as they now were with the splendors of the setting sun, ap- 
 peared as if they had been called up from the ocean by the 
 wand of an enchanter." 
 
 It is an interesting form of this figure, too, when, after 
 the points of resemblance, the point or points of dissimil- 
 itude are stated, as thus in Anthony Trollope's " Three 
 Clerks," Chapter XIII. ; excellent, as are all his novels: 
 
 " New friends, like one's best coat and polished patent-leather 
 boots, are only intended for holiday wear. At other times they 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 1 8 1 
 
 are neither serviceable nor comfortable; they do not answer 
 the required purposes, and are ill adapted to give us the ease 
 we seek. A new coat, however, has this advantage, that in time 
 it will become old and comfortable; so much can by no means 
 be predicated with certainty of a new friend." 
 
 Let the student of style reflect how often such stating 
 of a dissimile may be impressive. Let us also recom- 
 mend strongly Anthony Trollope's female characters ; 
 and his English style, admirably accurate. 
 
 We have been eagerly lauding Beecher's homely sim- 
 iles ; no more perfect instance can be found of the effect- 
 ive use of such than in the following by Miss Charlotte 
 Young, on " Evening:" 
 
 " How like a tender mother, 
 
 With loving thoughts beguiled, 
 Fond Nature seems to lull to rest 
 
 Each faint and weary child ! 
 Drawing the curtain tenderly, 
 
 Affectionate and mild. 
 
 . " Hark to the gentle lullaby 
 
 .That through the trees is creeping 
 Those sleepy trees that nod their heads 
 Ere the moon as yet comes peeping, 
 Like a tender nurse, to see if all 
 Her little ones are sleeping." 
 
 This other comparison accept of, from a work still 
 celebrated in the history of English literature, the " Eu- 
 phues" of John Lyly. If he had always written as fol- 
 lows, his work would not have become a synonym for 
 affectation in style: 
 
 " I have read of Themistocles, which, having offended Philip, 
 the King of Macedonia, and could no way appease his anger, 
 meeting his young son, Alexander, took him in his arms, and 
 met Philip in the face. Philip, seeing the smiling countenance 
 of the child, was well pleased with Themistocles. Even so, if 
 through thy manifold sins and heinous offenses thou provoke 
 
1 82 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 the heavy displeasure of thy God, inasmuch as thou shalt trem- 
 ble for horror, take his only-begotten and well-beloved Son, 
 Jesus, in thine arms, and then He neither can nor will be angry 
 with thee." 
 
 We betake us for another bunch of flowers to James 
 Joseph Callanan, on the Loch of Gougaune Barra, Coun- 
 ty Cork, Ireland : 
 
 " There grows the wild ash, and a time-stricken willow 
 Looks chidingly down on the mirth of the billow; 
 As like some gay child, that sad monitor scorning, 
 It lightly laughs back to the laugh of the morning; 
 And the waters rush down 'mid the thunder's deep rattle, 
 Like clans from their hills at the voice of the battle." 
 
 W. W. Fosdick paints thus a scene in a maize field- 
 very American ; be sure not to leave out of your view 
 the haze on the hills : 
 
 " A thin veil hangs over the landscape and flood, 
 
 And the hills are all mellow'd in haze; 
 While Fall, creeping on like a monk in his hood, 
 Plucks the thick rustling wealth of the maize." 
 
 Two remarks in conclusion. First, the distinction be- 
 tween the form and the essence of the poetic its body 
 and its soul. A long controversy has prevailed as to 
 what constitutes poetry ; from the vain endeavor to ex- 
 press, by one word, the internal spirit and the external 
 form. This can not be done ; let there be two words 
 carefully kept apart. Ossian has the soul of poetry with- 
 out the rhyme and rhythm ; Sternhold and Hopkins, in 
 their wretched versions of the Psalms, have the form 
 without the imagination, the fancy, or the inspired glow. 
 In this volume we purposely designate the inward as 
 Poesy the outward as Poetry; and the obscurity at 
 once is gone. For a subject will be kept in perpetual 
 obscurity and confusion by the lack of a sufficiently rich 
 and precise nomenclature. One fit word can dissipate a 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 183 
 
 thousand mists. Truth is retarded piteously by men's 
 not having the right word, or not knowing how aright 
 to use the words they have. 
 
 Finally, we have hinted at many of the deeper sources 
 of simile; and of all those figures that rest on resem- 
 blance. We have not referred to the deepest source of 
 all. We state it now very briefly. If one writer pen 
 " Paradise Lost " and " Paradise Regained," many re- 
 semblances it will be possible to detect between the two. 
 But outward nature and mental nature are from the same 
 author the One great Thinker and Poet, who hath de- 
 veloped his divine ideas on sky and sea ; on conscience, 
 heart, and intellect ; a basis, God-given, whereon to rest 
 those similitudes on which rhetoric rests ; and which ren- 
 der rhetoric vivid, the servant of truth, and accordant 
 with the Deity. Low, shallow views have degraded our 
 subject ; yet, manifestly, it reaches up to God. Ponder 
 this for life. Atheism, into whatsoever literary field it 
 intrudes, brings with it the narrow, shallow, and degrad- 
 ing. No theme can reach its highest, or attain its apo- 
 theosis, till it reaches the feet of God. We laugh there- 
 fore at the idea that our atheists can sneer Religion from 
 her throne. They may as easily sneer away the dews, 
 the mountains, or the dawn. 
 
184 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 PART THIRD. 
 
 The Metaphor. 
 
 XXXVI. THE Metaphor next introduces itself. Let 
 us take you to hear old Father Taylor preach. He is 
 trying to give his congregation an idea of redemption. 
 He described a terrific storm at sea, rising to greater and 
 wilder fury; amid the weltering waves a vessel is seen 
 laboring in distress, and driving on a lee shore ; the masts 
 bend, break, go overboard ; the sails are rent ; the helm 
 unshipped ; the vessel begins to fill ; she sinks deeper, 
 deeper: 
 
 " But what do I see yonder ! Through the mist I see it. 
 That flash of lightning has shown it to me. A life-boat ! a 
 life-boat ! Christ is that life-boat !" 
 
 "Christ is like that life-boat " is a simile. " Christ is that 
 life-boat." is far stronger; an expression not of resem- 
 blance, but of identity; it is a metaphor; shorter, stron- 
 ger, a flash of thought. That quick flash is delightful : 
 condensation of mental power; bolt of the Jove-like 
 mind. Or listen to Ebenezer Elliott ; in essence, simile ; 
 in utterance and feeling, more : 
 
 " O lift the workman's heart and mind 
 
 Above low, sensual sin ! 
 Give him a home, the home of taste ; 
 Outbid the house of gin. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 185 
 
 O give him taste ! It is the link 
 
 Which binds us to the skies ; 
 A bridge of rainbows thrown across 
 
 The gulf of tears and sighs." 
 
 In metaphor, the subject of which the metaphorical 
 affirmation is made is always taken literally; the meta- 
 phor lies wholly in the copula or verb, which asserts 
 something of the subject that is not literally proper to 
 the nature of that subject : 
 
 " Judah is a lion's whelp." 
 
 Here Judah is taken literally, as is always the subject 
 spoken of; all the metaphor lies, not in the subject and 
 just as little in the predicate " lion's whelp," which 
 means something, and that something is precisely what 
 it expresses, but in " is," the mind being strongly affect- 
 ed by some points of what ? why, of resemblance ; so 
 as to use the verb " is" instead of the more cautious and 
 measured verb "resembles;" which verb "resembles" 
 would be truer to the matter of fact, but, mark it well, 
 not nearly so true to the matter of feeling. How wise 
 the principle, how deep the condemnation in Lamar- 
 tine's critique on Thiers's " History of the Consulate and 
 the Empire :" 
 
 "Man is every where evident in this history; God is no- 
 where. M. Thiers's book is a landscape without a sky." 
 
 The two objects, " book " and " landscape without a 
 sky," mean exactly what they express; else the assertion 
 means no one can tell what. The whole figure lies in 
 the verb ; which is used instead of the milder verb " re- 
 sembles." Some have taken the ground that it is a pe- 
 culiarity of the Hebrew to use " is " for " represents." 
 We take the wider and far more philosophical ground 
 it is a peculiarity and an absolute necessity of the uni- 
 versal human mind : 
 
 " This is my body." 
 
1 86 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 If these words teach a change, they must say so "This 
 is changed into my body." As they stand, they express 
 a figure the most common in human language. "This" 
 is taken literally; " my body" is taken literally; all the 
 figure lies in " is ;" and for " is " to mean " represents " is 
 nothing more than the great and every-where-spread 
 usage of the common figure called metaphor; whereas 
 for " is." to mean " changed into " is altogether unknown 
 and violent. Ponder this carefully; we can not linger 
 on it. The correct doctrine of the metaphor sweeps the 
 doctrine of transubstantiation out of the Scriptures. 
 
 Hare, speaking of atheism, couches much argument 
 in the following and atheism lies at the other extreme 
 from what we have just been looking at in transubstan- 
 tiation : 
 
 " There is no being eloquent for atheism. In that exhaust- 
 ed receiver the mind can not use its wings." 
 
 Washington Irving met Sir Walter. The classical 
 American told the North Briton that Campbell was kept 
 from writing by the superior brilliancy of Byron's poetry 
 and of his, Scott's. To this Scott, free from envy as he 
 was always, replied : 
 
 "Pooh! How can Campbell mistake the matter so much? 
 Poetry goes by quality, not by quantity or bulk. My poems 
 are mere cairngorms, wrought up perhaps with a cunning hand, 
 and may pass well in the market so long as cairngorms are 
 in fashion ; but they are mere Scotch pebbles after all. Now 
 Campbell's are real diamonds, and of the first water." 
 
 Mark ever in the metaphor how the mental glow acts 
 on the connecting verb. And as the rapidity and force 
 are greater, so, better far than in the simile, the meta- 
 phor at times suits the orator, and that tone of unpre- 
 meditated earnestness which dreams not of ornamenta- 
 tion, but solely of the subject itself. There is not in all 
 the speeches of Demosthenes a single simile. S., "Cori- 
 olanus," act iv., scene v., line 3, of Aufidius's 4th speech. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 187 
 
 Metaphors are direct that is, founded on a resem- 
 blance between the things themselves ; as when you say, 
 " The ways are mountains in their height ;" or they are 
 analogical, that is, founded on the fact that the two ob- 
 jects mentioned bear resembling relations to certain 
 other objects; thus, when you say "Reason is a guiding 
 light," you proceed on the idea that reason bears a sim- 
 ilar relation to the mental world that light does to the 
 outward world. As such analogies, or analogical rela- 
 tions, are altogether innumerable, it is arithmetically im- 
 possible that true genius can ever find its materials run 
 out. Then, since the more unlike two objects are, the 
 more is the mind exhilarated with a sweet surprise by 
 the discovery made to it of a point in which these ap- 
 parently so unrelated objects do really agree, it follows 
 that analogical metaphors and similes must often give 
 more pleasure than direct ones, as when Trench, in his 
 admirable work on the " Parables," says: 
 
 " Language is the amber in which a thousand precious 
 thoughts have been safely imbedded and preserved." 
 
 No similarity between language in itself, and amber in 
 itself; but they have resembling uses, or may produce 
 resembling effects. 
 
 Holy Writ, what a storehouse of metaphors ! If it 
 were worth reading on no other account, it would be 
 well worth reading for its metaphors alone. A vast 
 treasury of the beautiful as well as of the true. Gather 
 a hundred from it, and a hundred similes from it. The 
 poet cries: 
 
 " Hide me under the shadow of Thy wings !" 
 
 Behold yon mountain-eagle ; a mother's tenderness ani- 
 mating the bird ; covering on an exposed crag its nest- 
 ling with its wings, when darkness lowers, when light- 
 nings threat. Jehovah is the Parent-eagle of the soul ; 
 the warmth of his parental wings makes this life, which 
 
1 88 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 but for him were an exposed crag, a home of love and 
 safety. Luke xxii., 19, 20. 
 
 One of the main truths in the sweet science of poesy is 
 that very much of the poetic lies in the vivid perceiving 
 of relations between the world of matter and the thoughts 
 or feelings of the mind. Hence our great bards place 
 in a scene of inward passion, or near those who are en- 
 joying great delights, or who are suffering from dark 
 sorrows, some outward object, which we feel to harmon- 
 ize with what brightens or darkens in the soul. In noth- 
 ing that you can specify do lofty genius and ideality more 
 strikingly display themselves. In Shakespeare's " Lear," 
 the lightning is made to burn, the pitiless tempest to 
 rave, around the bare, discrowned head of the king, so 
 old and so desolate. In " Paradise Lost," happy Eve is 
 bowered all around by budding and blushing roses, and 
 by each lush flower of graceful stalk, which seem as if 
 they had caught their graceful waving and their brill- 
 iancy of tint, from the elegant form and delicate blush 
 of their young May-queen. On the other hand, when 
 the first sin volcanoes out its way, Milton tells us, with 
 the deepest poetic truth : 
 
 " Sky lowered ; and, muttering thunder, some sad drops 
 Wept at completing of the mortal sin.' 5 
 
 Sir Walter Scott places the wild enthusiast, Balfour of 
 Burley, in a gloomy cave, amid overhanging crags, and 
 over the bed of a river, dark in its rushing, and tortured 
 among pitiless rocks. When in the same wondrous nov- 
 el, " Old Mortality," Morton is doomed to death by an 
 extreme sect of the Covenanters, they place him be- 
 fore a clock, to watch the approach of its hands to the 
 fatal minute fixed for his death ; and the light tick of 
 the clock thrills on his ear, with such painful distinctness 
 as if each sound were the prick of a bodkin on the naked 
 nerve of the organ of hearing. On the same great prin- 
 ciple that there is an analogy between the outward and 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 189 
 
 the mental, in the delightful old ballads, when two lov- 
 ers are buried near each other, the following lovely mir- 
 acle occurs: 
 
 " Lord William was buried in Marie's kirk, 
 
 Lady Margaret in Marie's quire; 
 From the ladie's grave grew a red, red rose, 
 
 And out o' the knicht's a brier. 
 And they twa met, and they twa plat, 
 
 Sae fain they wud be near ; 
 And a' the warld micht ken richt weel, 
 
 They were twa lovers dear." 
 
 But our field of vision changes; we open the " Samson 
 Agonistes" of Milton : a drama sternly plain, as if hewn 
 in Parian marble, worthy of ^Eschylus, him earlier than 
 Sophocles and Euripides, the other two great tragedians 
 of Greece. The " Samson " is moulded very much on 
 the Greek model ; breathes the very tone of the Greek 
 genius ; yet, very singular to say, is full-fra,ught with the 
 Hebrew spirit of worship, contrition, and the prophetic; 
 as though we heard the harp of Isaiah struck on a hill- 
 side of Arcady : a blending of the classical and the ador- 
 ing, which who hath attained so greatly as Milton. John 
 Milton is the unsurpassed ; the great Puritan and repub- 
 lican poet, of whom Wordsworth said, in a line that is a 
 proverb : 
 
 " His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." 
 
 In his youth he was so fair and beautiful as to be called 
 the Lady of his college. Latin secretary to Oliver Crom- 
 well, after the restoration of Charles II. he lived in close 
 retirement, hated by the party in power; Samuel John- 
 son, a hundred years after, detested him. As he grew 
 older, he entirely lost his sight ; to his daughters was 
 dictated the " Paradise Lost," incomparably the world's 
 most sublime poem. Hear two verdicts on him. Said 
 Waller the poet: 
 
190 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 "The old blind schoolmaster, John Milton, hath published 
 a tedious poem on the fall of man; if its length be not consid- 
 ered as merit, it hath no other." 
 
 Next let Dryden decide, referring to Homer and Virgil ; 
 but Dryden's greater third was Milton: 
 
 " Two poets in two distant ages born 
 Did famous Greece and Italy adorn: 
 Nature exhausted could no farther go; 
 To make a third, she joined the other two." 
 
 Metaphor supplies us with abundant proof that to 
 write well we need to fill our minds with facts. Thus 
 Bancroft, in his "History of the United States" elo- 
 quent, impartial, but deficient in graceful ease is helped 
 by his botanical knowledge to a good metaphor: 
 
 " Style is the gossamer on which the seeds of truth float 
 through the world." 
 
 Mark how science here ministers to poesy; as does a 
 sympathetic familiarity with, not the hollow shams, but 
 the stern realities, of human life. So Gray, looking on 
 schoolboys at their sports, prognosticates the fierce pas- 
 sions that shall tear many of them when they grow to be 
 men : 
 
 " These shall the fury passions tear 
 The vultures of the mind." 
 
 Surface views of man and his career, which ignore his 
 depth of guilt, his intense miseries, may seem poetic; 
 and may perchance accord best with the tinkling of a 
 lady's guitar; but wherewithal shall be fed those crises 
 of the Tragic without which the genuine poesy can not 
 live ? The dread Bible pictures of man, with their abys- 
 mal glooms and their heaven-piercing heights their in- 
 ward hells and heavens will, strange to say, suggest ten 
 thousand metaphors, and of a far nobler sort, for one 
 suggested by those ideas of man which ascribe to him, 
 as his destiny, a voluptuary's opium-dream or a trifler's 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 1 9 1 
 
 "butterfly flight. Nothing so poetical, romantic, and epic 
 as is the severely true. 
 
 For a minute let us seek relief in a few metaphors 
 very brief and sparkling. From Douglas Jerrold these: 
 
 " Contentment is the poor man's bank." 
 
 " In the wedding-cake, Hope is the sweetest of the plums." 
 
 " Military glory is a bubble blown from blood." 
 
 Of a very tall gentleman dancing with a very dumpy 
 lady: 
 
 " There's the mile dancing with the mile-stone." 
 Washington Irving gives this : 
 
 " A scolding woman's tongue is the only edge-tool that grows 
 sharper by constant use." 
 
 Roundell Palmer, in his choice selection of hymns, 
 " The Book of Praise," terms the sacred paintings of the 
 early painters 
 
 "The hymns of painters addressed to the sense of sight." 
 
 Alexander Smith has equaled Tennyson in finish, in 
 delicacy of touch, in pellucid clearness, as witness his 
 admirable tale, " Deira." Of the clouds, he says: 
 
 "The changing clouds, 
 The playful fancies of the mighty sky." 
 
 And again 
 
 "I've learned to prize the quiet lightning deed; 
 Not the applauding thunder at its heels, 
 Which men call fame." 
 
 Of an infant he thus writes : 
 
 " O thou bright thing, fresh from the hand of God ! 
 The motions of thy dancing limbs are swayed 
 By the unceasing music of thy being ! 
 Nearer I seem to God when looking on thee. 
 
192 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 'Tis ages since he made his youngest star 
 His hand was on thee as 'twere yesterday 
 Thou later revelation ! Silver stream 
 Breaking with laughter from the Lake Divine, 
 Whence all things flow." 
 
 From Byron is this, of man : 
 
 " Thou pendulum between a smile and tear." 
 
 Let this quotation cause us to follow Mr. Trelawney 
 to a pitying visit to Byron's corpse, as he lies dead at 
 Missolonghi, in the noble cause of Greek Independence. 
 Byron was then at the early age of thirty-seven : 
 
 " No one was in the house but Fletcher, who withdrew the 
 black pall and the white shroud; and there lay the embalmed 
 body of the pilgrim more beautiful even in death than in life. 
 The contraction of the skin and muscles had effaced every line 
 traced by time or passion; few marble busts could have matched 
 its stainless white, the harmony of its proportions, and its per- 
 fect finish. Yet he had been dissatisfied with that body, and 
 longed to cast its slough. How often have I heard him curse 
 it. I asked Fletcher to bring me a glass of water; and on his 
 leaving the room, to confirm or remove my doubts as to the 
 cause of his lameness, I uncovered the pilgrim's feet, and was 
 answered both his feet were clubbed, and the legs withered 
 to the knee : the form and face of an Apollo, with the feet and 
 legs of a sylvan satyr." 
 
 Well may the sad name of Byron bring to mind the 
 great line of Campbell which Sir Walter called " the 
 most beautiful and original simile " (he should have said, 
 metaphor) " which we have yet found applied to a theme 
 so often sung:" 
 
 " In the fond visions of romantic youth 
 
 What years of endless bliss are yet to flow; 
 But, Mortal Pleasure, what art thou in truth ? 
 The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below." 
 
 When Campbell was a student at Glasgow University, 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 193 
 
 of which he afterward was chosen Lord Rector, there 
 stood next door to each other on the street he passed 
 along in going to his classes, the store of A. Fyfe, an au- 
 rist, and of a Mr. Drum, a seller of ardent spirits. Camp- 
 bell and some other students took down the sign-boards 
 of the two neighbors during a dark night, and put up in 
 their stead a board on which they had painted the well- 
 known line from Shakespeare : 
 
 " The spirit-stirring Drum, the ear-piercing Fyfe." 
 
 Sir Thomas Browne, a learned physician and very 
 quaint writer, is justly renowned through the potency 
 of a single metaphor: 
 
 "Light that makes things seen, makes some things invisible. 
 Were it not for darkness and the shadow of the earth, the 
 noblest part of creation had remained unseen, and the stars in 
 heaven invisible. The greatest mystery of religion is expressed 
 by adumbration; and in the noblest parts of Jewish types we 
 find the cherubim shadowing the mercy-seat. The sun itself is 
 but the dark simulacrum and light is but the shadow of God." 
 
 Connected with our subject, which by this time you 
 feel to be no trivial one, is Henry T. Tuckerman's theme, 
 the Poetical Principle : 
 
 " It is the breeze that lifts the weeds on the highway of time, 
 and brings to view the violets beneath. It is the holy water 
 which, sprinkled on the Mosaic pavement of life, makes vivid 
 its brilliant tints. It is the mystic harp upon whose strings 
 the confused murmur of toil, gladness, and grief loses itself in 
 music. But it performs a yet higher function than that of con- 
 solation. It is through the poetical principle that we form im- 
 ages of excellence, a notion of progress, that quickens every 
 other faculty to rich endeavor." 
 
 As in this work we must perforce deal so much in bits 
 and scintillations, we quote from Hudson's very able 
 " Lectures on Shakespeare " a necessary caution : 
 
 " I agree with old Montaigne that every abridgment of a good 
 
 N 
 
194 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 work is foolish. For a genuine literary work is not a collection 
 of wheat and chaff, to be winnowed before it is fit for use, but a 
 living tree, covered with leaves and buds and blossoms; cut it 
 up for its beauties, and all is but chips. Or, to vary the figure, 
 such a work is not a mere articulation of parts, dovetailed to- 
 gether grossly or closely, according to the dullness or ingenuity 
 of the artisan, but an organic growth like the human form, shap- 
 ing and fashioning itself out into an individual whole ; and it is 
 the breathing harmony, the eloquent physiognomy of the whole, 
 that forms its beauty and its worth. Selecting beauties from 
 such a work is as foolish and almost as wicked as plucking out 
 a lady's eye, and showing it to us that we may the better appre- 
 ciate her beaut^. If the lady were no lady at all, but merely 
 an automaton with glass eyes, all this might be well enough, 
 for in that case there would be no life or expression to be lost; 
 but as it is, the very life and living grace which made the di- 
 vine beauty of this soul-speaking organ has been destroyed by 
 the separation." 
 
 To appreciate good metaphors we need to look at a 
 few bad ones. Saith Addison, whose own Spectator, No. 
 595, is law on this subject : 
 
 "I bridle in my struggling Muse with pain, 
 That longs to launch into a bolder strain." 
 
 It is a wise rule, in regard to this and to many an- 
 other figure, never to mix or jumble together two that 
 are discordant. Yet his Muse is a lady and a goddess. 
 Addison, however, speaks of having bridled her atro- 
 cious unpoliteness. It will not do to tell us that it is Peg- 
 asus he was thinking of; for Pegasus nor any other horse 
 was one of the nine Muses. But, not content with re- 
 garding his goddess as a horse, he instantly views her as 
 a ship that longs to launch itself, and, of all places in the 
 world, into a strain a horse that longs to break out a 
 singing ! which inclination to break out a singing is to 
 be kept in check by a bridle. Yet Addison himself has 
 given us an excellent test to try metaphors by : 
 
 " Try and form a picture on them." 
 
Figiires of Rhetoric. 195 
 
 If the parts, when pictured out by a painter, be incon- 
 gruous, put your metaphor in the fire ; lest there should 
 stand before you a goddess, horse, and ship, all in one. 
 We betake ourselves to Robert Montgomery : 
 
 " And shall the soul, the fount of reason, die, 
 When dust and ashes round its temple lie?" 
 Did God breathe in it no etherial fire, 
 Dimless and quenchless, though the breath expire ? 
 
 He asks whether a fountain can die. One would think 
 he need be in no great anxiety on that account. Then 
 what can he mean by the temple of a fountain ? And 
 how can fire be breathed into a fountain ? Besides, what 
 may the breath of a fountain be ? 
 
 The idolatry of conceits infected much of English lit- 
 erature from Surrey to Dryden's middle age. John 
 Lyly, " the Euphuist," being its high-priest, though the 
 style by no means originated with him, but is traceable 
 to an Italian influence. Lyly's work, " Euphues, or the 
 Anatomy of Wit," was published, the first part in 1579, 
 the second part in 1580, and went through ten editions 
 in fifty-six years. It is a novel in prose. The hero, 
 Euphues, is an Athenian youth. It is a wiser produc- 
 tion than is generally conceived ; but its cumbrous affec- 
 tations in style, and its lack of an interesting plot, have 
 sunk it in oblivion. Well said Ben Jonson in his " Dis- 
 coveries," which is the earliest exposition in English of 
 the principles of sound writing: 
 
 " Nothing is lasting that is feigned;" 
 
 precisely what this book in your hands sets forth from 
 beginning to end. Nay, Lyly himself, in the dedication 
 to his work, attacks those Englishmen 
 
 " Who desire to hear finer speech than the language will al- 
 low; to eat finer bread than is made of wheat; or wear finer 
 cloth than is made of wool." 
 
196 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 The rapidity and condensation of the metaphor are 
 illustrated in the clergyman's remark, who, having been 
 once addicted to bawling in the pulpit, had at last made 
 the discovery that the low tones are the most effect- 
 ual: 
 
 " I once thought it was the thunder that killed, and now know 
 it is the lightning that does the execution. I mean to thunder 
 less and lighten more." 
 
 Sir Archibald Alison, the historian of modern Europe, 
 leads us back to false metaphors once more. Of the 
 allied sovereigns, when first they caught sight of Paris in 
 1814, he asserts that 
 
 " They inhaled the entrancing spectacle." 
 Of the intrigues in Napoleon's favor at Elba : 
 
 " The inferior officers and the soldiers of the army were, in 
 an especial manner, the seat of this conspiracy." 
 
 And again : 
 
 " He did not establish a throne surrounded by republican in- 
 stitutions, but a republic surrounded by the ghost of monarch- 
 ical institutions." 
 
 As when the brave Irishman led his three captives into 
 his general's presence : 
 
 " How did you take them ?" said his general. " Faix, I sur- 
 rounded them." 
 
 How to surround a republic by a ghost is a problem that 
 would have puzzled Euclid. Besides, here are many in- 
 stitutions that have but one ghost among them a small 
 slice of a ghost to each. 
 
 Yet be this caution inserted, else criticism will be a 
 ruthless scalping-knife : When a figurative expression has 
 been current so long as to have lost its figurative char- 
 acter, we must not urge too far the 4< catch-thief" cry of 
 
Figures of Rhetoric.' 197 
 
 "mixed metaphor!" Shakespeare's expression is much 
 found fault with 
 
 " To take arms against a sea of troubles." 
 
 But not one only, but both sides of the phrase have lost 
 the figurative sense ; it is no more than " to contend 
 against innumerable troubles." There are thus three 
 kinds of expressions : many wavering between the figu- 
 rative and the literal ; many whose figurative character 
 is worn wholly off; many decidedly figurative. The 
 critic must not, in too tiger-like a style, tear a defenseless 
 metaphor to pieces. Yet it is better to lean to virtue's 
 side : never be thine a far-fetched ornament ; be your 
 metaphors founded on a resemblance that is clear and 
 striking when once pointed out ; never join metaphor 
 and plain language in such a way that part of your state- 
 ment must be understood metaphorically and part liter- 
 ally; never dwell long on a metaphor; never condescend 
 to any that is threadbare by long use; their charm is 
 rapidity, freshness, surprise ; all of which you feel in this 
 from Jeremy Taylor, in a funeral sermon : 
 
 " Her heart was a passion-flower, bearing within it the crown 
 of thorns and the cross of Christ." 
 
 And for our teachers in the pulpit is this special passage 
 from Dr. Guthrie : 
 
 " How difficult would it be to name a noble figure, a sweet 
 simile, a tender or attractive relationship, in which Jesus is not 
 set forth to woo the reluctant sinner and cheer the desponding 
 saint. Am I wounded ? He is balm. Am I sick ? He is med- 
 icine. Am I poor ? He is wealth ? Am I hungry ? He is bread. 
 Am I in debt ? He is a surety. Am I thirsty ? He is water. 
 Am I in darkness ? He is a sun. Have I a house to build ? He 
 is a rock. Must I face the black and gathering storm ? He is 
 an anchor, sure and steadfast. Am I to be tried? He is an 
 advocate. Is sentence passed and am I condemned? He is 
 pardon. To deck him out and set him forth, Nature culls her 
 
198 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 finest flowers, brings her choicest ornaments, and lays her treas- 
 ures at his feet." 
 
 This being so, no excuse for a dry sermon. O yes ! as 
 much excuse as for not being at pains enough to read the 
 Bible well ; the volume, intensely eloquent', which sup- 
 plies matter for the noblest elocution ; but which we lay- 
 men are shall we say seldom condemned to hear read 
 with such slovenly carelessness that even the very words 
 are blundered; and so, when we hear it read with heav- 
 en-born reverence, and with emphasis deep as a*whisper 
 of thunder, or gently light as evening's last sigh, we look 
 up in astonishment from our pews, wondering who this 
 man can be who has been Christ-taught to read it, as 
 suits its Author, its Hero, its Wielder, its truthfulness, 
 its passion, its calmness, and its theme. 
 
 By the time this page has been reached, every reader 
 feels the vast importance of our subject. Think of the 
 great historical words : 
 
 "This is my body." 
 
 Ah, the tens of thousands slaughtered for transubstan- 
 tiation ! According to Protestantism and the laws of 
 metaphor, "this" is literal; "body" is literal; "is" 
 stands for " represents" a sense emphatically given, 
 which it has, thousands of times. According to the 
 priests, "this" is literal; "body" is literal; "is" stands 
 for " is changed into " a sense it never has. Which of 
 the two parties is the more literal? Our subject holds 
 within it such . truths, laws, applications, as would, by- 
 God's blessing, have saved to the earth much of the 
 most precious blood ; and tortures so dire in their cru- 
 elty, so cowardly in the circumstances of their infliction, 
 that at the recollection of them History blushes. Is our 
 subject trivial, then ? Degraded so long by tame, shal- 
 low, thoroughly unphilosophical handling ! 
 
 Permit us to cool our indignation by launching for 
 
Figures of .Rhetoric. 199 
 
 a moment, like Addison's Muse and horse, into " a 
 strain;" one of our own: 
 
 Moveless for ages, see vast Erie lying : 
 
 At length, from forth its rock-bound bed, the lake 
 
 Bours, with a high outbreak. 
 In terror from its rush see thousands flying ! 
 Christ Grace, Love, Life, and Light, not crushing awe 
 
 Is God's Niagara ! 
 
 We now lay before you Professor Lowell's anathema 
 of old John Gower, Chaucer's contemporary. In this 
 passage are several good specimens of both metaphor 
 and simile : 
 
 " Gower has positively raised tediousness to the precision of 
 a science; he has made dullness an heir-loom for the students 
 of our literary history. As you slip to and fro on the frozen 
 levels of his verse, which give no foothold to the mind; as your 
 nervous ear awaits the inevitable recurrence of his rhyme, reg- 
 ularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day clock, and re- 
 minding you of Wordsworth's 
 
 ' Once more the ass did lengthen out 
 The hard, dry see-saw of his horrible bray,' 
 
 you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this inde- 
 fatigable man. He is the Undertaker of the fair mediaeval le- 
 gend; and his style has the hateful gloss, the seemingly un- 
 natural length, of a coffin. Love, beauty, passion, nature, art, 
 life, the natural and the theological virtues there is nothing 
 beyond his power to disenchant ; nothing out of which the tre- 
 mendous hydraulic press of his allegory (or whatever it is, for 
 I am not sure if it is not something even worse) will not squeeze 
 all feeling and freshness, and leave it a juiceless jelly. It mat- 
 ters not where you try him, whether his story be Christian or 
 pagan, borrowed from history or fable, you can not escape him. 
 Dip in at the middle or the end, dodge back to the beginning, 
 the patient old man is there, to take you by the button and go 
 on with his imperturbable narrative. You may have left off 
 with ' Clytemnestra,' and you may begin again with ' Samson' 
 it makes no odds, for you can not tell one from t'other." 
 
2OO Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 But while you flee for your life from John the Idea- 
 less, you will find in Carlyle's " French Revolution," or 
 in the writings of Thomas Fuller, figures all fresh, and 
 flashing by the hundred ; while the wit and whimsicality 
 of Fuller will tickle you to your heart's content. Or for 
 a lofty delight, hasten to Burke, " the supreme writer of 
 his century," as De Quincey has well said of him. Mark 
 in the following what excellent use Fuller makes of one 
 of the homeliest of facts: 
 
 " To use force before people are fairly taught the truth, is to 
 knock a nail into a board without wimbling a hole in it, which 
 then either not enters, or turns crooked, or splits the wood it 
 pierceth." 
 
 What a pity and shame that such a writer is so little 
 read ! 
 
 We close our discussion of the metaphor with " The 
 Three Mourners/' translated by us from the German of 
 Chamisso, and never presented in English before. In 
 this translation we claim the whole of the metaphor in 
 line eighteenth 
 
 " A thunder-bolt borne on a thunder-cloud ;" 
 
 and we have expunged the coarse sneer in the original, 
 which represents the widow as mourning only three 
 weeks " drey wochen :" 
 
 " From vale and from mountain bursts the cry 
 * To arms ! to arms ! the invader is nigh !' 
 See hastily riding, from near and far, 
 Our choicest youth to Freedom's war. 
 Severe the hour and dark with fate ; 
 Full many a home left desolate. 
 ' Stern war ! Thou takest each dearest one, 
 My blooming bridegroom; my brother; my son 1' 
 Woman's hand fits out for battle's rough bed: 
 The bride puts the helm on her lover's head; 
 Sister brings the black steed he loves so well ; 
 Mother opens the gate, and weeps ' Farewell !' 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 201 
 
 'My bridegroom ! my brother! my son! again 
 When comest thou back ? Quick ! Tell us when !' 
 ' When air and water and land are free 
 From invasion's taint, I'm again with thee.' 
 They are off, with a cheer, and a neighing loud 
 A thunder-bolt borne on a thunder-cloud. 
 
 "'The time is long; far away the camp; 
 But we listen each night for his war-steed's tramp. 
 Day drags after day. Night's dark and dreary; 
 No horseman returns. We're weary, weary !' 
 At last 'tis a horse, with a rapid tread ; 
 No horseman there the bridle is red. 
 They crowd around him ; the blood-marks see 
 * Why com'st thou alone ? He where is he ? 
 Hast thou left him bleeding, untended, alone ? 
 Give me back my bridegroom ; my brother ; my son ! 
 They have slain my hero ! O steed accursed, 
 Why left ye him dying, in blood and thirst ?' 
 The steed seemed to answer, the lightning-eyed, 
 1 I've brought you his message !' Then reeled and died. 
 
 " To the gory field have hastened the three, 
 To seek the lone mound where their loved one may be. 
 They sat them down by that bloody bed : 
 At the feet, at the side, and one at the head. 
 At the head the mother; and at the side 
 The sister dear; at the feet the bride. 
 ' O woe ! O woe ! Broken-hearted here, 
 Who knows our bitterness, loneliness, fear ? 
 Yet we willingly gave him to God's great strife, 
 For a threatened homestead, a nation's life. 
 Yet we're but women ! Life's light hath fled ! 
 Our only joy, to bemoan the dead.' 
 
 " The bride and the sister wept long and sore ; 
 But the years went by they wept no more. 
 But lifelong tears mother's love supplied, 
 Till she slept in his grave by her young hero's side." 
 
2O2 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 
 PART FOURTH. 
 Metonymy. Synecdoche. Metalcpsis. 
 
 XXXVII. THE class of figures now to be considered 
 is Metonymy : a title that comes from two Greek words, 
 which, with Athenian precision, mean " a change of name 
 or noun." That is, metonymy lies always in a noun, 
 never in an adjective or in a verb. Mark that point. 
 Moli&re, the great French comedian, tells of one who, 
 taking to grammar late in life, was amazed to find that 
 he had all his life been using substantives, adverbs, and 
 such like, without his knowing of it. Many a capital 
 metonymy have you produced in your day without ever 
 dreaming of it. 
 
 Metonymies are not founded on resemblances, as sim- 
 iles and metaphors, the sisters, are ; but on such intimate 
 relations as those thirty-four which we shall now specify, 
 each whereof is a figure. How many more they are ! for 
 each has its twin. The close study of this figure is fitted 
 to give deep insight into the delicacy of language, that 
 exhaustless marvel, and proof of man's God-birth. Va- 
 riety is what calls attention; and sylph-like elegance. - 
 Nothing more etherial can be thought of. 
 
 I. A noun that expresses the cause is put for a noun 
 that expresses the effect. In one of Goldsmith's poems, 
 " The Deserted Village," is this : 
 
 " There was a time, ere England's griefs began, 
 When every rood of ground maintained its man." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 203 
 
 " Ground," the cause, is put for the produce of the 
 ground. Nobody uses the ground for food. " You write 
 a bad hand," says teacher to pupil ; " hand," the cause, 
 being put for " writing." When Keats, in his rich " Lines 
 to the Nightingale," cries, in his creamy, mellifluous 
 style 
 
 " O for a beaker full of the warm South !" 
 
 " South " stands for the wine mellowed there. 
 
 We obtain from his excellent poem, " Prince Adeb," 
 this from George Henry Boker, where he uses " sum- 
 mer" for the flowers that are the effect and bloom of 
 summer: 
 
 " Mossy floors 
 Flower'd with the silken summer of Shiraz." 
 
 You say, " I have read Prescott and Thierry ; I have 
 read Froude, I have read Freeman:" you mean their 
 noble histories, which the sooner you read the better. 
 We have prescribed for you a very little of Edmund 
 Spenser say ten lines a day. In the following are two 
 fine metonymies, in " Old Decay" and in " Darkness;" 
 which aid us much in detecting the source of the de- 
 light given us by this variety the wide, dreamy vague- 
 ness that lies in the cause. It is the Cave of Mammon : 
 
 " Both roof and floor and walls were all of gold, 
 But overgrown with dust and Old Decay ; 
 And hid in darkness, that none could behold 
 The hue thereof, for view of cheerful day 
 Did never in that house itself display. 
 But a faint shadow of uncertain light, 
 Such as a lamp whose life doth fade away; 
 Or as the moon, clothed with cloudy night, 
 Does show to him that walks in fear and sad affright." 
 
 Tennyson we turn to. Would he did not refine and 
 polish quite so much, till the bow is becoming so much 
 
204 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 ornamented away as to lose its rough and oaken strength. 
 But here is a choice metonymy : 
 
 " And like a flower that can not all unfold, 
 So drenched it is with tempest." 
 
 Or a princess is seen 
 
 " Robed in the long night of her deep hair." \ 
 
 " Night/' the cause of darkness, is put for darkness, the 
 effect ; " tempest " is put for rain. A feeling of vague 
 width is on us : far larger than a single sharply defined 
 effect. This half baffles, half pleases the mind, which 
 roams forth untrammeled in a hazy dream-land peopled 
 with wonders. Jeremy Taylor is rich in a usage akin to 
 this, as when he tells us that 
 
 " The rose began to put on darkness " 
 or Spenser speaks of Una in her white innocence : 
 
 " She, of naught afraid, 
 Through woods and wasteness wide him daily sought." 
 
 See her wandering, almost without hope of end, like the 
 white and stainless moon, through limitless mists and 
 far Sahara-stretches of midnight. Very choice, too, the 
 following from Aaron Hill, both in expression and in 
 sentiment : 
 
 " Hide not thy tears : weep boldly, and be proud 
 To give the flowing virtue manly way 
 Tis Nature's mark to know an honest heart by. 
 Shame on those breasts of stone that can not melt 
 In soft adoption of another's sorrow." 
 
 2. In a way precisely the converse of that just men- 
 tioned, the noun proper to the effect is used to express 
 the cause. The Rev. James Harvey, author of " Medi- 
 tations in a Flower Garden," remarkable for its florid 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 205 
 
 style, and of "Theron and Aspasia," a very able work 
 on the side of stalwart Calvinism, has this line : 
 
 " Swift as an arrow flies the leaden death." 
 
 " Death," the effect of the bullet, is put for the bullet 
 itself. When Junius, with his too usual sneer, asks: 
 
 " Can gray hairs make folly venerable ?" 
 
 " gray hairs," the effect of old age, stands for old age. 
 The advantage of this is evident. Some one graphic 
 effect can be singled out ; the cause can thus be pictured 
 to our eyes by its most picturesque result. See 2 Kings 
 iv., 40, where " death," the effect, is named for the poi- 
 sonous gourds, the cause. Oratory can make a deep im- 
 pression in this way. Passion naturally fixes on the 
 dreaded or on the desired consequence. Thus Thom- 
 son, in his description of a spring shower: 
 
 " 'Tis silence all 
 
 And pleasing expectation. Herds and flocks 
 Drop the dry sprig; and, mute-imploring, eye 
 The falling verdure." 
 
 Or in his justly celebrated " Hymn on the Seasons," 
 he says of God : 
 
 "He 
 Flings from the sun direct the flaming day." 
 
 " Day," the effect, is used for light, the cause. So, by 
 Sir Walter, in his great novel, the " Antiquary," which 
 you really must read. " The deep voice " for Time, the 
 utterer or cause the deep voice, unembodied thing, 
 that hovers in mystic evanescence around us : 
 
 "'Know'st thou not me?' the Deep Voice cried; 
 
 1 So long enjoy'd, so oft misus'd ; 
 Alternate, in thy fickle pride, 
 
 Desired, neglected, and accused.' " 
 
 See Gen. xxxi., 53 ; Rev. i., 12. 
 
206 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 So " Henry VIII.," act iii., scene ii., Surrey brands 
 Wolsey thus : 
 
 "Thou scarlet sin." 
 
 But how unworthy of the heart and of the reason the 
 too common metonymy of Nature, the effect, for God, 
 the cause : as if it were a burden to name our Father or 
 to own a Personal Deity, without whom man were an 
 orphan. Wisely, Lamarck, the great botanist and geo- 
 logian : 
 
 "Nature is an order of things constituted by the Supreme, 
 and subject to laws which are the expression of his will." 
 
 Lyell's " Principles of Geology " is a work of merit. 
 In the first edition was this sentence : 
 
 "Our admiration is strongly excited when we contemplate 
 the powers of insect life, in the creation of which Nature has 
 been so prodigal." 
 
 In the later editions the cold term " Nature " is altered 
 into the phrase, " the Author of Nature :" more philo- 
 sophic far ; for the laws of Nature, geometric to the core, 
 bear the deepest, most pervading impress of a Thinker ; 
 as do the arrangements of the solar system ; for exam- 
 ple, in Bode's law. 
 
 It is time to point, in the most definite manner, to a 
 very singular fact in language, particularly manifest in 
 metonymies : that if, by one mode, fine effects are pro- 
 duced, fine effects will also be produced by exactly the 
 contrasted mode, as witness No. I and No. 2, P. L., ii., 704. 
 
 3. A noun denoting the place is used for a noun de- 
 noting the inhabitant. In a rugged ballad by the Ital- 
 ian shoemaker, Fantini, written in 1860, on King Victor 
 Emanuel, " house" is for family or dynasty: 
 
 " They'll keep to-day in the happy future j 
 
 'Twill be a holiday set apart; 
 For then as now the House of Savoy 
 Will wear us all in its royal heart." 
 
 Matt, x., 11-13; Isa. x., 5. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 207 
 
 In Parnell's best poem, " The Hermit," we find " world " 
 for inhabitants of the world : 
 
 " At length the world, renewed by calm repose, 
 Was strong for toil;, the dappled morn arose." 
 
 So we speak of Heaven smiling on us ; of America 
 disgraced by shameless peculators ; of Europe precipi- 
 tating itself on Asia in the Crusades. Resemblance is 
 not in the least the ground of such metonymies : some- 
 thing real must be that basis. It is the ground of resi- 
 dence, so dear and permanent the charm of fatherland. 
 
 4. The badge is used for that of which it is the sym- 
 bol. We speak of the sword and the gown. James 
 Shirley, the dramatist, gives us this : 
 
 " The glories of our birth and state 
 Are shadows not substantial things; 
 There is no armor against fate, 
 Death lays his icy hand .on kings. 
 Sceptre and crown must tumble down, 
 And in the dust be equal made 
 With the poor crooked scythe and spade." 
 
 Using this kind of metonymy, George Canning, the 
 English statesman, after hearing Chalmers "preach, cried : 
 
 " The tartan beats us ! We have no preaching like that in 
 England." 
 
 Mrs. Hemans says of Bernardo del Carpio : 
 " His banner led the spears no more amid the hills of Spain." 
 
 Ruskin, the most eloquent, deploring the time in a 
 prosperous nation that forgets God in its prosperity, 
 makes mention of 
 
 " The noise of jesting words and the foulness of dark 
 thoughts, which succeed to the earnest purity of the girded 
 loins and the burning lamp." 
 
 It is scarcely too much to affirm that this one variety 
 
208 Might and Mirth of Liter at^cre t 
 
 of this one class of figures deserves a long volume to 
 itself, and would disclose a whole realm wealthy in many 
 kinds of beauty. I Kings xii., 10-14. 
 
 In Douglas Jerrold's hands, how energetic the lan- 
 guage becomes by using it, merely by signifying " re- 
 spect" by its emblem, "a bow:" 
 
 " A man who is not able to make a bow to his conscience 
 every morning, is not in a healthful condition." 
 
 In the subjoined, from Tennyson mark how mono- 
 syllabic his language with what trim neatness and 
 classic polish he utters his idea; and with what thrice 
 delicate touches he thinks out his thought. Flower, 
 snow, shadow emblematize summer, winter, death : 
 
 "The path by which we twain did go, 
 
 Which led by tracts that pleased us well, 
 Through four sweet years arose and fell, 
 From flower to flower, from snow to snow. 
 
 " But where the path we walked began 
 To slant the fifth autumnal slope, 
 As we descended, following Hope, 
 There sat the Shadow feard of man." 
 
 In these lines, from one of Toplady's many beautiful 
 hymns, how appropriately the manger is used as the 
 badge of humility: 
 
 "Let thy Cross my will control; 
 
 Conform me to my Guide; 
 In the manger lay my soul, 
 And crucify my pride." 
 
 5. A noun proper to an attribute is used to denote 
 the subject to which the quality belongs : that is, an ab- 
 stract is used for a concrete. How often there is reason 
 to cry : " There goes down Broadway a sleighful of youth 
 and health;" the abstract qualities, youth and health, 
 meaning the young and healthful. Shenstone skillfully 
 succeeds, with the word Tenderness: 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. . 209 
 
 " I have found out a gift for my fair : 
 
 I have found where the wood-pigeons breed; 
 But let me the plunder forbear 
 
 She would say 'twas a barbarous deed. 
 For he ne'er could be true, she averred, 
 
 Who could rob a poor bird of its young: 
 And I loved her the more when I heard 
 
 Such tenderness fall from her tongue." 
 
 Of this variety, where the name of a quality desig- 
 nates that to which the quality belongs, we have an in- 
 stance when the name of a color denotes the robes that 
 are colored. Can that be done ? Exquisitely, by Giles 
 Fletcher; who hopes for mercy through being wrapped 
 in the robes of Christ, dyed purple with atoning blood:. 
 
 " O in thy purple wrapt, receive me, Lord !' ; 
 
 What a happy allusion, too, to Christ as a mighty King, 
 clothed in the purple of state ! In S., " Lear," act i., 
 scene i., the 2d speech qf Lear, line 5, "strengths" af- 
 fords a choice instance of the attribute as the denomina- 
 tion of those who possess it. Sir Robert Grant writes: 
 
 " By the sacred griefs that wept 
 O'er the grave where Lazarus slept." 
 
 6. Mark carefully the opposite of No. 5 the subject 
 for the quality or qualities contained in it : that is, the 
 concrete for the abstract. Metonymies are golden coins, 
 of the most elegant mintage, with two faces. Thus, in 
 a discussion whether a Presbytery should sanction a 
 split in a certain congregation, and the erection of a new 
 church Edifice, Dr. Lyman Beecher decided in these 
 words : 
 
 "Sanction the split: Adam and grace together will do twice 
 as much as grace alone." 
 
 By Adam he designated that love of strife, that spirit of 
 rivalry and faction, by no means unknown in congrega- 
 
 O 
 
2io Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 tions of Adam's children. Dangerous work to build 
 churches by the hands of the devil as mason. 
 
 7. The container for the object contained ; that object 
 not being a quality or abstract, but itself a concrete or 
 object that has qualities. This therefore is not the same 
 as No. 6. See Luke xx., n, 20. " Your purse or your 
 life," shouts the highwayman. Not with your purse, the 
 container, is he enamored he loves the dollars in it ; 
 metonymy comes as natural to him as his pistols. Vir- 
 gil, in his " Georgics," speaks of the Falernian cellars, 
 meaning the wine in them. Lord Lyttleton, in lines on 
 a departed friend, uses " breast " for the spirit who ani- 
 mated it : 
 
 " O candid truth, O faith without a stain, 
 O manners gently fair, and nobly plain ; 
 O sympathizing love of other's bliss ; 
 Where will you find another breast like his." 
 
 8. If every metonymy or change of noun has its con- 
 verse, we may expect to find the name of the contained 
 put for the container. Ponder the question whereto 
 Charles Lamb made rejoinder. He was returning to 
 London in a stage-coach after dinner, feeling very ro- 
 tund, when a person thrust his head in at the coach door, 
 and asked : 
 
 " Are you full inside ?" 
 
 Lamb pretended to take the query to himself, and re- 
 plied : 
 
 "I am, for one; that last slice of plum-pudding did my busi- 
 ness." 
 
 Mark the metonymy in the query, " Are you full ?" where 
 by you, 'the contained in the coach, was meant the coach, 
 the container. 
 
 9. We dwell thus long on this figure for the very rea- 
 son of its minute details. To have any full appreciation 
 of how delicate an instrument language is, needful is it 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 211 
 
 to study its most refined niceties. The name of the 
 giver or producer is used for the thing given or produced; 
 when we speak of a glass of Madeira, Madeira, the name 
 of the island producing a certain sort of wine, is used as 
 a name for the wine. Sydney Smith was dining with a 
 rich merchant ; the host remembered his having Constan- 
 tia, a wine from -the Cape of Good Hope, in his cellar, so 
 he sent for one bottle of it. They grew clamorous for an- 
 other bottle, but the entertainer refused them a second : 
 
 " Well," quoth the wit, " since we can not double the Cape, 
 we must e'en go back to Madeira." 
 
 10. On the contrary, as usual ; the name of the product 
 stands for the producer: as in that wondrously delicate 
 passage in " Paradise Lost," v., 349 odors for the flowers 
 that breathed them forth : 
 
 " She strews the ground 
 With rose; and odors from the shrub unfumed." 
 
 That is, without the application of fire or the emission 
 of smoke. See P. L., vi., 216. 
 
 11. The voice or sound is used for the speaker, or ob- 
 ject producing the sound, with an effect striking almost 
 to paradox; as in Rev. i., 12: 
 
 "I turned to see the voice that spake with me." 
 
 P. L., vi., 212 ; John i., 23. 
 
 12. A deity of mythology is used for the name of the 
 object presided over. Bryan Waller Proctor, whose lit- 
 erary name was Barry Cornwall, is remarkable for the 
 variety and delicious melody of his rhythms; for his 
 love of the gentle and the genial ; for his passionate ear- 
 nestness and refined sentiment. Here is a quotation 
 from him : 
 
 " In a high, solitary turret, where 
 
 None were admitted, .would he muse, when first 
 The young day broke; perhaps because he there 
 Had in his early infancy been nursed; 
 
212 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Or that he felt more pure the morning air, 
 
 Or loved to see the great Apollo burst 
 From out his cloudy bondage, and the night 
 Hurry away before the conquering light." 
 
 The gods and goddesses of Hellas and of Rome would 
 not thus still sit on the cloud-thrones of fancy, did not 
 a whole world of moon-ray imaginings haunt every 
 name. Even Pollok, devout and dying Christian, in his 
 grand poem, " The Course of Time," published in 1827, 
 makes use of these names as the names of objects. Dr. 
 Holmes is led, by his bigoted spite at Christianity, to 
 maintain that Pollok has no tenderness nothing but 
 gloom. Judge for yourselves: 
 
 "It was an eve of autumn's holiest mood; 
 The cornfields, bathed in Cynthia's silver light, 
 Stood ready for the reaper's gathering hand ; 
 And all the winds slept soundly. Nature seemed 
 In silent contemplation to adore 
 Its Maker. Now and then the aged leaf, 
 Falling from its fellows, rustled to the ground ; 
 And as it fell bade man think of his end. 
 On vale and lake, on wood and mountain high, 
 With pensive wing outspread, sat heavenly Thought 
 Conversing with itself. Vesper looked forth 
 From out her western hermitage, and smiled ; 
 And up the east, unclouded, rode the Moon, 
 With all her stars, gazing on Earth intense, 
 As if she saw some wonder walking there." 
 
 13. A noun that denotes the thing supporting is used 
 for a noun that denotes the thing supported. We say 
 " field " for battle ; " table " for the eatables on it ; " al- 
 tar" for sacrifice. Milton thus writes: 
 
 " Amazement seized 
 The rebel thrones." 
 
 14. The name of the thing possessed instead of 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. . 213 
 
 the possessor; as when Fisher Ames, in a noble pas-' 
 sage: 
 
 '"The war-whoop shall wake the sleep of the cradle;" 
 and Shakespeare informs us that Coriolanus 
 "Drove the bristled lips before him." 
 
 The style of " Coriolanus " is Shakespeare at his best. 
 
 15. On the contrary, we have the possessor for the 
 possessed. In the " Georgics," iii., 324, Virgil has it thus : 
 
 " Let us browse on the fields cool with dew." 
 
 At first inspection, we are apt to think that the figure 
 here lies in the verb " browse ;" on looking more closely 
 we see that it lies in the pronoun " us," for "our flocks ;" 
 expressing, in a Nebuchadnezzar-like way, the identity 
 between the farmer and his live stock. Dr. Bushnell 
 warns us that 
 
 " There is a busy infidel always lurking in our hearts ;" 
 
 where " infidel " stands for infidelity. Luther, in his 
 rough, honest way, used to cry ? 
 
 " Every one of us has a pope in his inside :" 
 
 pope being used for the haughty feeling that loves to 
 deal in anathemas. 
 
 16. The instrument for the user: Isa. xiii., 18. Milton, 
 in his " Lycidas," in which pathos is blent with learning, 
 speaks with his wonted scorn of priests, and calls them 
 
 " Blind mouths that scarce themselves know how to hold 
 A sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else the least 
 That to the herdsman's art belongs." 
 
 Kossuth used this variety when he exclaimed alas ! it 
 was a dream 
 
 " Light has spread, and even bayonets think." 
 But Sir Walter rebukes Croker for writing 
 
 " Full fifty thousand muskets bright, 
 Led by old warriors trained in fight." 
 
214 Might and Mirth of Liter attire. 
 
 17. This ever-recurring figure gives the name proper 
 to that which exerts an influence, for the influence 
 exerted. Joanna Baillie, celebrated by her " Plays of 
 the Passions," presents us, in her " Columbus," with 
 these lines: 
 
 "When thinking of the mighty dead, 
 
 The young from slothful couch will start, 
 And vow, with lifted hands outspread, 
 Like them to act a noble part." 
 
 Observe that " slothful couch," that which exerts the 
 evil influence, is used as a name for sloth itself, the influ- 
 ence exerted. 
 
 1 8. The name of the progenitor for his posterity; as 
 by Sir Walter: 
 
 " When Israel, of the Lord beloved, 
 
 Out from the land of bondage came, 
 Her father's God before her moved 
 An awful guide, in smoke and flame." 
 
 19. The noun denoting the material for the thing 
 made of that material. Professor Aytoun, of Edin- 
 burgh, in his "Battle of Killiecrankie," by " steel " means 
 swords : 
 
 " Like a tempest down the ridges 
 Swept the hurricane of steel; 
 Rose the slogan of Macdonald, 
 
 Flash'd the broadsword of Lochiel." 
 
 Sir Richard Fanshaw translated the " Pastor Fido " of 
 Guarini. Speaking of the golden age, he thus writes : 
 
 " No wandering pines unto a foreign shore, 
 Or war or riches (a worse burden) bore." 
 
 Sir Richard translated also the " Lusiad " of Camoens, 
 the national epic of Portugal. Allan Cunningham, in a 
 spirited sea-song, thus breaks forth : 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 215 
 
 " The wind is piping loud, my boys, 
 
 The lightning flashes free ; 
 While the hollow oak our palace is, 
 Our heritage the sea." 
 
 20. The noun for the period of time during which cer- 
 tain events occurred for the events. Achilles, in Cow- 
 per's " Homer," thus cries: 
 
 " So have I worn out many sleepless nights, 
 And waded deep through many a bloody day." 
 
 Cowper is the domestic poet of England ; the Fourth 
 Book of the " Task " is perfect. 
 
 21. The noun that names a limb or bodily part ex- 
 presses him whose member it is. A fortune had been 
 made by selling snuff; an inscription was wanted for the 
 chariot about to be set up. A wit suggested : 
 
 "Who would have thought it, 
 That noses would have bought it ?" 
 
 " Noses " for the snuff-takers. 
 
 22. The thing that people sit at gives a name for the 
 people. An historian tells us of a board that, after long 
 deliberation, came to a unanimous vote. Wonderful 
 board, if you take it literally. 
 
 23. The name of him served for the service rendered. 
 No nobler example than in the words of Paul : 
 
 "To me to live is Christ;" 
 
 where Christ includes at least these three forms of serv- 
 ice: in him, by conversion; with him, by companionship 
 and open profession ; for him, by obedience. 
 
 24. The object which an action respects or deals with 
 may be put for the action. Robert Surtees, the histo- 
 rian of Durham, a famous ballad collector, who first sug- 
 gested to Scott the idea of working up the Jacobin tra- 
 ditions of the Scottish Highlands into Waverley, called 
 on the Bishop of Lichfield, Dean of Durham, to request 
 his aid for a poor man who had lost his only cow : 
 
216 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Go," said the Bishop, " to my steward, and tell him to give 
 you as much money as will buy the best cow you can find." 
 
 Surtees exclaimed 
 
 " My lord, I hope you will ride to, heaven on the back of that 
 cow." 
 
 " On the back of that cow " means " on that action." 
 A day or two after, one told him that the wish was 
 absurd : 
 
 " I see nothing absurd in it," responded he ; " when the 
 Dean rides, to heaven on the back of that cow, many of his fel- 
 low-clergymen may be glad to lay hold of her tail." 
 
 25. A subtle and very beautiful metonymy it is, when 
 the thing or things manifested or proved is taken for the 
 name of the thing that manifests it or them. The blood 
 of crucifixion proved what sorrow what love His; says 
 Dr. Watts: 
 
 " See from His head, His hands, His feet, 
 Sorrow and love flow mingled down." 
 
 26. The name of a person for the person himself; as 
 Milton, grandly because dimly : 
 
 " By them stood 
 
 Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name 
 Of Demogorgon." 
 
 ' 27. Per contra, the person for the person's name. As 
 a pronoun is used for a noun, a metonymy may be in a 
 pronoun. A literary man, very extravagant, had got a 
 friend to go round for a subscription in his behalf not 
 the first time the hat had petitioned. Application was 
 made to Douglas Jerrold : 
 
 " How much money do you want ?" " Only a four and two 
 naughts." "Then put me clown for one of the naughts." 
 
 " Me " is a change of noun for " my name." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 217 
 
 28. The thing worn for the wearer. In the old song, 
 
 " Good-morning to your Night-cap," 
 
 " night-cap " means him whose pate it covers. Milton, 
 iv., 7&5, has this: 
 
 " Half wheeling to the shield, half to the spear;" 
 
 that is, to the left hand and to the right; the shield be- 
 ing worn on the left arm ; the spear being wielded by 
 the right hand. Livy, the Latin historian, whose style 
 is so perfect in its milky blandness, has a phrase, exactly 
 similar : 
 
 "To wheel to the^spear, or to the shield." 
 
 29. The name of that which is waged is used for the 
 instruments wherewith you wage it ; thus, in P. L., vi., 
 712: 
 
 " Bring forth all my war, 
 My bow and thunder." 
 
 30. The name of the leader is imparted to the fol- 
 lower ; as when the Saviour said to Peter, as if to show 
 for all time that that apostle had no superiority over 
 the other apostles: 
 
 "Get thee behind me, Satan." 
 
 Matt, xvi., 19, 23, with xviii., 18. 
 
 31. The name of a loved object is ascribed to those 
 who are dearly loved. Ponder a charming instance in 
 Mark iii., 31-35 ; and open your mind to the conviction 
 that none ever used figures more frequently than De- 
 mosthenes, Paul, and the Saviour. So strong this tend- 
 ency in the last named, that continually it ripened into 
 full-formed fruit in the form of parable. That peerless 
 intellect, what an extraordinary bent was in it to figura- 
 tive word and thought and action what a fount of 
 p'oesy and of the oratoric ! 
 
2 1 8 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 32.. The place for the occurrence that happened there; 
 as in Shakespeare: 
 
 " By this cimeter, 
 That won three fields of Sultan Solyman !" 
 
 XXXVIII. 33. Synecdoche next insists on receiving 
 mention, because it is a thirty-third and double form of 
 metonymy, so important as to have obtained a separate 
 title a part for the whole, or a whole for the part : as 
 when Thomas Aird addresses his mother as " Thou sa^ 
 cred head " an expression very familiar to the students 
 of Homer; or as when you term your home "Thou be- 
 loved roof;" or as when a general is said to win a vic- 
 tory. Gen. iii., 19; Matt, viii., 8; Mark xvi., 15. In Heb. 
 ii., 14, by " flesh and blood " is meant the whole human 
 nature. When the -Saviour told Peter, " Flesh and blood 
 have not revealed it unto thee," he did not mean that 
 Peter obtained his views from a soulless body ; but a part 
 stands for the whole. It is said that there are " a thou- 
 sand souls " in a town ; then their bodies are implied 
 their souls, a part, contain the whole of them. " They 
 shall be one flesh" is said of twain who are wed ; it means 
 not that the wedded pair become a hapless twain de- 
 prived of minds or souls. Thus synecdoche scatters the 
 error that the Redeemer is destitute of a human soul, 
 because when a part is specified, the whole is included. 
 Yet Mr. H.W. Beecher, wonderful to say, has adopted 
 this queer idea. As if no such thing as synecdoche ever 
 existed ; or as if every wedded pair underwent a loss of 
 soul a heavy tax on matrimony. How important is 
 synecdoche how thoroughly it proves a bulwark against 
 a heresy, even ! 
 
 In Pickering's ballad a synecdoche is found. A wan- 
 dering minstrel comes to a farmer's door on a midnight 
 of snow; the farmer lets him in, thus addressing the 
 old man : 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 2 1 9 
 
 " ' Come in, auld carl, I'll steer my fire, 
 
 I'll make it bleeze a bonnie flame; 
 
 Your bluid is thin, ye've tint the gate, 
 
 Ye shouldna stray sae far frae hame.' " 
 "'Nae hame have I,' the minstrel said; 
 ' Sad party-strife o'erturn'd my ha' ; 
 And weeping at the close of life, 
 
 I wander through a wreath of snaw.' " 
 
 Here one wreath is put for the many. 
 
 XXXIX. 34. Metalepsis has also to be carefully cata- 
 logued, not without wonder Compound Metonymy. In 
 Virgil's first " Eclogue," line 70, Melibceus speaks of re- 
 visiting his old homestead 
 
 "After some beards of corn;" . 
 
 where " beards " stand for ears of corn ; " ears of corn " 
 for the corn crop ; the corn crop for autumn ; autumn 
 for the year. Dr. Gibbons has said, in his " Rhetoric :" 
 
 " This figure, metalepsis, is like an echo in a spacious dome, 
 that returns again and again upon us before it ceases its 
 sound." 
 
 Dr. Boyd, "The Country Parson," has a very clever 
 essay on veal : Veal being immature beef; and immature 
 beef being an emblematic name of immature young men. 
 In an old song, a lady over-bibulous is introduced to us. 
 Her husband prays that she may drink " hooly " that 
 is, considerately : 
 
 " First she drank Crummie, and syne she drank Charlie ; 
 O that my wife wad drink hooly and fairly." 
 
 She did not literally drink Crummie, the cow, nor Char- 
 lie, the horse. " Crummie " denotes the money got by 
 the sale of Crummie ; and the money so obtained de- 
 notes the whisky bought with the money. In his " Aus- 
 tin Elliot," Henry Kingsley says: 
 
 " We shall none of us know any more about the matter till 
 the kye come hame;" 
 
220 Might and Mirth, of Literature. 
 
 that is, till death ; for the kye come home at the gloam- 
 ing ; and gloaming, or the twilight of day, stands for the 
 evening of life ; and at the evening of life comes death 
 the great mystery which is the solver of mysteries. 
 Very wondrous is metalepsis, our thirty-fourth kind of 
 metonymy. S., " Lear," act i., scene i., Lear's 4th speech, 
 line 6. But we hurry to a close. This chapter is by far 
 the most complete treatment of metonymy the world 
 has ever seen. Yet it is evident to you that we hasten 
 to an incomplete close. Easily might you specify a hun- 
 dred varieties instead of our scanty thirty-four. Of each 
 of these thirty-four we implore you to cull a hundred 
 specimens: a month's work at least. Zech. xi., 10; S., 
 " Julius Caesar," act i., scene i., 4th speech of Flavius, 
 line 10. 
 
 We take leave of metonymy, this elegant depart- 
 ment of our subject, by giving a specimen of our own. 
 " Lama sabachthani?" "why hast Thou forsaken me?" 
 is one of the dying cries of our Saviour on the. cross. 
 Let us use, then, the cry uttered by a person for the per- 
 son himself, and term the Great Martyr " the Lama 
 Sabachthani of lost mankind." Further, we trust our 
 readers will hold with us that as metonymy is a. change 
 of name or noun, no other figure ought to be permitted 
 to refer to change of noun. Trope must not be suf- 
 fered to intrude into this province. If ever distinctness 
 is to reign on this subject, a change of a noun will no 
 longer be admitted to be a trope. Trope must go, in 
 search of a kingdom, to some other part of speech. We 
 hasten, therefore, to our next chapter. Yet we can not 
 but apologize for the very few words we have given to 
 our fifth variety of metonymy the use of abstracts for 
 concretes ; than which there is nothing in language more 
 refined, more susceptible of poesy. Do not be satisfied 
 till you collect, into your herbarium, two hundred speci- 
 mens at least. We have thrown away scores of examples, 
 from the painful dread of making our volume too bulky. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 221 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 
 PART FIFTH. 
 
 Tropes. 
 
 XL. OUR next figure, a very important one, is the 
 Trope ; yet is our subject in a condition so disgrace- 
 ful tp our language that never yet has the term Trope 
 been precisely defined. Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary, 
 thus decides : " In strict acceptation, the change of a 
 word is a trope " of a single word. But of what word ? 
 The term trope is from the Greek rpcVw, / turn ; the 
 turning of a word from its original application, more or 
 less. This brings us so far on our way; but it is far 
 from sufficient, as it does not tell us what kind of word. 
 Webster and all the rest are equally inadequate ; you 
 will search all our writers in vain for a clear distinction 
 which is what the language and the theme imper- 
 atively demand between a trope and a metonymy. 
 Every other commonly employed term is occupied such 
 as simile, metaphor, implication ; metonymy especially is 
 clear as day it lies always in a noun ; is trope to wan- 
 der around loose, causing only confusion ? Yet a large 
 group of figures of the rarest fairy-like beauty, of corus- 
 cating might, are left to go destitute of a distinct appel- 
 lation. Your author is daring enough to seize an unap- 
 propriated title, and to wed it to a magnificent group 
 of . figures, which that title most exquisitely suits; those 
 turns that lie in adjectives, and which, as soon as you 
 gaze on them, will triumphantly vindicate their deserv- 
 ingness of a wholly separate name. They are not $ub- 
 
222 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 jects, but attributes or descriptives of subjects ; in fact, 
 adjectives. 
 
 1. An adjective of one operated, on is ascribed to the 
 cause, as in the expressions jovial wine, musing midnight, 
 drowsy tinklings, blushing honors, eddying oar. Will- 
 iam Motherwell calls the way weary. Not the way can 
 be weary, but him operated on by the way : 
 
 "I've wandered east, I've wandered west, 
 
 Through mony a weary way; 
 But never, never can forget 
 The love of life's young day." 
 
 Milton, in his unsurpassed " L'Allegro," has the ex- 
 ression 
 
 "The merry bells;" 
 
 Thomas Moore has 
 
 "Heaven's forgiving rainbow;" 
 
 neither the bells nor the rainbow, literally, possess these 
 ascriptives. More delicate this than even metonymy. 
 Disgraceful to make " trope " common to two so differ- 
 ent things. 
 
 2. An adjective belonging to a subject is bestowed on 
 one of the parts or members of that subject. We speak 
 of one visiting a church with " religious footsteps." Rob- 
 ert Ferguson, the precursor of Burns, ascribes wisdom 
 to the snout, in a panegyric on broadcloth : 
 
 "Braidclaith lends folk an unco heeze; 
 Makes mony kailworms butterflies ; 
 Gies mony a doctor his degrees 
 
 For little skaith : 
 In short, you may be what you please 
 
 Wi' guid braidclaith. 
 For though you had as wise a snout on 
 As Shakespeare or Sir Isaac Newton, 
 Your judgment folk would hae a doubt on, 
 
 I'll tak' my aith, 
 Till they could see you wi' a suit on 
 
 O' guid braidclaith." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 223 
 
 Mrs. Barbauld, a writer of uncommon vigor, writes of 
 the discomforts of a washing-day. Not is it the hand 
 that can be " impatient :" 
 
 " Thine eye shall rue 
 
 The budding fragrance of thy tender shrubs, - 
 Myrtle or rose all crush'd, beneath the weight 
 Of coarse-check'd apron, with impatient hand 
 Twitch'd off when showers impend." 
 
 Magnificent our example from Campbell's " Curse of. 
 O'Connor's Child;" not the faces were " dying,'\but her 
 unpitying brothers themselves : 
 
 " Away ! away ! to Athunrie ! 
 Where downward when the- sun shall fall 
 The raven's wing shall be your pall ! 
 And not a vassal shall unlace 
 The visor from your dying face !" 
 
 3. An adjective true of an agent is given to the instru- 
 ment with which or on which he works, or which he or 
 she employs : as in the expressions, "rjkms incense," 
 " coward swords." In Spectator, No. 2^ddisoft)speaks : 
 
 "I have seen a fan so very angry that it would have been 
 dangerous for the absent lover to have come within the wind 
 of it ; and at other times so very languishing that I have been 
 glad, for the lady's sake, that the lover was at a convenient 
 distance." 
 
 Sir Walter, deploring Leyden's early death, applies an 
 ascriptive, " varied in lore," to the lamp which Leyden 
 studied by. S., " Antony and Cleopatra," act ii., scene 
 vi., line 6. 
 
 . 4. In Miss Landon's " Adieu to a Bride " the roof is 
 called " fond " an adjective true of the contained is 
 turned over to the container : 
 
 " She wept to leave the fond roof where 
 
 She had been lov'd so long; 
 Though glad the peal upon the air, 
 And gay the bridal throng." 
 
224 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 The Hon. William Herbert, celebrated for his elegant 
 translations from the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, 
 and especially from the Danish and Icelandic, published 
 his " Helga," in 1815, in seven cantos. He describes the 
 sudden* summer of the far North thus: 
 
 " Fair glens and verdant vales appear, 
 And warmth awakes the budding year." 
 
 Not the year buds, but the flowers which that year con- 
 tains in its spring. 
 
 Similarly Joel Barlow, in his national American poem, 
 " The Hasty Pudding," has this couplet : 
 
 " At last the closing season browns the plain, 
 And ripe October gathers in the grain." 
 
 5. An adjective of the possessor may be turned over to 
 the thing possessed. TTnrarpJft/alpnje,. the prince of let- 
 ter-writers, calls one always grinning to show his fine set 
 of teeth 
 
 " The gentleman with the foolish teeth." 
 
 Francis Beaumont speaks of " pale passion," though 
 not the passion can be pale, but he whose the passion is: 
 
 " Fountain-heads, and pathless groves 
 Places which pale passion loves." 
 
 Southey, in his excellent poem, " Madoc," terms the 
 sunshine " joyful." 
 
 6. An adjective expressive of the season, place, or per- 
 son, is ascribed to an object which strongly characterizes 
 that season, place, or person ; as when Milton sings of 
 the gray-fly 
 
 " Winding its sultry horn." 
 
 Not the horn is sultry, but the summer evening when 
 its sleepy noise is heard. 
 
 7. The main history of an individual is marked fitly 
 by an adjective, which adjective is ascribed to the indi- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 225 
 
 vidual himself. Galileo is characterized as " the starry 
 Galileo." In one adjective may a life be thus con- 
 densed. 
 
 8. An adjective true literally of the thing represented 
 by an emblem is turned over to the emblem itself. Snow 
 is not innocent in any moral point of view; but it is a 
 striking emblem of moral purity. Milton therefore thus 
 writes of Nature at the season of Christ's birth ; and in 
 the expression is naught of straining : 
 
 " She woos the gentle air 
 To hide her guilty front with innocent snow." 
 
 Richard Crashaw asks of a gladsome old age 
 
 " Would'st see December smile ? 
 Would'st see nests of new roses grow 
 In a bed of reverent snow ?" 
 
 Darkness, an emblem of melancholy, is itself called 
 melancholy, in the following by Clifford : 
 
 "When the humid showers gather 
 
 Over all the starry spheres, 
 And the melancholy darkness 
 
 Gently weeps in rainy tears, 
 'Tis a joy to press the pillow 
 
 Of a cottage chamber-bed, 
 
 And to listen to the patter 
 
 Of the soft rain overhead." 
 
 9. An adjective belonging to a thing described is given 
 to the description of it. In the following, from " Madoc," 
 the best long sea-poem in our language a tale de- 
 scriptive of perils is called perilous. Read with care 
 Southey's four great poems : " Thalaba," wild and won- 
 drous ; " Kehama," fantastic, irregular, fascinating; "Ma- 
 doc," with its admirable descriptions of outward nat- 
 ure, and its interesting episodes ; " Roderic," his most 
 matured production, strong in dramatic power: 
 
 P 
 
226 Might and Mirth of Liter atiire. 
 
 " Tis pleasant, by the cheerful hearth, to hear 
 Of tempests and the dangers of the deep; 
 And pause at times and feel that we are safe, 
 Then listen to the rjerilous tale again." 
 
 10. An adjective proper to the cause is turned over to 
 an effect of that cause. The load becomes sweet. Willis 
 G. Clark speaks : 
 
 " Mother, thy child is bless'd ; 
 And though his presence may be lost to thee, 
 And vacant leave thy breast, 
 And missed a sweet load from thy parent knee ; 
 Though tones familiar from thine ear have passed, 
 Thou'lt meet thy first-born with the Lord at last." 
 
 Our American painter and poet, Washington All- 
 ston, in his " Spanish Maid," terms the cannons' rattle, 
 "deadly:" 
 
 " She hears the cannon's deadly rattle." 
 
 ii An adjective of the thinker is ascribed to the ef- 
 fects of thought. Fisher Ames (every thing from him 
 let be studied with great care) speaks of 
 
 "A sanguine and passionate hypothesis." 
 
 Not the hypothesis, but those who rushed into it. 
 
 12. An adjective proper to a thing worn is given to 
 the wearing of it. This form of trope is rare; only one 
 instance have we discovered in Horace, noted for his 
 unsurpassed felicity of expression. In his " Odes/' the 
 great lyrist has this phrase : 
 
 " Purple dresses, the wearing of which is brighter than any 
 J star." 
 
 After many perusals, we can riot find in Horace one 
 strictly original thought ; but what elegant diction ! 
 
 13. An adjective of a thing worn is given to the wearer 
 of it. Quarles, of Lazarus and Dives, says : 
 
 "The dogs far kinder than their purple master." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric, 227 
 
 14. An adjective strictly proper to the thing received 
 is turned and given to the receiver of it, as in " Paradise 
 Lost," vi., 528: 
 
 " Others from the dawning hills 
 Looked round." 
 
 " Dawning" is strictly true of the light ; the hills are the 
 receivers of the light. 
 
 Such are fourteen varieties. Continue to collect, till 
 you can delight yourself with shall we say, a hundred? 
 but, first of all, abundantly illustrate the small number 
 which we have succeeded in amassing. A small num- 
 ber, yet this is the fullest treatise on tropes that ever 
 the English or any literature has seen. 
 
 Before leaving this part of our field, we inquire, whence 
 do tropes arise ? Affinities, the laws of association, run 
 through them all ; and actual fittings and adaptations 
 fused all through mind and matter by Him who is their 
 common Author. It is the peculiarity of Wordsworth, 
 for instance, that he perceives so clearly and widely the 
 affinities between man and matter, and between these 
 twain and the pervading Thinker. All true poets are 
 naturally eager for relationships that really exist ; they 
 are therefore keen to discover truths ; it is the very office 
 of imagination to exhibit these subtle, beautiful points 
 of connection ; while passion is equally busy, outward 
 objects reflecting back our own grief or joy. Hear Bun- 
 yan cry: 
 
 " I lifted up my head, and methought I saw as if the sun 
 that shined in the heavens did grudge to give me light ; as if 
 the very stones on the street, and tiles on the houses, did band 
 themselves against me." 
 
 Listen to Lear as he looks up to the heavens, frenzied 
 with lightnings, and implores them to take part with 
 him in his wrongs : 
 
 " For ye, too, ye Heavens, are old !" 
 
 i 
 
228 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Passion and poesy thus bend the inward depths of 
 man's heart with stern sublimities ; with the winning 
 beauties, with the crash or with the hush of nature, 
 whose meanings are innumerable ; and the heart and the 
 fancy prove to be informing powers, that give animation 
 and deciphering to all things. Accept from Richard 
 Coe a sample of this sacred art of the bard, whereby he 
 can read Nature's heart : 
 
 " Falleth now from off a tree 
 
 A wither'd leaf; 
 This the lesson taught to me 
 
 1 Life is brief!' 
 Hear it say : 
 
 * Mortal, soon thou'lt follow me 
 To decay.' 
 
 " Mounteth now on wings of air 
 
 To the sky, 
 A little dew-drop, pure and clear, 
 
 Far up on high. 
 Hear it say : 
 
 * All above the earth is fair ; 
 
 Watch and pray ! 
 Night or sorrow comes not here; 
 J Tis perfect day !' " 
 
 At the basis of every metonymy, or change of noun, 
 and of every trope, or change of adjective, lies some af- 
 finity; this affinity a common eye sees not, but it is 
 there, if the trope or metonymy is worth aught. " All 
 things talk thoughts" to the man of genius; he sur- 
 passes others by a greater power of interpreting nature, 
 and reading beauty, truth, and God there. Grand mean- 
 ings throng in all things to grand souls ; for the grand 
 meanings are there. As it would be fatuous to dream 
 that Milton could compose a book without filling -it to 
 overflow with Miltonic thoughts, so it were incompar- 
 ably more fatuous to dream that Jehovah composed his 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 229 
 
 great book, the External Universe, without crowding it 
 with -his thoughts. Metonymies, therefore, and tropes 
 will ever be new ; poesy will never run out ; for the in- 
 tellect and the heart of God are inexhaustible ; he hath 
 purposely flung every where materials to feed inspired 
 thoughts. 
 
 A false religion is sure to be a hinderance to noble 
 writing, however wondrous the inimitable good taste of 
 the writer. No Athenian has given us any description 
 of the noble view from the Acropolis ; nor any Roman 
 of the Alps, of the Bay of Naples, or of those Italian 
 lakes so unsurpassed in their melting charm. By a 
 throng of wood-nymphs ; of dryads, naiads, and satyrs, of 
 nereids and oreads ; of gods and goddesses, Nature was 
 almost mobbed out of sight. When the admirable Vir- 
 gil has to describe Mount Atlas, what a worse than fail- 
 ure ! He speaks of him as a being whose head is shaggy 
 with pines, and whose shoulders are covered with snow 
 the pines being his locks, the snow his mantle; whereas, 
 in Titanic truth, the top of that, and of every mountain 
 of the first class, is snow-clad, while the woods grow far- 
 ther down. Great mountains stand before God with 
 their heads uncovered. Such violence to Nature does 
 Mythology lead a great poet to commit. In contrast 
 with which, we prescribe a most beautiful and wonder- 
 fully suggestive exercise : Draw up a full list of all the 
 very various outward objects that our Jesus the Rep- 
 resentative Man of the New Age made use of, as illus- 
 trations and trope-materials : such as the lily, the rock, 
 the fountain, the pearl, the net, the mother -hen, the 
 eagle, the sunset-cloud, .the torrent, the sower, the hill, 
 the sun, the rain, the moth, the rust, the salt, the eye, 
 the wheat ; the harvest, ripening in the autumn. Even 
 the classic influence kept men away, in large part, from 
 nature ; Christ led men back to it ; and to the innumer- 
 able tropes, metonymies, and similes that thence have 
 their suggestion. 
 
Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Job v., 26 ; vi., 1 5-20 ; vii., 7, 9 ; viii., 11-15. Psa - * 3 
 4; cxxxiii. Jer. xxxi., 12. 
 
 We add here an important reflection : In arranging 
 figures, three heads of arrangement at once suggest 
 themselves Figures of Similarity, Figures of Contigu- 
 ity, Figures of Contrast. A fourth class, such as Inter- 
 rogation, Exclamation, Apostrophe, instead of being 
 departures from the ordinary application of words, are 
 departures from the ordinary structure of sentences. 
 But we might as well expect to be able to reduce, under 
 four or under fifty classes, all the varieties into which the 
 spray of the sea is tossed by the wind, as to be able to 
 reduce all the very numerous varieties into which lan- 
 guage is whirled by- the agitations of the mind. Mark 
 it well, that the trope contains in its single self many 
 varieties of linguistic form, just as the metonymy does. 
 Unless you fully appreciate this fact, you are by no 
 means sufficiently awake to the rich susceptibilities of 
 language. 
 
 In taking our final leave of tropes, we once more urge 
 on literary men the adoption of the reform suggested by 
 us. Unless this improvement in the nomenclature be 
 admitted, there will be an unnecessary appellation in- 
 truded on the metonymy, while " change of adjective " 
 will be destitute of an appellation devoted solely to it- 
 self. But is " change of adjective " deserving of a name 
 all to itself? This chapter presents you with a sufficient 
 reply. These adjectival changes are innumerable; and 
 they are most susceptible of exquisite delicacy and beau- 
 ty. Let us welcome them, then, to a separate niche in 
 the Pantheon of Rhetoric. And never can a depart- 
 ment of thought conquer for itself a reputable place in 
 literature till its nomenclature is strictly arranged and 
 defined. One name for one thing, and no more. Let 
 change of noun mean metonymy; let change of adjective 
 mean trope. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 231 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 PART SIXTH. 
 
 Hypocatastasis or Implication. Epanarthosis or Correc- 
 tion. Anamnesis or Recalling. Aposiopesis or Sudden 
 Silence. Sudden Self -interruption. Emblem. 
 
 XLI. HYPOCATASTASIS is now before us ; that is, 
 Implication : unnamed, undiscriminated by literary men 
 in general an humbling and extraordinary proof of 
 the wretched neglect into which this subject has fall- 
 en. This most beautiful and far-reaching figure had 
 a name in Quintilian's day; scarce any one knows of 
 it by a distinct name in our day, or since Addison's 
 time, at latest. Implied resemblance a resemblance 
 not stated expressly, but taken for granted. The Sav- 
 iour's favorite figures were interrogation and implication. 
 If metaphor be ofttimes more forcible than simile, im- 
 plication can be more forcible than metaphor; so that 
 no point is better fitted to arouse to a vivid conscious- 
 ness of the marvelous capabilities of English, those who 
 hitherto have no adequate conception of what a won- 
 drous thing our language is. 
 
 An implication is an implied metaphor or an implied 
 simile. Thus Southey : 
 
 " No palm-grove islanded amid the waste." 
 
 It is implied that the wide desert is an ocean, or is like 
 an ocean. Yet as the adjective, islanded, is not turned 
 
232 Might and Mirth of Liter atiire. 
 
 aside from such a word as it originally fits, it is not a 
 trope that is before us ; another and distinct name is de- 
 manded to classify such a usage. Heeren discourses 
 sublimely of Persepolis 
 
 "Rising above the deluge of years;" 
 
 whereby is implied that years sweep over the loftiest 
 edifices of the past as did the flood over the mountain- 
 peaks. Frederick Tennyson, brother of the laureate, 
 sings : 
 
 " The vales are surging with the grain." 
 
 A simile or resemblance is implied between fields wav- 
 ing with grain and a full sea with its surges. Washing- 
 ton Irving draws a picture of his second Dutch Gover- 
 nor, William the Testy: 
 
 " He was some such a little Dutchman as we may now and 
 then see stumping briskly about the streets of our city, in a 
 broad-skirted coat, with huge buttons, an old-fashioned cocked 
 hat stuck on the back of his head, and a cane as high as his 
 chin. His visage was broad and his features sharp; his nose 
 turned up with the most petulant curl ; his cheeks were scorch- 
 ed into a dusky red, doubtless in consequence of the neighbor- 
 hood of his fierce little gray eyes, through which his torrid 
 soul beamed with tropical fervor." 
 
 It is not asseverated, simile-fashion, that his soul was 
 like the tropics, nor, metaphor-wise, that his soul was the 
 tropics: the simile is implied. Matt, iii., 8, 10, 12; v., 
 29, 30; vii., 3-6; xvi., 6, 12; Mark L, 17. Turn to the 
 closing lines of the " Pleasures of Memory," the leading 
 poem of Samuel Rogers, banker and poet. The implied 
 similes are thick inlaid : 
 
 " Hail, Memory, hail ! In thy exhaustless mine, 
 From age to age, unnumbered treasures shine. 
 Thought and her shadowy brood thy call obey, 
 And Place and Time are subject to thy sway; 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 233 
 
 Thy pleasures most we feel when most alone 
 The only pleasures we can call our own. 
 Lighter than air Hope's summer visions die 
 If but a fleeting cloud obscure the sky; 
 If but a beam of sober reason play, 
 Lo, Fancy's fairy frost-work melts away ! 
 But can the wiles of art, the grasp of power, 
 Snatch the rich relics of a well-spent hour? 
 These, when the trembling spirit wings her flight, 
 Pour round her path a stream of living light; 
 And gild those pure and perfect realms of rest, 
 Where Virtue triumphs and her sons are blest." 
 
 In a companion-piece to this, Campbell's " Pleasures 
 of Hope," you will find implication abounding as much. 
 In the closing lines: 
 
 " Eternal Hope ! When yonder spheres sublime 
 Pealed their first notes to sound the march of Time, 
 Thy joyous youth began ; but not to fade 
 When all the sister planets have decayed; 
 When wrapt in fire the realms of ether glow, 
 And Heaven's last thunder shakes the world below, 
 Thou, undismayed, shall o'er the ruins smile, 
 And light thy torch at Nature's funeral pile." 
 
 Here are a class of ornaments to style, deep imbedded 
 in it, that are as ethereal as the down of the peach or 
 blush of the primrose. A ballad, much renowned, by 
 John Lowe, opens thus: 
 
 " The moon had climb'd the highest hill 
 
 That rises o'er the source of Dee, 
 And from its eastern summit shed 
 
 A silver light on tower and tree, 
 When Mary laid her clown to sleep, 
 
 Her thoughts on Sandy far at sea; 
 When soft and low a voice was heard 
 
 4 Sweet Mary, weep no more for me.' " 
 
 If Lowe had told us that the moon's light was like sil- 
 
234 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 ver, he would have presented us with a simile ; if he had 
 informed us that it was silver, this would have been a 
 metaphor ; as it is, we have neither the one nor the other, 
 nor yet a metonymy, for it lies not in a noun ; but in an 
 adjective, not subjected to a turn or trope. It is an 
 " implied simile or metaphor," there being a refined de- 
 light in the reader's making the application for himself. 
 We quote the famous speech of the Rev. Sydney Smith 
 in favor of Reform in the British House of Commons: 
 
 " I do not mean to be disrespectful ; but the attempt of the 
 Lords to stop the progress of reform reminds me very forcibly 
 of the great storm of Sidmouth, and of the conduct of the ex- 
 cellent Mrs. Partington on that occasion. In the winter of 
 1824 there set in a great flood upon that town; the tide rose 
 to an incredible height ; the waves rushed in upon the houses, 
 and every thing was threatened with destruction. In the midst 
 of this sublime and terrible storm, Dame Partington, who lived 
 upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house, with mop and 
 pattens, trundling the mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vig- 
 orously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was 
 roused; Mrs. Partington's spirit was up ; but I need not tell you 
 the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Part- 
 ington. She was excellent at a slop or a puddle ; but she should 
 not have meddled with a tempest. Gentlemen, be at your ease; 
 be quiet and steady. You will beat Mrs. Partington." 
 
 At a time when a nation's passions were roused, this 
 hypocatastasis, in which the wit says not that the House 
 of Lords was the dame, nor was like her, set all England 
 a-laughing, and helped considerably to make that rev- 
 olution a bloodless one. 
 
 We throw together a few implications, without com- 
 ment: 
 
 " Life, struck sharp on Death, 
 Makes awful lightning." Mrs. Browning. 
 
 "America is as yet in the youth and gristle of her strength." 
 Burke. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 235 
 
 "America is rising with a giant's strength. Its bones are 
 yet but cartilages." Fisher Ames, in 1794. 
 
 " When a bribe is, as it were, cast into one scale, it goes pre- 
 ponderating, and forces down the judgment with it; and no 
 longer he who does this reasons about any thing accurately or 
 soundly." 
 
 This is from the oration on the Peace by Demosthenes ; 
 who does not disdain, you perceive, the commonest il- 
 lustrations ; and who was exceedingly far from the folly 
 of thinking that men are not responsible for their rea- 
 sonings and their beliefs. How often is the judgment, 
 like a scale heavily weighted by false weights, forced 
 down to shameful adjudications. 
 Said Dr. Johnson: 
 
 "An elevated genius employed about little things appears 
 like the sun in his evening declination; he remits his splendor, 
 but retains his magnitude, and pleases more though he dazzles 
 less." 
 
 No beauty in this passage, were it not that a real anal- 
 ogy did exist here. The words are full of poesy ; but 
 just as full of wisdom. But to detect, detain, and fix 
 moral or intellectual relations, can not be done without 
 using many an analogy sought out by fancy ; so that not 
 great poets only, but great thinkers, need to possess, and 
 some of them have in a remarkable degree possessed, a 
 style full of figures, notable examples being Lord Bacon, 
 Edmund Burke, Hugh Miller, and Sir David Brewster. 
 With profound truth Madame de Stael has laid down 
 this axiom : 
 
 "Imagination, so far from being, as many narrowly, unthink- 
 ingly deem, a faculty that deals only or chiefly in illusions, is 
 as mighty a discoverer of truths as judgment itself can be." 
 
 Young, author of " Night Thoughts," remarks: 
 
 " When we dip too deep in pleasure, we always stir a sedi- 
 ment that renders it impure and noxiqus." 
 
235 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 When he thus says, there is force of argument in what 
 he urges as well as aptness of illustration. How contin- 
 ually Jehovah himself uses implications. In Scripture, 
 guilt is a spotted, leprous garment ; iniquity is the treas- 
 ures of darkness ; a sinful life is a crooked path, or a 
 feeding on ashes ; the unslumbering conscience is the 
 worm, the snake, that never dies ; remorse is the quench- 
 less fire in the breast that turns eternity into flame ; 
 while, on the other hand, innocence is a white robe, 
 washed in Christ's blood ; heaven is the city of victor- 
 palms ; and all these analogies are referred to, very often 
 in broad statements, but also in allusions and implica- 
 tions the most refined. How many hypocatastases in the 
 first ten chapters of Isaiah, or in the fifty-fifth ; though 
 often the more ethereal shade of meaning has escaped 
 our translators. Thus in the Greek were two words for 
 white : one denoted a dead white, as that of white pa- 
 per; the other a living, flashing, glistening white, as that 
 of a diamond or a star, or that of stainless snow in the 
 sunray; and it is the latter which is used in Rev. iii., 4. 
 How beautiful an expression ! Those in heaven, res- 
 cued by the Deliverer, walk in gleaming, glistening 
 white, incarnated in star-glory. 
 
 Of course, as much want of taste may be betrayed in 
 implications as in any other figure; as when Washing- 
 ton Irving speaks thus of rural life in England : 
 
 " While it has banded society together, it has implanted in 
 each intermediate link a spirit of independence." 
 
 How can any thing be planted in a link ; or how can a 
 spirit be planted any where ? 
 
 At the court of James IV. of Scotland flourished Will- 
 iam Dunbar, a poet immeasurably superior to any of 
 whom England could boast in the whole dreary one hun- 
 dred and ninety years between the " Canterbury Tales" 
 and the " Faerie Queene." His, an eminently beautiful 
 paem " The Merle and the Nightingale." The Merle 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 237 
 
 argues human love to be best. The Nightingale replies 
 in behalf of love to God. Thus mellifluously she : 
 
 " A Nightingale with sugar'd notes new, 
 Whose angel feathers as the peacock shone. 
 Her sound went with the river as it ran." 
 
 Samuel Daniel, the dramatist, in a style light, sinewy, 
 elegant, gives us this to gather: 
 
 " He that of such a height hath built his mind, 
 And rear'd the dwelling of his thoughts so strong, 
 As neither hope nor fear can shake the frame 
 Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind 
 Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong 
 His settled peace, or to disturb the same 
 What a fair seat hath he from whence he may 
 The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey." 
 
 Of the imitators of Dr. Johnson's sounding style, Sir 
 Walter asked : 
 
 " Most of these have his report, but which of them carries 
 his bullet?" 
 
 From the beautiful ballad " Helen of Kirkconnel " we 
 select the epithet applied to that young lady slain at 
 her lover's side: 
 
 " When in my arms Bird Helen dropt." 
 
 In illustration of which sweet expression, perhaps its 
 source, see the never too much admired and wondered 
 at, S., " Cymbeline," act iv., scene ii., Arviragus's I5th 
 speech, 1st line. 
 
 Miss Mulock, whose prose is muscular as the arm of 
 a first-class gladiator, has in her poetry, of one over- 
 pompous: 
 
 "Your Maggotship." 
 
 Nay, Thomas Paine gives us one of the happiest impli- 
 cations; when, while Burke is all preoccupied with the 
 
238 Might arid Mirth of Literature. 
 
 disasters that crushed the French aristocracy, he reminds 1 
 him of the horrors long endured by the common peo- 
 pie: 
 
 "Mr. B. pities the plumage, but he forgets the dying bird." 
 
 Two implications, of kin to each other, we have, one 
 from Byron, of a person very pretentious : 
 
 " All his goods are put in the shop-window ;" 
 
 another from Jerrold, to a youth eager to see himself in 
 print: 
 
 " Be advised by me, young man don't take down the shut- 
 ters till there is something in the window." 
 
 Very important the view of Passion presented by John 
 Foster, in his most invaluable " Essay on Decision of 
 Character" worth reading once a year: 
 
 " The whole amount of Passion of which any mind, with im- 
 portant transactions before it, is capable, is not more than 
 enough to supply interest and energy to its practical exertions; 
 and therefore as little as possible of this sacred fire should 
 be expended in a way that does not augment the force of ac- 
 tion." 
 
 How absurd, on the other hand, Cowley's implied 
 simile of one early famous : 
 
 " In life's fair morn his fame did early crow !" 
 
 Most renowned once, " The Divine Weeks " of Guil- 
 laume de Sallust du Bartas, a French nobleman of Henry 
 IV.'s court going through thirty editions in six years ; 
 translated into Italian, German, Latin, and English, but 
 destroyed by its false figures. " I remember, when I was 
 a boy," says Dryden in the Preface to his " Spanish Friar," 
 " I thought inimitable Spenser a mean poet in compari- 
 son with Sylvester's ' Du Bartas/ and was wrapt in an 
 ecstasy when I read : 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. t 239 
 
 " ' Now when the winter's keener breath began 
 To crystallize the Baltic Ocean (O-ce-ann !), 
 To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods, 
 And periwig with snow the bald-pate woods.' " 
 
 Let us take Dryden's excellent advice in that passage ; 
 let us see that our thoughts themselves be valuable ; 
 for, after all, the thought is the main thing. Taste, too, 
 is very capable of being greatly bettered by education. 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds, the painter, was deeply disappoint- 
 ed when he first saw the works of Raphael in the Vati- 
 can but not when he saw them the twentieth time. " I 
 remember," says Leslie, in his admirable "Autobiograph- 
 ical Recollections," " when the picture of ' The Ages,' by 
 Titian, was first pointed out to me by Allston as an ex- 
 quisite work, I thought he was laughing at me." In 
 fine, hypocatastasis or implication is a figure so refined 
 that to collect a good hundred of them would of itself 
 go a considerable way to furnish you with the needed 
 culture of your taste. As when Camoens (translated by 
 Mickle) says : 
 
 " Honor and selfishness are never found in the same sack." 
 
 XLII. We hurry on to Correction or Epanorthosis 
 the recalling of an expression in order to put a stronger or 
 a more guarded one in its place. From Charles Sprague 
 take an example of this figure, so born for oratory, from 
 his " Lines on a Picture :" 
 
 " O it is life ! Departed days 
 Fling back their brightness while I gaze; 
 'Tis Emma's self this brow so fair, 
 Half-curtained in this glossy hair. 
 These eyes, the very home of love; 
 The dark twin arches traced above; 
 These red, ripe lips that almost speak; 
 The fainter blush of this pure cheek ; 
 The rose and lily's beauteous strife 
 It is ah no ! 'tis all but life." 
 
240 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Pierpont, on the grave of a sage, bestows on you a su- 
 perior instance : 
 
 " Nature's priest, how pure and fervent 
 
 Was thy worship at her shrine. 
 Friend of man ! of God the servant, 
 
 Advocate of truths divine. 
 Taught and charm'd as by no other 
 
 We have been and hoped to be; 
 But while waiting round thee, brother, 
 
 For thy light, 'tis dark with thee ! 
 Dark with thee ? No ! Thy Creator, 
 
 All whose creatures and whose laws 
 Thou did'st love, shall give thee greater 
 
 Light than Earth's, as Earth withdraws." 
 
 In Erskine's speech for Hardy, accused of high-trea-' 
 son, these words were addressed to the jury, 1794: 
 
 " If you can say this, that he is guilty, upon the evidence, it 
 is your duty to say so, and you may with a tranquil conscience 
 return to your families, though by your judgment the unhappy 
 object of it must return no more to his. Alas, gentlemen, 
 what do I say? He has no family to return to. The affec- 
 tionate partner of his life has already fallen a victim to the 
 surprise and horror which attended the scene now transacting." 
 
 See John xvi., 32. Rom. viii., 34. Gal. i., 6; iii.,4; iv., 9. 
 John Randolph, of Roanoke, was in his time the very 
 impersonation of satire in debate. On one occasion he 
 thus declaimed : 
 
 " It is a shame, Mr. President, that the noble bull-dogs of the 
 administration should be wasting their precious time in worry- 
 ing the rats of the opposition." 
 
 Cries of order interrupted the speaker ; but the presi- 
 dent sustained him. The fierce debater resumed, cor- 
 recting himself pointing to his opponents most con- 
 temptuously : 
 
 " Rats, did I say ? mice ! mice !" 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 241 
 
 John Godfrey von Herder, eminent among the Ger- 
 mans in poetry and in prose, thus speaks : 
 
 " Were there in the Bible never so many mistakes of geol- 
 ogy, history, astronomy, and the like (but it is proved that there 
 is none in the mean time we will assume it), yet it is certain 
 that the Bible was not given to instruct me in these matters, 
 but only in regard to religion and virtue." 
 
 Or Dr. Claus Harms speaks a distinguished ornament 
 of the German pulpit ; he addresses the prosperous un- 
 godly : 
 
 " Fortunate men, I envy you ! Nay, no irony here ! I envy 
 you not, for your rest is a false rest." 
 
 John Summerfield, whose career as a preacher was so 
 short and so brilliant, and who has been called the se- 
 raphic Summerfield, furnishes this : 
 
 " That kingdom whose sceptre once swayed the world, be- 
 twixt whose colossal stride all nations were glad to creep to 
 find themselves dishonored graves, is now forgotten, or if its 
 recollection be preserved, its history is emphatically called 
 The Decline and Fall.' " 
 
 We leave this great oratorical figure in the hands of 
 our pulpit guides ; little have they pondered the capa- 
 bilities of their position if they be not very familiar with 
 it. S., " Romeo and Juliet," act iv., scene v., lines 59-63. 
 
 As our final example of Correction a figure which all 
 will admit to be very noble, and which demands to be 
 frequently used by the orator, in even his highest mo- 
 ments take a homely instance, selected from one of 
 those most amusing books on Scottish character, by 
 Dean Ramsay, Dean of Edinburgh, a great favorite in 
 the Edinburgh society of our day. In a large village 
 in the Land of Cakes, as Scotland is gastronomically 
 termed, flourished a person who had from poverty risen 
 to wealth, whereof he was proud. In his later years, he 
 occasionally was found, though never in a loose, yet 
 
 Q 
 
242 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 sometimes in a tight condition. Reeling homeward one 
 summer night, he fell into a ditch, where he was discov- 
 ered thus communing with himself: 
 
 " Here lies one thousand pounds a year !" 
 
 (Using, observe, without borrowing it from us it was 
 quite original on his part No. 14 of our list of metony- 
 mies, the thing possessed for the possessor.) He paused 
 abruptly for a moment. Then, correcting himself, he 
 resumed : 
 
 " Hoot, toot, man. Ye should hae said, when ye were aboot 
 ft, here lies twa thousand a year." 
 
 XLIII.- Anamnesis that is, Recollection is merely 
 one special form of Correction ; the sudden calling to 
 mind of some particular that was overlooked -in reality, 
 not in appearance. As suppose a Gospel preacher were 
 to cry, as we heard .one lately, as he was summing up a 
 discourse on God* 
 
 "Hitherto in this discourse I did not sufficiently bear in 
 mind one momentous consideration peculiar to our subject it 
 flashes on me now. When I address you about Abraham or 
 Moses he of whom I speak is absent ; when I adventure to 
 speak of God he of whom I speak is present, to see with what 
 heart I speak of Him." 
 
 But be it no pretended forgetting. Condescend to no 
 sham for the sake of effect. With ease and with con- 
 tempt will your hearers see through your hollowness. 
 
 XLIV. Sudden Silence, Aposiopesis "the Greeks," 
 says old Puttenham, " call him the figure of Silence ;" 
 it is the leaving of a sentence unfinished in consequence 
 of some emotion or perception of the mind suddenly 
 and powerfully intruding upon us. Of kin it is to Cor- 
 rection. Thus, in the First Book of the " ^Eneid'," Nep- 
 tune is threatening the Winds with vengeance for having, 
 by him unlicensed, upheaved the ocean with tempest : 
 
 . "Ye winds, whom I but it is better to calm the billows." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 243 
 
 A speaker thus vividly makes us feel that such intense 
 passion burns within him as almost carries him beyond 
 the bounds of reason, but yet that reason, though with 
 difficulty, regains control. See* Luke xix., 42 ; xiii., 9. 
 Take" an illustration from "The Bride's Tragedy,'-' by 
 Beddoes : 
 
 " And must I hide these sweets not in my bosom 
 In the foul earth ! She shudders at my grasp ! 
 Just so she laid her head across my bosom 
 When first O villain ! Which way lies the grave ?" 
 
 XLV. Sudden Self -interruption bears close resem- 
 blance to the three last; when in broken sentences the 
 eddying perturbations of the soul, and its jarring inward 
 self-contradictions, are powerfully set forth. Shake- 
 speare, whom let the young orator study night and day 
 to learn the resources of eloquence, gives examples in 
 the soliloquies of" Hamlet," which seem written as if to 
 show how utterly the human spirit defies to be bound 
 in the fetters of any system or stiff theory. How un- 
 matched the following: 
 
 " That it should come to this ! 
 
 But two months dead ! nay, not so much not two. 
 So excellent a king; that was, to this, 
 Hyperion to a satyr: so loving to my mother, 
 That he might not permit the winds of heaven 
 Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth ! 
 Must I remember ? . . . And yet, within a month 
 Let me not think on't ! Frailty, thy name is woman ! 
 A little month ; or ere those shoes were old 
 With which she follow'd my poor father's body, 
 Like Niobe, all tears ; why she, even she 
 O heaven ! a beast, that wants discourse of reason, 
 Would have mourn'd longer married with my uncle, 
 My father's brother; but no more like my father, 
 Than I to Hercules." 
 
 An instance as wondrous that is, as like the almost 
 
244 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 miraculous reality of the mind, find in " Lear," act ii., scene 
 iv., Gloster's 1st speech, 15 lines. It is not that Shake- 
 speare represents the human heart. No ! He merely 
 places man before us, and lets him represent himself. 
 
 Sjr James Macintosh's speech for Peltier is very noble. 
 He asks the Attorney-General, who urged the punish- 
 ment of Peltier for a libel on Bonaparte, if it would have 
 been wrong to expose, in the strongest manner, certain 
 deeds, like Napoleon's, of previous French rulers : 
 
 "When Carrier ordered five hundred children under four- 
 teen years of age to be shot, the greater part of whom escaped 
 the fire from their size, when the poor victims ran for protec- 
 tion to the soldiers, and were bayoneted clinging round their 
 knees, would my friend but I can not pursue the strain of in- 
 terrogation. It is too much. It would be an outrage to my 
 friend. It would be an insult to human nature." 
 
 Turn again to S., " Winter's Tale," act iti., scene ii., 
 Paulina's 4th speech, line ii. " Richard III.," act v., 
 scene iii., Richard's loth speech, lines i 16. Do we often 
 hear any thing so intense as this from the pulpit ? If not, 
 why not ? Of all places under heaven, it is worse than 
 inexcusable that the grand Christian rostrum should be 
 tame. A hero of Shakespeare can say, without the 
 least exaggeration : 
 
 " A thousand hearts are great within my bosom." 
 
 Why must not every Christian orator feel constrained 
 to as much? It is remarkably evident that feelings 
 which would prompt such a whirl of interrogations and 
 breaks as Shakespeare dashes in our faces would make 
 it wholly impossible to read that part of the sermon, and 
 would necessitate a delivery as wild, abrupt, untram- 
 meled, cataract-like, as the style. 
 
 XLVI. Emblem, a thrilling figure, permit us to con- 
 dense within an extremely brief notice ; of which the 
 most beautiful, the most impressive uses might be made, 
 far more frequently than is done ; such a volume of the 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 245 
 
 poetic and of pathos can be hinted in a single emblem- 
 atic object. A magnificent instance be one as good as 
 a hundred. When man fell, Milton assures us that 
 
 " Earth trembled from her entrails, as again 
 In pangs ; and Nature gave a second groan. 
 Sky lower'd ; and, muttering thunder, some sad drops 
 Wept at completing of the mortal sin." 
 
 Or mark the force of the emblematic storm in Tenny- 
 son's " Sisters ;" a howl of tempest that raves and mad- 
 dens in every tiger-stanza : 
 
 "I kissed his eyelids into rest; 
 His ruddy cheek was on my breast; 
 
 The wind is raging in turret and tree." 
 
 Why, in the name of all that is fresh and arousing, is 
 this not oftener heard from the pulpit ? While the sum- 
 mer sunshine through the high church windows pours 
 flashingly, eloquent for God ; or over the bread in the 
 sacrament the white cloth lies, like a shroud over a 
 corpse, admirable would the effect be of leaving the em- 
 blem unapplied ; for it is well to trust something to the 
 audience. See Dr. Emmons, page 375. This we heard 
 lately, suppose though your author coins it : 
 
 " How sad the ruin of female virtue ! The purest thing hath 
 been trampled into the most polluted ! The other day the 
 pure snow from heaven lay on the pavement of a street near 
 by. How it glistened in the beam of God ! Two days after, 
 it was a soiled and sullied mass." 
 
 From the Italian of Giambatista Volpe permit your 
 author to translate for you the following sonnet, consist- 
 ing all of emblems : 
 
 "AN APPEAL TO YOUTH. 
 
 " To battle trained, the death-defying steed 
 
 Hastes fearless to the throng and din of fight. 
 But if unrein'd he loiters in the mead 
 
 Soon fades his kindling eye, his warrior might. 
 
246 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Mirror for wood-nymph's form, the streamlet leads 
 
 Down from the mountain lake its waves of light; 
 If sluggish grow their course, unsightly weeds 
 
 The life and lustre of the waters blight. 
 The gallant ship defies the flashing sea; 
 
 But lingering in the dock, the moths consume 
 Heaven-pointing mast and white sail fluttering free. 
 
 Ye young! be warn'd; lest indolence engloom 
 Your manhood in its base obscurity, 
 
 And never laurel round your forehead bloom !" 
 
 No more pathetic instance will you find than that in 
 the " Iliad," Book II., 308-332. As the serpent caught 
 and slaughtered the sparrow and her brood of eight, so 
 were the Achaeans to storm Troy after the nine years of 
 siege. The wise Odysseus dwelt all on this, in a most 
 effective speech at a most critical moment. How in- 
 structive this old and triumphant case of pleading by 
 emblem ! 
 
 As Theodore Tilton refers to the Weird, in which Mrs. 
 Browning excels, we quote from him : 
 
 " She abounds in figures, strong and striking, sometimes 
 strange and startling; sometimes grotesque and weird; often, 
 one may say, unallowable; but always having a piercing point 
 of meaning that gives warrant for their singularity. Swords 
 have not keener edges, nor flash brighter lights than the sudden 
 similes drawn by this poet's hand. She illustrates at will from 
 nature, art, mythology, history, literature, Scripture, common 
 life. She plucks metaphors wherever they grow, and, to those 
 who have eyes to see, they grow every where. Occasionally, 
 taking for granted a too great knowledge on the part of her 
 readers, even of such as are cultivated, her figures are covered 
 with dust of old books, and their meaning is hidden in a vex- 
 ing obscurity. But, on the other hand, her sentences often are 
 as clear as ice, and have a lustre of prismatic fires." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 247 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 
 PART SEVENTH. 
 
 The Weird. The Quaint. Antithesis. Epantiosis. An- 
 timetaboles. Parison or Annomination. Omoioteleuton. 
 Isocolon. Commutation. 
 
 XLVII. WE open this chapter with a turn of writing 
 capable of fine adaptations, yet needing only short no- 
 tice the Weird ; never heretofore registered as figura- 
 tive, but susceptible of effects that lie deep, and which 
 are very beautiful, though extremely difficult to define. 
 Often we feel them when we can not describe them ; as 
 in this by Horatius Bonar, a sainted Scottish clergyman: 
 
 "Beyond the smiling and the weeping, 
 
 I shall be soon. 
 
 Beyond the sowing and the reaping, 
 Beyond the waking and the sleeping, 
 
 I shall be soon. 
 Love, rest, and home ! 
 Sweet hope ! 
 Lord, tarry not, but come. 
 
 " Beyond the frost chill and the fever, 
 
 I shall be soon. 
 
 Beyond the rock waste and the river, 
 Beyond the ever and the never, 
 
 I shall be soon. 
 Love, rest, and home ! 
 Sweet hope ! 
 Lord, tarry not, but come." 
 
248 Might and Mirth of Literatiire. 
 
 If devices such as this, partly linguistic and partly of 
 thought, be hailed by you as figurative, you will feel that 
 many a figure goes much deeper into the soul than it is 
 usual to imagine. Study the poems of George Herbert 
 and of Francis Quarles for abundant examples, and the 
 " Ancient Mariner" and the " Christabel " of Coleridge, 
 in which the weird is not only the pervading spirit of 
 the whole, but marks many of the individual expressions. 
 XLVIII. The Quaint is another form of words never 
 before deemed figurative, yet fairly claiming so to be cata- 
 logued. George H. Clark indulges in a form, shall we 
 say of words, that can get itself arranged under not any 
 of the old figures when he sums up the successful re- 
 sult of a friend's application for legal damages for a 
 railway accident in this wise : 
 
 " And he writes me the result 
 
 In his quiet way as follows: 
 That his case came up before 
 
 A bench of legal scholars, 
 Who awarded him his claim 
 
 Of $1500." 
 
 XLIX. But let us not innovate too much at a time; 
 let us get back among the regular veterans. We turn 
 your attention to Antithesis, called Epantiosis, when 
 things very different are compared. Throughout the 
 Book of Proverbs, the practical man's vade-mecum, the 
 Dictionary of Good Sense, fine examples every where 
 occur. Consult the book at random. Antithesis is well 
 fitted for sarcasm, epigram, character-painting ; its strong- 
 pointed condensations make it suit the climax of ora- 
 tory ; but for the pathetic, for the tragic scenes of the 
 drama, it has too labored an air. In the writings of Dr. 
 Johnson, as in his " Rambler," it is often false, lying chief- 
 ly in the words ; in the letters of the political thunderer, 
 Junius, it is real, and lies in the images and thoughts. 
 Byron in his shorter poems is constantly using it. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 249 
 
 To begin with Pope's celebrated contrast of Virgil 
 and Homer: 
 
 "Homer was the greater genius, Virgil the better artist; in 
 the one we most admire the man, in the other the work. Ho- 
 mer hurries us with a commanding impetuosity ; Virgil leads 
 us with an attractive majesty. Homer, like the Nile, pours 
 out his riches with a sudden overflow; Virgil, like a river in 
 its banks, with a constant stream." 
 
 Equally famous Johnson's comparison of Dryden and 
 Pope ; we quote one very characteristic sentence John- 
 son all through : 
 
 " Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, 
 and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegeta- 
 tion. Pope's is the velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe and 
 leveled by the roller." 
 
 Or turn to Dr. Campbell's " Philosophy of Rhetoric/' 
 a book which it would be almost impossible to recom- 
 mend too highly: 
 
 " All art is founded on science, and the science is of little 
 value that does not serve as the foundation of some beneficial 
 art. On the most sublime of all sciences, theology and ethics, 
 is built the most important of all arts the art of living." 
 
 In another passage he has this : 
 
 " Taste consists in the power of judging, genius in the pow- 
 er of execution. Taste appreciates, genius creates." 
 
 Take an illustration from another Scotchman, Dr. 
 Thomas Chalmers, from his magnificent " Astronomical 
 Discourses ;" where he contrasts the telescope and the 
 microscope : 
 
 "The one led me to see a system in every star; the other, 
 leads me to see a world in every atom. The one taught me 
 that this mighty globe, with the whole burden of its people and 
 of its countries, is but a grain of sand in the high field of im- 
 mensity; the other teaches me that every grain of sand may 
 
250 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 number within it the tribes and the families of a busy popula- 
 tion. The one told me of the insignificance of the world I 
 tread on; the other redeems it from all its insignificance, for 
 it tells me that in the leaves of every forest, and in the flowers 
 of every garden, and in the waters of every rivulet, there are 
 worlds teeming with life, and numberless as the glories of the 
 firmament." 
 
 How excellently, then, antithesis is fitted, in the pero- 
 ration of a speech, for bringing to a focus a number of 
 scattered lights. It is in composition what the sum- 
 ming up is, exactly opposite each other, of the Dr. and 
 Cr. columns in book-keeping showing at a glance the 
 state of the whole account. Of this the admirable, the 
 brilliant Macaulay is a great master. But nothing is 
 heavier, nothing more offensive to a simple and manly 
 taste than false antithesis the fault of Seneca among 
 the Latins, of Young's " Night Thoughts " in our litera- 
 ture. Never be this figure used from the mere love of 
 balancing sentences ; never be it so strong as to exag- 
 gerate and convey false views. 
 
 Of a figure so important there are many varieties that 
 have been named. Words are repeated and. opposed in 
 the same tense or case, as when the ancient philosopher 
 said: 
 
 " I do not live that I may eat, but I eat that I may live." 
 
 This the Greeks called 
 
 L. Antimetabole. 
 
 LI. When a word is opposed to another of similar or 
 nearly similar sound but different meaning, this is Parison 
 or Annomination ; as when George Buchanan, whose 
 Latin version of the Psalms is so elegant, the renowned 
 teacher of James I. of England, terms the monks of the 
 time, not mendicant monks, but manducant monks. 
 
 LII. When there are similar syllable-endings of two 
 or more successive clauses in a sentence, there being 
 the same case or tense, this is Omoioteleuton, as in 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 251 
 
 Cicero's " Excessit, evasit, erupit ;" or in Caesar's part of 
 a letter: " Veni, vidi, vici." 
 
 LIII. Isocolon occurs when a sentence consists of mem- 
 bers of about equal length, balanced against each other, 
 as in this of Cicero: 
 
 " How triumphant he, did impudence avail as much in the 
 senate and in the courts of justice, as audacity prevailed in the 
 country and in the wilds of the province." 
 
 LIV. Commutation is the turning round of a proposi- 
 tion, as thus : 
 
 " If a poem is a speaking picture, a picture should be a si- 
 lent poem." 
 
 . This subject irresistibly reminds us of one of the short- 
 est and one of the best of books, which every young per- 
 son should buy the " Essays " of Lord Bacon, admir- 
 ably edited by Archbishop Whately ; a work of which 
 Professor Dugald Stewart has said: 
 
 " It may be read from beginning to end in a few hours, and 
 yet after the twentieth perusal one seldom fails to remark in it 
 something overlooked before." 
 
 In it you constantly meet such gems as these : 
 
 " Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and 
 writing an exact man." 
 
 But while all agree in lauding this booklet, the ponder- 
 ous tomes of Dr. John Owen, which some laud so highly, 
 are by Robert Hall branded as a " continent of mud." 
 Yet this is a saying inestimably valuable, by Owen : 
 
 "He that hath slight thoughts of sin, never had great 
 thoughts of God." 
 
 Daniel Defoe to whom boyhood owes some of its 
 brightest hours, author of the unsurpassed " Robinson 
 Crusoe " first and best of its kind ; many a volume did 
 he pen ; his a boundless wealth of homely, racy, most 
 
252 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 vigorous Saxon. He seems almost entitled to rank as 
 founder of our periodical literature ; for his Review, a 
 sheet that appeared twice a week, preceded the Tattler 
 of Steele and Addison. In the opening of his " True- 
 born Englishman" are these four lines of the church 
 and the theatre : 
 
 " Wherever God erects a house of prayer, 
 The devil always builds a chapel there; 
 And 'twill be found upon examination, 
 The latter has the larger congregation." 
 
 To many, perhaps, will be more pleasing the lines of 
 Hannah More, a lady who did excellent service to mo- 
 rality and religion toward the close of the last century : 
 
 " Since trifles are the sum of human things, 
 And half our misery from our foibles springs; 
 Since life's best joys consist in peace and ease, 
 And though but few can serve, yet all may please 
 O let the ungentle spirit learn from hence 
 A small unkindness is a great offense. 
 To spread large bounties though we wish in vain, 
 Yet all may shun the guilt of giving pain." 
 
 Or take this most weighty saying of Bishop Griswold 
 a double antithesis : 
 
 " If we are born but once, we shall die twice ; but if we are 
 born twice, we shall die but once" 
 
 a sentence which in its meaning and in its style reminds 
 us of the writings of the Latin Father, Augustine, which 
 run over with the noblest truths put antithetically. 
 
 Pope Gregory First refuses us not a noble antithe- 
 sis: 
 
 " When we pray for everlasting life with the mouth, and do 
 not desire it in the heart, our cry is a silence; when we long 
 for it out of the abundance of the heart, our silence is a cry, 
 which does not reach human ears, yet fills the ears of God." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 253 
 
 In the subjoined from Bayne's valuable " Essays " we 
 find a truth of high value in criticism : 
 
 " Memory and imagination are essentially distinct. The one 
 is, indeed, the handmaid of the other the serviceable, the in- 
 dispensable handmaid ; but the handmaid can not change 
 places with the mistress. Memory brings the materials and 
 lays them out; it may be in systematic arrangement; it may 
 be in chaotic disorder. Imagination looks upon them, and 
 they are grouped into unity or spring into life. Mere mechan- 
 ical order becomes living harmony; and disorder subsides into 
 a world. All those lights of natural beauty, all those truths 
 of symmetry and form which the Greek imagination embodied 
 in Aphrodite, could be catalogued and counted over by mem- 
 ory. The bend of the sea-wave ; the white foam mantling in 
 the sunlight into rose-bloom; the laughing light that danced 
 in a thousand smiles over the broad front of Ocean, might all 
 have been chronicled, yet remained forever dead and apart. 
 But imagination comes upon the scene. Lo ! the bending 
 wave is a moving arm ; the snow of the foam and the tints 
 of its rainbows blend in a living cheek; the many-twinkling 
 laughter of the sea is gathered into the witching eye of Aphro- 
 dite'." 
 
 We shall next take a few examples of how well-fitted 
 this great figure is for character-painting. We introduce 
 to you one whom Byron, too flatteringly, styled " Nat- 
 ure's sternest painter, but her best," the Rev. George 
 Crabbe, whose biography will present to you as hard and 
 as victorious a life-battle, through extremest difficulties, 
 to honor, usefulness, and peace, as the history of genius 
 and worth ever exhibited. He thus delineates the 
 almshouse physician : 
 
 " But soon a loud and hasty summons calls, 
 Shakes the thin roof and echoes round the walls ; 
 Anon a figure enters, quaintly neat, 
 All pride and business, bustle and conceit; 
 With looks unaltered by these scenes of woe; 
 With speed that, entering, speaks his haste to go. 
 
254 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 He bids the gazing throng around him fly, 
 And carries fate and physic in his eye; 
 A potent quack long versed in human ills, ' 
 Who first insults the victim whom he kills; 
 Whose murderous hand a drowsy bench protect, 
 And whose most tender mercy is neglect." 
 
 Dryden's character of the Duke of Buckingham 
 let next flit before your vision. What power is in 
 it! 
 
 " A man so various, that he seem'd to be, 
 Not one, but all mankind's epitome. 
 Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong; 
 Was every thing by starts, and nothing long 
 But in the course of one revolving moon, 
 Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon. 
 Then all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking, 
 Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking. 
 Blest madman, who could every hour employ 
 With something new to wish or to enjoy. 
 Railing or praises were his usual themes, 
 And both to show his judgment in extremes. 
 So over-violent or over-civil, 
 That every man with him was God or devil. 
 Squandering of wealth was his peculiar art; 
 Nothing went unrewarded but desert." 
 
 In our American poesy few contrasts more striking 
 than that which reigns in Dana's " Buccaneer." The 
 island, once the haunt of pirates and of murder, is now 
 a home of Sabbath-bells and love : 
 
 " But when the light winds lie at rest, 
 
 And on the glassy heaving sea 
 The black duck with her glossy breast 
 
 Sits swinging silently 
 How beautiful ! No ripples break the reach, 
 And silvery waves go noiseless up the beach. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 255 
 
 " Nor holy bell, nor pastoral bleat, 
 
 In former days, were in the vale. 
 Flapped in the gale the pirate's sheet. 
 
 Curses were on the gale. 
 
 Rich goods lay on the sand, and murdered men ; 
 Pirate and wrecker kept their revels then." 
 
 Let us now betake us to prose for a few illustrations. 
 The Rev. Julius Hare gives us this: 
 
 " To Adam paradise was a home ; to the good among his 
 descendants, home is a paradise." 
 
 From Bishop Pearson on the " Creed " we take the 
 following : 
 
 " The corn by which we live, and for want of which we per- 
 ish with famine, is cast upon the earth and buried in the 
 ground, with a design that it may corrupt, and, being corrupt- 
 ed, may revive and multiply. Our bodies are fed by this con- 
 stant experiment, and we continue this present life by a suc- 
 cession of resurrections. And is it imaginable that God should 
 thus restore all things to man, and not restore man to him- 
 self?" 
 
 Of gunpowder and printing, the sixth American Pres- 
 ident writes thus ably : 
 
 " Perhaps if a reflecting man were required to point out the 
 two incidents which have had the most extensive influence 
 upon the history of nations and the happiness of private life 
 since the foundation of Christianity, he would name gunpowder 
 and printing. They effected a total revolution in the manage- 
 ment of the two great engines which operate upon human ac- 
 tion force and reason. To the application of physical force, 
 gunpowder gave a concentration of activity and energy which 
 had never before been known. To the operation of intellectu- 
 al power, printing added the advantages of multiplicity and dis- 
 semination. By the composition of gunpowder, matter seemed 
 sublimed into soul. By the process of printing, soul derived 
 new vigor by the vesture of matter." 
 
256 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Tassoni, by investing his antithesis with surprisal, 
 adds new power to it, as in his " Bucket :" 
 
 " Now issuing from the Ram the sun forth showers 
 
 On the cold clouds his radiant archery; 
 Earth shone in turn like heaven, the skies like flowers ; 
 
 And every wind fell sleeping on the sea; 
 Only the zephyr with his gentle powers 
 
 Moved the soft herbage on the flowery lea. 
 Nightingales murmur'd still their loves and pities 
 
 And jackasses commenced their amorous ditties." 
 
 We all feel at once how sweet is the contrast, verbal 
 and in fact, stated by the Latin Father, St. Bernard, Ab- 
 bot of Clairvaux : 
 
 "God is without passion, but not without compassion." 
 
 And how impressive the way taken in the subjoined of 
 urging on the heart the sad absence of the loved, by 
 stating the presence of the unloved and undesired; when 
 a youth slain in fight returns not home 
 
 " His mother from the window looked, 
 
 With all the longing of a mother; 
 His little sister weeping walked 
 
 The greenwood path to meet her brother. 
 They sought him east, they sought him west, 
 
 They sought him all the forest thorough : 
 They only saw the cloud of night; 
 
 They only heard the roar of Yarrow." 
 
 Bishop Earle's " Microcosmography " is an old and 
 forgotten work that ought to be republished. How 
 many a spirited antithesis in the following portrait 
 " The Clown :" 
 
 "The plain country fellow is one that manures the ground 
 well, but lets himself lie fallow and untilled. He seems to have 
 the punishment of a Nebuchadnezzar, for his conversation is 
 among beasts, and his talons none of the shortest, only he eats 
 not grass, because he loves not sallets. His mind is not much 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 257 
 
 distracted with objects ; but if a good fat cow come in his way, 
 he stands dumb and astonished though his haste be never so 
 great, and will fix here half an hour's conversation. His habita- 
 tion is some poor thatched roof, distinguished from his barn by 
 the loop-holes that let out smoke ; which the rain had long since 
 washed through, but for the double ceiling of bacon which has 
 hung there from his grandsire's time, and has yet to make rash- 
 ers for posterity. His dinner is his other work, for he sweats at 
 it as much as at his labor; he is a terrible fastener on a piece 
 of beef. He is capable but of two prayers for rain and fair 
 weather. His compliment with his neighbor is a good thump 
 on the back. He is sensible of no calamity but the burning 
 of a stack of corn or the overflowing of a meadow, and thinks 
 Noah's flood the greatest plague that ever was, not because it 
 drowned the world, but because it spoiled the grass." 
 
 An instance or two of overdone antithesis may now 
 be useful, especially if from an author apt to allure us to 
 imitate him too much. In the following from Macau- 
 lay's wonderful "History" you will feel an excess that 
 makes the style heavy and monotonous : 
 
 " Drawn in opposite directions by the charm of habit and 
 by the charm of novelty. Two rival confederacies of states- 
 men : a confederacy zealous for authority and antiquity, and a 
 confederacy zealous for liberty and progress." 
 
 Such a constant see-saw and balancing of clauses such 
 an artificial contrast and repetition of sounds, becomes 
 a great blemish, especially in a long historical work. 
 
 Our treatment of this figure would be utterly incom- 
 plete, unless attention were directed to the circumstance, 
 evident in many of the above extracts, that the contrast 
 may, with the most powerful effect, be made to lie in 
 the opposition of situations, or of personal characters. 
 There is much of this in Nature ; and literature should 
 image Nature. There is the shaggy mountain and the 
 smooth clover-field. There is the rock, storm-defiant; 
 and the well, moss-circled. Thus in Spain's greatest lit- 
 
 R 
 
258 Might and Mirth of Liter at^lre. 
 
 erary product, the never-to-be-surpassed " Don Quixote," 
 by Cervantes ; there runs through it all the living antith- 
 eses, between the Don the disinterested, dreamy hero 
 and Sancho Panza, sly, selfish, shrewd, vulgar-minded, 
 whose dreams are never of glory, but of beef and bacon, 
 like those of Cuddie Headrigg. Nothing in a drama can 
 be more important than this contrast of characters, as 
 when in Schiller's great tragedy of " Wallenstein'," so 
 almost incomparably translated by Coleridge, the two 
 lovers, Max and Thekla, shine in calm, star-like beauty, 
 purity, love, in touching contrast with the licentious or 
 ambitious or traitor-like denizens of a tumultuous camp. 
 No writer surpasses Shakespeare in this. The old, nar- 
 row school of critics long derided his introducing scenes 
 of broad humor into his tragedies, into even his four 
 greatest and severest" Lear," " Othello," " Macbeth," 
 " Hamlet ;" but, despite of the clever shallowness of Vol- 
 taire, all now admit this mingling of mirth and sorrow 
 to be no more than what occurs in actual life. The woe 
 is thus deepened by contrast. The tears have their fount 
 close to the laughter. The mad pranks of the fool in 
 "Lear" reveal more clearly the utter desolation of the 
 outraged and houseless king and father. So in the " Win- 
 ter (^ightjs Tale," how delightful the contrast between 
 the former part, which introduces us to a royal court, and 
 the latter part, which leads us into a shepherd's cottage, 
 where a sweet shepherdess reigns queen over hearts. So 
 it is in " Cymbeline." But let us select a specimen. 
 Open with us act i., scene vi., of " Macbeth." After wild 
 incidents of storm and battle, when the raven shrieks 
 till he is hoarse, and supernatural beings, whose wild, 
 dim forms baffle description and even conception, meet 
 at their rites of hell, on a heath, in thunder and in hail, 
 and immediately before the midnight assassination of a 
 generous and confiding king, the following dialogue is 
 inserted, between Duncan and Banquo, as they arrive 
 before the walls*of Macbeth's castle : 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 259 
 
 "Duncan. This castle hath a pleasant seat. The air 
 Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself 
 Unto our gentle senses. 
 
 "Banquo. This guest of summer, 
 
 The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, 
 By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath 
 Smells wooingly here. No jutty frieze, buttress, 
 Nor coigne of vantage, but this bird hath made 
 His pendent bed, and procreant cradle. Where they 
 Most breed and haunt, I have observed, the air 
 Is delicate." 
 
 Excellent the remark of the great painter, Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds, on this passage : 
 
 " This short dialogue has always appeared to me. a striking 
 instance of what in painting is termed repose." 
 
 Similarly, Homer, after a battle, while the blood of the 
 slain yet lies wet on the ground, often introduces a rural 
 image. The unsurpassed picturings of harvest joys and 
 of the operations of quiet art, in his description- of the 
 figures on the wondrous shield of Achilles, are inter- 
 posed so as to have the finest antithetic effect. 
 
 We can not refrain from throwing in here these words 
 of strange power from Clarence's dream in Shakespeare. 
 The doomed prince, whose death is near, is asleep ; but 
 sleepless is his mind. A vision flits before him ; thus he 
 tells of what he saw what a glimpse unsurpassed ! 
 
 " There came wandering by 
 A shadow like an angel; with bright hair 
 Dabbled in blood." 
 
 Let us throw together a few antitheses given in few 
 words. Saith H.W. Beecher of our Greatest Friend: 
 
 " He came into this world, not by the palace door, but by the 
 stable door." 
 
 Says Jackson the painter : 
 
 " Whatever is worth doing for the sake of example, is worth 
 doing for its own sake." 
 
260 Might and Mirth of Liter atiire. 
 
 From De la Rue, in his great sermon, " The Dying 
 Sinner," hear what he utters of a death-bed repentance : 
 
 " Produce me one solitary instance from Scripture. St. Ber- 
 nard finds but one: that of the thief upon the cross. I con- 
 fess that this is a very great sinner, but is he a hardened sin- 
 ner ? This moment is the last of his life ; but, says Eusebius, it 
 is the first of his calling. You blame the tardiness of his con- 
 version. I, says St. Ambrose, admire the promptitude of it." 
 
 Halleck, last of all, enables us to close with antithesis 
 and surprisal ; leading us on a trip to Alnwick Castle, a 
 seat of the Dukes of Northumberland : 
 
 " You'll ask if yet the Percy lives 
 
 In the armed pomp of feudal state? 
 The present representatives 
 
 Of Hotspur and his gentle Kate, 
 Are some half-dozen serving-men 
 In the drab coat of William Penn; 
 A chambermaid, whose lip, and eye, 
 And cheek, and brown hair, bright and curling, 
 
 Spoke Nature's aristocracy; 
 And one, half groom, half seneschal, 
 Who bowed me through court, bower, and hall, 
 From donjon-keep to turret-wall, 
 
 For ten and sixpence sterling !" 
 
 The feeling that, in closing this chapter, ought to be 
 left on the mind by the many various forms of excel- 
 lence exemplified by so many quotations, is this that 
 the choicest things in literature are such as awaken a 
 response in the common heart. The " Elegy in a Coun- 
 try Church-yard," by Gray, and " The Cotter's Satur- 
 day Night," by Burns, are two of such pieces. How it 
 enheartens those who believe in the progress of man ; in 
 his emancipation from war, alcohol, and pollution, to see 
 glorious literature and the Divine Cross manifestly form- 
 ing and addressing a common and universal brother- 
 hood; that the tendency to diversities of language is 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 261 
 
 plainly past its worst; that the truths of Calvary and 
 the loveliest thoughts of the finest thinkers are work- 
 ing in harmony to expand all minds into the enjoyment 
 of a vast body of common faiths, and a vast body of in- 
 tellectual products, owned in common, as a wealth in 
 which all can exult. 
 
 We close this chapter with a few figures put together 
 in disorder, purposely, in review. 
 
 George S. Hillard gives us this passage: 
 
 " The poet's visions of evening are all compact of tender 
 and soothing images. It brings the wanderer to his home, the 
 child to his mother's arms; the ox to his stall, and the weary 
 laborer to his rest. * But to the gentle-hearted youth who is 
 throvyn upon the rocks of a pitiless city, and stands homeless 
 amid a thousand homes, the approach of evening brings with it 
 an aching sense of loneliness and desolation which comes down 
 upon the spirit like darkness upon the earth. In this mood his 
 best impulses become a snare to him, and he is led astray be- 
 cause he is social, affectionate, sympathetic, and warm-hearted. 
 If there be a young man thus circumstanced within the sound 
 of my voice, let me say to him that books are the friends of the 
 friendless, and that a library is a home of the homeless." 
 
 Dr. Thomas Brown, the celebrated successor of Pro- 
 fessor Dugald Stewart in Edinburgh, thus speaks : 
 
 " The proud look down upon the earth, and see nothing that 
 creeps upon its surface more noble than themselves. The hum- 
 ble look upward to their God." 
 
 Thomas Randolph, the dramatist, a contemporary of 
 Shakespeare, presents us with this : 
 
 "Justice like lightnings ever should appear 
 To few men's ruin, but to all men's fear." 
 
 Mary Howitt bestows on us a very deft enallage an 
 adjective for a noun. His taste is still numb, to whom 
 this little matter imparts not an exquisite thrill; he 
 
262 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 is much to be pitied, whom tiny beauties do not de- 
 light: 
 
 " Little streams have flowers a many, 
 Graceful, beautiful, as any." 
 
 From Robert Southwell, in Elizabeth's reign, accept 
 of a striking ellipsis ; he died on the scaffold : 
 
 " I read the label underneath, 
 
 That telleth me whereto I must; 
 I see the sentence too that saith, 
 Remember, man, thou art but dust." 
 
 A teacher of Botany, a science of the beautiful, some- 
 times throws together a confusion of flowers, and asks 
 the students to classify them. Let the teacher of style 
 occasionally treat figures in the same way. He will find 
 intentional confusion very useful. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 263 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 
 PART EIGHTH. 
 
 Intentional Discrepancy. Nonsense. Oxymoron, or Wise 
 Folly. Euphemism. Misnomer. Hyperbole. Change 
 of Usage. 
 
 LV. INTENTIONAL DISCREPANCY next deserves men- 
 tion on our list of figures. Thus S. : 
 
 " The work we have in hand, 
 Most bloody, fiery, and most terrible," 
 
 Why is the "most" left out before fiery? With delib- 
 erate intention, to humor our love of variety ; to avoid 
 a monotonous return of the same construction. Who 
 but derives an agreeable sensation from it ? S., " Julius 
 Caesar," act ii., scene i., Brutus's 2Oth speech, last line. 
 So when Octavius Caesar, in " Antony and Cleopatra," 
 says: 
 
 " Farewell, my dearest sister, fare thee well." 
 
 Again, in " Hamlet," act ii., scene ii., lines 33, 34 ; " Meas- 
 ure for Measure," act ii., scene ii., Angelo's I7th speech, 
 line 3. 
 
 Denis Florence Maccarthy thus expostulates in be- 
 half of Ireland. Mark the last of the four lines, "And 
 they perish," instead of" and they are perishing:" 
 
 "They are dying they are dying, where the golden corn is 
 
 growing; 
 
 They are dying they are dying, where the crowded herds 
 are lowing; 
 
264 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 They are gasping for existence where the streams of life are 
 
 flowing; 
 And they perish of the plague where the breeze of life is 
 
 blowing." 
 
 LVI. Nonsense ; shall we dignify thai: with a place 
 on our list ? Assuredly will vote for doing so every one 
 who hath at all duly noticed what admirable and wise 
 uses it can be, and often is, put to, though never before 
 in rhetoric has it been so highly honored. How deeply 
 does clever or quaint nonsense abide in the memory, 
 and for how many a decade from earliest youth to age's 
 most venerable years. You see how sweet and dear it 
 is to unsophisticated human nature, in the fact that, in 
 all nations, nurses sing nonsense verses to the babes they 
 fondle. We had not been in Savannah, Georgia, one hour, 
 till we heard rhymes that had been familiar to us on the 
 banks of the Clyde ; and we heard them with delight : 
 
 " Zickaty, dickaty, deck, 
 The mouse ran up the clock. 
 The clock struck one, 
 Down the mouse run 
 Zickaty, dickaty, dock." 
 
 See Hood's inimitable letter to a child, quoted farther 
 on in this chapter. Burns is not without a specimen : 
 
 " Ken ye aught o' Captain Grose ? 
 
 Igo and ago. 
 If he's 'mang his freens or foes ? 
 
 Iram, coram, dago. 
 Is he slain by Highlan' bodies ? 
 
 Igo and ago ; 
 And eaten like a wether-haggis ? 
 
 Iram, coram, dago." 
 
 An old ballad before the Reformation, attacking the 
 Romish clergy, and such popular ballads were numer- 
 ous, has for its refrain : 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 265 
 
 " Sing hey trix, 
 Trim go trix, 
 Under the greenwood tree." 
 
 A celebrated political ballad of William, the great Lib- 
 erator, is known by a nonsense chorus : 
 
 "Lilliburlero bullin a-la." 
 
 LVII. By an easy transition, Wise Folly, or Oxymoron, 
 comes next, according to which words of contrary sig- 
 nification are united, thus producing a seeming contra- 
 diction ; as when Horace speaks of a " strenuous idle- 
 ness;" or Ben Jonson of the " liquid marble" of poetry. 
 Cicero, Rome's chief of orators, says to Catiline : 
 
 "Thy country, silent, addresses thee thus." 
 Milton shows to Despair 
 
 "In the lowest depth a lower depth." 
 Tennyson lauds 
 
 " A deedful life j a silent voice." 
 
 The voice, silent in one respect, that is, to the outward 
 ear, speaks to the admiring minds of those who mark 
 the heavenward course of a life that abounds in noble 
 deeds. Addison, in his well-known hymn, explains the 
 grounds on which this figure rests : 
 
 " What though in solemn silence all 
 Move round the dark terrestrial ball ? 
 What though no real voice nor sound 
 Amidst their radiant orbs be found ? 
 In Reason's ear they all rejoice, 
 And utter forth a glorious voice ; 
 Forever singing as they shine 
 ' The Hand that made us is divine.' " 
 
 In Sidney's very interesting " Life of the Rev. Row- 
 land Hill," we meet with this statement by Hill, very 
 momentous: 
 
266 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Many are willing to be justified, but desire not to be sancti- 
 fied. Not so with me. I can say of justification and sancti- 
 fication, like the child who replied, when asked which he loved 
 best, his father or his mother ' I love them both best.' " 
 
 Or, as George Macdonald has it : 
 "Jesus is more Man than any man." 
 
 John Trumbull, a poet of the Revolutionary War, is 
 the author of " McFingal," an imitation of " Hudibras " 
 a very able one. The hero is a Scotch justice of the 
 peace, near Boston ; the whole three cantos are very in- 
 teresting. Here comes a good oxymoron : 
 
 " Not only saw he all that was, 
 But much that never came to pass 
 Whereby all prophets far outwent he, 
 Though former days produced a plenty ; 
 For any man with half an eye 
 What stands before him may espy; 
 But optics sharp it needs, I ween, 
 To see what is not to be seen." 
 
 Very finely expressed was Mrs. Barbauld's line, ener- 
 getic in a high degree, as every thing of hers is. Of a 
 night of stars, when not a wind moves the leaves when 
 not a cloud specks the moonlight or dims the dome, she 
 exclaims : 
 
 " How deep the silence, yet how loud the praise." 
 
 Thomas Hood, in another vein, informs us that when 
 Sally Brown beheld young Ben hauled off to sea by a 
 press-gang, she cried, after fainting and coming to again : 
 
 " ' And is he gone ? And is he gone ?' 
 
 She cried, and wept outright ; 
 1 Then I will to the water go, 
 And see him out of sight.' " 
 
 Nor does Sir Henry Wotton go too far when he af- 
 firms: 
 
Figiires of Rhetoric. 267 
 
 " How happy is the born and taught, 
 
 That serveth not another's will; 
 Whose armor is his honest thought, 
 
 And simple truth his utmost skill. 
 This man is freed from servile bands 
 
 Of hope to rise or fear to fall ; 
 Lord of himself, though not of lands, 
 
 And having nothing, yet hath all." 
 
 See Matt, xvi., 25 ; Mark viii., 35 ; Isa. Ixv., 20. 
 
 In the style of St. Paul, full of sudden Demosthenic 
 turns and condensations of thought, some very daring 
 oxymorons meet us ; as when he says : 
 
 " We preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling- 
 block and to the Greeks foolishness; but the foolishness of 
 God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger 
 than men." "When I am weak, then am I strong." "In 
 nothing am I behind the very chiefest apostles, though I be 
 nothing." " God has chosen the foolish things of the world to 
 confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of 
 the world to confound the things which are mighty, and base 
 things of the world and things which are despised, hath God 
 chosen, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that 
 are." "Approving ourselves as the ministers of God; as de- 
 ceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well-known ; as 
 dying, and behold we live; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; 
 as poor, yet making many rich ; as having nothing, and yet 
 possessing all things." 
 
 Nowhere in literature do we find stronger examples of 
 a soul almost overcharged with force, working through a 
 forceful style, than in the writings of the great apostolic 
 intellect. Our common version not half does justice to 
 that massiveness, depth of meaning, and consummate 
 mastery of all rhetorical resources, by which is character- 
 ized the style of this Heaven-sent Demosthenes, who yet 
 depicted himself by that wondrous 'Greek adjective of 
 \\iSjElahisteros a superlative compared: " Less than 
 the least." The humility of that greatest apostle tries 
 
268 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 to its uttermost the powers of that greatest language. 
 See Rev. xi., 24 ; Matt, vi., 23. 
 
 A fine example we have from Coventry Patmore, who 
 possesses eminently the power he prays for : 
 
 " Thou Primal Love, who grantest wings 
 
 And voices to the woodland birds, 
 Grant me the power of saying things 
 Too simple and too sweet for words." 
 
 An historical truth, far too sadly true, is that of Ed- 
 mund Burke, again attested by Sedan and the Com- 
 mune: 
 
 " The French have shown themselves the greatest architects 
 of ruin that have hitherto existed in the world." 
 
 And weighty that bold stanza of Dr. Young on man's 
 need of God, and dissatisfaction till he finds his Father 
 and his aim : 
 
 " Give man Earth's empire if no more, 
 
 He's beggar'd and undone ; 
 Imprison'd in unbounded space, 
 Benighted by the sun." 
 
 Colonel Higginson says wisely of Herbert Spencer: 
 
 " His is what Talleyrand calls the weakness of omniscience, 
 which prompts him to write on all subjects." 
 
 In Bossuet's " Pulpit Discourses," as in those of Mas- 
 sillon and Bourdaloue, are many of the noblest senti- 
 ments of Christianity, expressed with astonishing sub- 
 limity and beauty. Bossuet, on the Death of Conde, 
 speaks of 
 
 " Columns which appear as if they would bear to heaven the 
 magnificent evidence of our emptiness." 
 
 In a very skillful fable, " The Mysterious Stranger," 
 by Jane Taylor, the hero of the piece, rejoicing in the 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 269 
 
 hope of those heavens to which a believing death is the 
 entrance, exclaims : 
 
 "What a favor is this which is granted me, in being sent to 
 inhabit a planet in which I can die." 
 
 Miss Martineau, in another and lower vein that suits 
 her, in her " Society in America," specifies certain Amer- 
 icanisms that may rank as oxymorons ; as that of the 
 sick man relieved of pain but left very weak, who said : 
 
 " I am powerful weak, but cruel easy." 
 
 So we sometimes hear of " a dreadful fine day." Or let 
 us enjoy Coleridge's reply to the lady who asked him if 
 he believed in ghosts : 
 
 " No, madam ; I have seen too many to believe in them." 
 
 Or, once more ascending, let us listen to Richard Wat- 
 son, the great Methodist, when he says, in a noble ser- 
 mon, " Man magnified by the Divine Regard :" 
 
 " Those who deny immortality, make the volume close at the 
 preface." 
 
 And again : 
 
 " Insects and reptiles, the rank which the ambition of Infi- 
 delity would assign to man." 
 
 Nay, let Dr. Hitchcock eloquently mould our opin- 
 ions: 
 
 "The Divine Mind is the ocean from which all truth orig- 
 inally sprang, and to which it ultimately returns. To trace out 
 the shores of that shoreless sea; to measure its measureless 
 extent, and to fathom its unfathomable depths, will be the noble 
 and joyous work of eternal ages." 
 
 S., " Romeo and Juliet," act iii., scene v., Juliet's- 6th 
 speech, line 3. 
 
 LVIII. Euphemism, or the Smooth Handle, is a figure 
 much employed by the peculiarly polite, who wish to 
 
270 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 convey a harsh truth as gently as they can. The Latin 
 word for thief is fur ; so they called a thief " a man of 
 three letters." 2 Sam. xviii., 32. A delicate instance 
 occurs in the " Revenger's Tragedy," by Cyril Tourneur. 
 Castiga's mother and brother have been counseling her 
 to abandon herself to a shameful career. Thereupon 
 she cries : 
 
 " False ! I defy you both. 
 I have endured you with an ear of fire ; 
 Your tongues have struck hot irons on my face. 
 Mother ! come from that poisonous woman there ! 
 "Mother. Where ? 
 "Cos. Do you not see her? She's too inward, then." 
 
 " She's too inward, then," is a softer phrase for " she is 
 thyself." So Burns speaks of 
 
 " An honest wabster to his trade, 
 Whase wife's twa neives were scarce weel-bred." 
 
 He affirms here, euphemistically, that her two fists were 
 well acquainted with her husband's ears. 
 
 Colonel Grahame, of Claverhouse, afterward Viscount 
 Dundee, too well known to Scottish Presbyterians as 
 " Bloody Clavers," whose courage and his zeal for the 
 bigoted Stuart kings have exalted him into a hero, in 
 the view of Sir Walter Scott and Professor Aytoun, but 
 whose murderous slaughter of a godly peasantry should 
 make his name Satanic, attacked at Drumclog a party 
 of country people met for worship on the moor. How- 
 ever, they were men who trusted in God, and kept their 
 powder dry. As he galloped off in ignominious flight, a 
 clergyman, Mr. King, whom he had with him a prisoner, 
 but whom he was compelled to let go, shouted after the 
 fleeing hero-murderer : 
 
 "Ho, Colonel, will you not stay for the afternoon's sermon." 
 
 "Afternoon's sermon" is "a smooth handle" put on an- 
 other volley of Presbyterian bullets. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 271 
 
 LIX. Misnomer, as we venture to call it, may be used 
 with good effect. We find this newly named figure hon- 
 ored by our Saviour's use ; for what figure did he not 
 use ? exhausting all appliances of language to reach our 
 consciences. See John iv., 16-18. In Shakespeare it is 
 said over dead Cleopatra : 
 
 " Now boast thee, Death ! In thy possession lies 
 A lass unparallel'd." 
 
 Similarly Romeo says of the flies of Verona, who were 
 not banished from that fair city, while he was : 
 
 " They are free men, but I am banished." 
 
 LX. Hyperbole, or Exaggeration, we come to now. 
 See Matt, iii.,9; Gal. iv., 14, 15; Matt, xix., 24; xxiii., 24; 
 Luke xix., 40, 44 ; Ezek. ii., 9 ; xxxii., 4-6 ; S., " Antony 
 and Cleopatra," act v., scene ii., Cleopatra's I3th and I4th 
 speeches. We purposely abstain from more quotations 
 from him. Shakespeare's hyperboles are unspeakably 
 beautiful and kingly ; nay, they satisfy our idea of the 
 language of an archangel ; be stimulated to go in quest 
 of them for yourselves; make the doing so one entire 
 exercise. One hundred of his hyperboles. We give 
 you, instead, one from the dainty Greek singer Anacre- 
 on, as translated by Abraham Cowley, respecting the 
 grasshopper : 
 
 " Man for thee doth sow and plow, 
 Farmer he and landlord thou. 
 Thee country hinds with gladness hear, 
 Prophet of the ripened year." 
 
 This may often be essentially the language of truth, for 
 that which is an exaggerated statement of the matter 
 of fact may be no more than a fair statement of the mat- 
 ter of feeling ; so that, without hyperbole, it might be 
 impossible to show the strong view you are taking of 
 things the enthusiasm that hurries you along. In the 
 Bible itself we meet many striking instances ; as might 
 
272 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 be expected in a glowing Oriental style. Deut. ix., I ; 
 Job xx., 6, 7; John iv., 21, 29. Take the closing verse 
 of John's Gospel : 
 
 "And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the 
 which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even 
 the world itself could not contain the books that should be 
 written." 
 
 The defense of such expressions is easy ; it is proper for 
 the Scripture to speak in a way natural to man. It is 
 natural to man to speak of the sun rising and setting. 
 Sir Isaac Newton himself, in his ordinary talk, did the 
 same ; and the Bible is far above the foppery of scien- 
 tific terms stuck into its style, which breathes the unaf- 
 fected homeliness of daily life ; yet a handful of narrow- 
 minded critics object because the Book, meant for all 
 the world, uses the language of common -sense, and 
 speaks as all the world speaks. That hyperboles come 
 instinctively to us all, witness how often we use them. 
 We say of a great talker, " There is no end of his talk ;" 
 when something very bad is done by a man, we are told 
 that every body is down on him ; Bridget cries, " I'll be 
 there with the coals in less than no time." There is, 
 too, the close of our letters, " Your most obedient serv- 
 ant ;" nay, there is the French style of hyper-politeness, 
 " I am charmed and ravished to see you, my dearest 
 friend." Let Fletcher's "Faithful Shepherdess" afford 
 us a string of examples : 
 
 " O you are fairer far 
 
 Than the chaste blushing morn, or that fair star 
 That guides the wandering seamen through the deep ; 
 Straighter than straightest pine upon the steep 
 Head of an aged mountain ; and more white 
 Than the new milk we strip before daylight 
 From the full-freighted bags of our fair flocks ; 
 Your hair more beautiful than those hanging locks 
 Of young Apollo." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 273 
 
 Mark in the preceding the tasteful choice of circum- 
 stances ; the pellucid elegance of the language ; its spring- 
 iness and elasticity, like the bound of the roe along a 
 moss-grown forest pathway ; the freedom and melody of 
 the versification, as line melts into line, far surpassing the 
 much more monotonous melody of Pope. Some of the 
 poets of the sixteenth century were of a far more brill- 
 iant rank than the correct drawing-room writers of the 
 eighteenth. But Thomson, Cowper, and Burns arose, 
 and talented commonplace disappeared. 
 
 Hope's " Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Modern Greek," 
 is one of the most eloquent novels in our language. 
 Anastasius commits a murder; and thus tells us how 
 deep was his remorse : 
 
 " In the silent darkness of the night I saw the pale phantom 
 of my friend stalk round my watchful couch, covered with gore 
 and dust; and during even the unavailing riots of the day I 
 still beheld the spectre rise over the festive board, glare on me 
 with piteous look, and hand me whatever I attempted to reach. 
 But whatever it presented seemed blasted by its touch. To 
 my wine it gave the taste of blood; and to my bread the rank 
 flavor of death." 
 
 How naturally, then, does vehement passion color its 
 statements with hyperbole ! Grammar gives us but three 
 degrees of comparison the positive, the comparative, 
 the superlative. But passion is ever seeking for a fourth ; 
 and hyperbole comes to the aid of passion to help it to 
 utter all its laboring breast. But wit and burlesque are 
 as much indebted to this figure as vehement emotion is. 
 In Sheridan's sparkling opera, the " Duenna," Isaac says 
 of a proud beauty : 
 
 "The very rustling of her silks has a disdainful sound." 
 He describes a certain lady as 
 
 "An old woman endeavoring to put herself back into a girl;" 
 while another lady he calls 
 
274 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " A pretty woman studying looks, and trying to recollect an 
 ogle, like Lady A., who has learned to play her eyelids like 
 Venetian blinds." 
 
 Said one of his deacons to the Rev. Robert Hall : 
 
 " I understand you are going to marry Miss M." " I marry 
 Miss M. !" quoth the eloquent preacher; "I would as soon 
 marry Beelzebub's eldest daughter, and go home and live with 
 the old folks." 
 
 In Ireland a man very sharp is said to be as shrewd 
 as the famous fox of Ballybotherem, that read the news- 
 papers every morning to find out where the hounds were 
 to meet. Rabelais, who had some wit, and an unlimited 
 supply of the abominable, introduces to his readers the 
 Giant Gorgantua, as the gentleman who often ate 
 
 " Six pilgrims in a salad." 
 
 Butler assures us that Hudibras was chokeful of learn- 
 ing: 
 
 " Besides, 'tis known he could speak Greek 
 As naturally as pigs squeak ; 
 That Latin was no more difficile, 
 Than for a blackbird 'tis to whistle." 
 
 And, making his bow to the charmer he is in quest of, 
 he tells her: 
 
 " Madam ! I do, as is my duty, 
 Honor the shadow of thy shoe-tie." 
 
 Curious it is to find how this genius for exaggeration 
 is an old quality in the Saxon blood. Read Dasent's 
 admirable translation of the " Norse Tales." Thus Thor 
 and his companions one night see a house wide open. 
 They go in. It has one large hall, very large, and a con- 
 siderable closet. After staying there all night, they 
 found in the morning that this house is the glove of a 
 giant, the closet being the place for the thumb. 
 
 For an exhaustless crop, *>f. hyperboles, read, and buy 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 275 
 
 that you may read frequently, Charles Lamb's volume 
 of " Extracts from the Elizabethan Dramatists." Thus, 
 in Poole's " David and Bathsheba," the king exclaims: 
 
 " To joy her love, I'll build a kingly bower, 
 Seated in hearing of a hundred streams." 
 
 The boldest dramatic genius before Shakespeare was 
 Christopher Marlowe, a youth of wild life and of most 
 miserable end. In a drunken brawl, his opponent wrest- 
 ed his own dagger from him, and pierced him through 
 the eye into the brain. Thus writes he of Hero ; with 
 a flush and flow of youth and of ocean that are buoyant 
 and delightful: 
 
 "At Sestos Hero dwelt Hero the fair; 
 Whom young Apollo courted for her hair, 
 And offered as a dower his burning throne ! 
 Some say for her the fairest Cupid pined, 
 And looking in her face was stricken blind 
 So lovely fair was Hero, Venus' nun." 
 
 What a tempest of magnificence in the following of his : 
 
 " The horse that guide the golden eye of Heaven, 
 And blow the morning from their nostrils !'" 
 
 Mark here, as we pass, the curious bent in our English 
 to use the singular for the plural. " Sheep " is used in- 
 stead of " sheeps." We say " two thousand " for " two 
 thousands." So Marlowe here uses "horse" instead of 
 " horses." 
 
 John Harrington, the Elder, presents the following 
 string of pearls : 
 
 "Whence comes my love ? O heart, disclose ! 
 It was from cheeks that shamed the rose ; 
 From lips that spoil the rubies' praise; 
 From eyes that mock the diamond blaze. 
 Whence comes my woe as freely own ? 
 Ah me ! 'twas from a hearLjaf stone !" 
 
276 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 But be most scrupulously on your guard against hy- 
 perboles that consist in mere wind, without an honest 
 enthusiasm. Virgil has merely said : 
 
 "The wide ether resounded, and the affrighted river rolled 
 backward." 
 
 This Dryden inflates in this fashion : 
 
 " The sky shrunk upward with unusual dread, 
 And trembling Tiber dived beneath his bed." 
 
 Virgil informs the world how Turnus lopped off a war- 
 rior's head at one blow. Dryden, by no means satiated 
 with this performance, adds: 
 
 * " The Latin fields are drunk 
 With streams that issued from the bleeding trunk." 
 
 Sir William Davenant attains an equal height of bom- 
 bast, thus : 
 
 " The lark now leaves his wintry nest, 
 
 And, climbing, shakes his dewy wings; 
 He takes your window for the East, 
 
 And to implore your light he sings. 
 Awake ! awake ! the Morn will never rise 
 Till she can dress her beauty at your eyes." 
 
 It is an instructive fact that savage tribes, living con- 
 stantly out of doors with nature, and intimate with its 
 appearances, practice and demand exact accuracy in the 
 descriptions of all the things that are familiar to them ; 
 in all the genuine poetry of such tribes, false hyperbole 
 never occurs in delineations of the outward. Homer has 
 nearly twenty descriptions of the effects of wind on wa- 
 ter, and not an exaggerated circumstance is admitted 
 into one of them ; while Virgil, living in more artificial 
 times, and far less conversant with the sea-foam and the 
 billow, is continually making his waves, when storm- 
 tossed, strike not the clouds only, but the stars. 
 
 On this whole subject, necessarily a big -one, of the 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 277 
 
 hyperbole, a caution is cleverly conveyed in the follow- 
 ing excerpt from Sterne's " Sentimental Journey:" 
 
 " When the barber came, he absolutely refused to have any 
 thing to do with my wig 'twas either above or below his art. 
 I had nothing to do but to take one ready made, of his own 
 recommendation. ' But I fear, friend,' said I, * this buckle 
 won't stand.' ' You may immerse it,' said he, ' into the ocean, 
 and it will stand.' What a great scale is every thing upon in 
 this city, thought I. The utmost stretch of an English periwig- 
 maker's ideas could have gone no farther than to have dipped 
 it "into a pail of water. What a difference ! 
 
 " I confess I do hate all cold conceptions, and am generally 
 so struck with the great works of nature that, for my own part, 
 if I could help it, I would never make a comparison less than a 
 mountain at least. All that can be said against the French 
 sublimity is, that the grandeur is more in the word, and less in 
 the thing. No doubt the ocean fills the mind with vast ideas, 
 but Paris being so far inland, it was not likely I should run 
 post a hundred miles to try the experiment ; the Parisian bar- 
 ber meant nothing. The pail of water standing beside the great 
 deep makes certainly but a sorry figure in speech, but 'twill be 
 said it has one advantage 'tis in the next room, and the truth 
 of the buckle may be tried in it without more ado in a single 
 moment. In honest truth, and upon a more candid revision 
 of the matter, the French expression professes more than it 
 performs." 
 
 Study very minutely the inimitable style of this inim- 
 itable banter. It seems to us that in his best pieces 
 Sterne has never been surpassed, and can not be. 
 
 Douglas Jerrold in this wise covered a pedantic fe- 
 male, a Blue, with hyperboles, in ridicule of pretended 
 learning : 
 
 " She's a traveling college, and civilizes wherever she goes. 
 Send her among the Hottentots, and in a week she'd write 'em 
 into top-boots. She spent only three days with the Esquimaux, 
 wrote a book on their manners, and by the very force of her 
 satire shamed 'em out of whale-oil into soda-water." 
 
278 Might and 'Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Of a person noted for a certain useless over-pity, he 
 declared that 
 
 " He was so benevolent a man that, in his mistaken com- 
 passion, he would have held an umbrella over a duck in a 
 shower of rain." 
 
 As all manner of exaggeration may be ranged under 
 hyperbole, Hood's letters to children may be quoted 
 here. He thus writes to one: 
 
 "Mv DEAR MAY, How do you like the sea? Not much 
 perhaps; it's so big. But shouldn't you like a nice little ocean 
 that you could put into a pan ? 
 
 " Have the waves ever run over you yet, and turned your 
 little two shoes into pumps full of water? Have you been 
 bathed yet in the sea, and were you afraid ? I was, the first 
 time; and, dear me, how I kicked and screamed! or at least 
 meant to scream ; but the sea, ships and all, began to run into 
 my mouth, and so I shut it up. Did you ever try, like a little 
 crab, to run two ways at once ? See if you can do it, for it is 
 good fun; never mind tumbling over yourself a little at first. 
 It would be a good plan to hire a little crab for an hour a day, 
 to teach baby to crawl, if he can't walk; and, if I was his mam- 
 ma, I would, too ! Bless him ! But I must not write on him 
 any more he is so soft, and I have nothing but steel pens. 
 And now, good-by. The last fair breeze I blew dozens of 
 kisses for you, but the wind changed, and I am afraid took 
 them all to Miss H., or somebody that it shouldn't." 
 
 To filch just one other wit-spark from Hood : he writes 
 of a night in which a Christian farmer would hardly have 
 left out his scarecrow. 
 
 LXL Let us close this chapter with one figure more, 
 that needs but very brief notice : Peculiarity of Usage. 
 Our greatest writers take such licenses. Thus Shake- 
 speare employs " like " for " please :" 
 
 " Sir, there she stands ; 
 If aught within that little-seeming substance 
 May fitly like your Grace." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 279 
 
 And again, very frequently, " owes " for " owns :" 
 
 " Will you, with those infirmities she owes, 
 Take her or leave her ?" 
 
 Once more he uses " procures " for " brings :" 
 " What unaccustom'd cause procures her hither ?" 
 
 See S., " Tempest," act i., scene ii., Prospero's 4th speech, 
 line 6, " out " for " quite." It needs the intuition of gen- 
 ius to know how far to go in this direction. In a deft 
 hand, these beautiful inaccuracies signally arouse and re- 
 ward attention. Several of our poets use " fulfill'd of 
 joy" for "filled with joy." 
 
 We conclude this chapter with two truths. One is of 
 great importance in this subject of figurative language 
 Many persons excuse the dry style which they write by 
 alleging that a turn for illustrations comes by nature; 
 for their part they have no turn that way. But Jiear this 
 in mind, and do act upon it : nothing admits more of 
 culture than this accomplishment. Said an eminent 
 preacher to us the other day: 
 
 "Within the last six years I see the greatest change on my 
 style in this respect. Figures and illustrations now come to 
 me with much ease, and by the dozen. This faculty I have 
 gained by effort and study." 
 
 Be encouraged be greatly encouraged, my dear Dryas- 
 dust, if you are deeply convinced of the usefulness of 
 illustrations, and if you are eager to obtain the gift. 
 Nothing can be more successfully cultivated ; of that 
 fact be very certain. It has been far too little attended 
 to ; far too little acted on. 
 
 The other truth is this: Hyperbole often arises from 
 mere credulity ; as in Sir John Maundeville, the oldest 
 prose writer in English, who wrote his travels in 1356. He 
 assures us that he had seen at Jerusalem, on the steps of 
 the Temple, the footmarks of the ass which our Lord rode 
 on Palm Sunday ; that the Ethiopians are a people who 
 have only one foot, but so big that they use it as a parasol. 
 
280 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 PART NINTH. 
 
 Litotes, Meiosis, or Lessening. The Bull, usually called 
 Irish. Repetition : Seventeen Varieties. Translation 
 from the German, by the A uthor. 
 
 LXII. LITOTES, Meiosis, or Lessening, is the figure 
 that naturally finds a place soon after its boisterous or 
 copious opposite, hyperbole. Hereby, while we seem to 
 lessen, we increase the force of the expression a strik- 
 ing proof of the flexibility of language when wielded 
 with skill. Hyperbole means less than it says ; litotes 
 means more. But very unfortunate the name ; for wheth- 
 er the o in the middle shall be long or short is always to 
 be a dispute, though scholars are well aware that short 
 it ought to be. Satan uses a lessening, when in a de- 
 spair and envy that hate all things bright, happy, un- 
 fallen, he thus bespeaks God's unsinning servant, the 
 Sun: 
 
 "Tothee I call, 
 
 But with no friendly voice, and add thy name, 
 O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams." 
 
 The apostle Paul sage, hero, man of ceaseless action, 
 ceaseless thought, and ceaseless love warns a Roman 
 official that he was 
 
 " A citizen of no mean city." 
 When we say " the man is no fool," we are understood 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 281 
 
 to admit that he is wise. " I can not praise such con- 
 duct," means that we condemn it. Chaucer, of his fat, 
 rosy monk, affirms 
 
 " He was not pale as a forpined ghost." 
 
 But Chaucer's poor clerk was the living antithesis, he 
 and his horse, of the monk : 
 
 " As lene was his horse as is a rake, 
 And he was not right fat, I undertake." 
 
 Under Lessening much sly insinuation may be carried 
 on it being well fitted for purposes of humor. And as, 
 when a person is not praised enough, the reader or hear- 
 er feels challenged to do him better justice, so this fig- 
 ure often suggests to us those stronger epithets, from 
 the use of which the author or speaker purposely ab- 
 stains, and we have in this way the gratification of doing 
 fully what has been left but half done. 
 
 Lessening is continually used to express affection ; we 
 depict an object as small in order to excite ourselves to 
 love and cherish it. Jesus and John loved to say : Little 
 children. The language of the nursery abounds in di- 
 minutives. Such terms are honorable to human nature, 
 proving how deep the fountains of perfectly disinter- 
 ested affection are in man's heart. Be helpless and you 
 will be cared for. In the following, by Emerson, the 
 claims of smallness and weakness are very cleverly set 
 forth : 
 
 " The Mountain and the Squirrel 
 Had a quarrel ; 
 
 And the Mountain called the Squirrel ' Little Prig.' 
 Bun replied : 
 
 ' You are doubtless very big; 
 But all sorts of things and weather 
 Must be taken in together 
 To make up a year 
 And a sphere; 
 
282 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 And I think it no disgrace 
 
 To occupy my place. 
 
 If I'm not so large as you, 
 
 You are not so small as I, 
 
 And not half so spry. 
 
 I'll not deny you make 
 
 A very pretty squirrel track: 
 
 Talents differ; all is wisely put 
 
 If I can not carry forests on my back, 
 
 Neither can you crack a nut.' " 
 
 Edwin Arnold coins a delicate usage for our not yet 
 half-developed language he going in the right direc- 
 tion, mark it well Saxonward. He thus addresses the 
 Almond Blossom, in an exquisite little poem: 
 
 " Blossom of the almond-trees, 
 April's gift to April's bees; 
 Birthday ornament of spring, 
 Flora's fairest daughterling !" 
 
 LXIII. A usage of a very different sort now presents 
 itself: The Bull, usually called Irish; though Rhetoric 
 blushes a little to recognize it as a legitimate figure of 
 speech. Exaggerated hyperboles are, however, second- 
 cousins, half removed. Bulls are the result partly of 
 confusion of ideas, and partly of confusion of words, yet 
 preserving a certain odd plausibility. Coleridge defines 
 them thus: 
 
 " A bull consists in a mental juxtaposition of incongruous 
 ideas ; with the sensation, but without the reality, of connection." 
 
 Said Jerrold's tipsy fellow, after long fumbling in the 
 dark with the key in his hand, at the door of his house : 
 
 "I see how it is; some scoundrel has stolen the key-hole." 
 
 John Claudius Beresford, banker in Dublin, was very 
 unpopular with the mob at the time of a rebellion in 
 Ireland : 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 283 
 
 " ' We'll ruin the rascal,' was the cry ; ' we'll destroy every 
 note of his bank we can lay our hands on j' " 
 
 and they actually burned some twenty thousand pounds' 
 worth of them. 
 
 Milton tries to impart some dignity to this Hibernian 
 way of speech in these terms : 
 
 "Adam the. goodliest man of men since born 
 His sons the fairest of his daughters, Eve." 
 
 But Wordsworth, though seemingly it was a bull, in re- 
 ality expressed a great verity, that the foundations of 
 the character of the man are laid in infancy even, and in 
 earliest boyhood ; and so he uttered the expression : 
 
 \ " The child's the father of the man." ( 
 
 We will be forgiven for purloining the following group 
 of bulls, the best we ever found collected ; too valuable 
 for our honesty to stand proof against. Pray let us in- 
 dulge in one good theft : 
 
 "Why the Irish, of all people, should be distinguished for bull- 
 making, or why there should exist among the natives of Ireland 
 such an innate and irresistible propensity to blunder, it is diffi- 
 cult to conjecture. Mr. and Miss Edge worth, in their inquiry 
 into the etymology of Irish bulls, endeavor to account for it 
 thus : ' That the English not being the mother-tongue of the 
 natives of Ireland, to them it is a foreign language, and, conse- 
 quently, it is scarcely within the limits of probability that they 
 should avoid making blunders both in speaking and writing.' 
 However this may be, an Irish bull is a thing more easily con- 
 ceived than defined. Perhaps, did we search for its precedent 
 among the long lists of bold tropes and figures which come 
 down from the old Greek writers and orators, the nearest ap- 
 proach we could find to it would be under the title of Catachre- 
 sis a catachresis being the ' boldest of any trope, necessity 
 makes it borrow and employ an expression or term contrary to the 
 thing it means to express? This certainly conveys a just idea 
 of what an Irish bull is or should be. 
 
284 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Many of the following examples we give as original, as they 
 occurred within our own personal knowledge ; the rest we have 
 selected from a variety of sources, and have been careful always 
 to distinguish between blunders and bulls a distinction which 
 is often neglected. 
 
 " One of the richest specimens of a real Irish bull which has 
 ever fallen under our notice was perpetrated by that clever and 
 witty, but blundering Irish knight, Sir Richard Steele, when in- 
 viting a certain English nobleman to visit him. l If, sir,' said 
 he, * you ever come within a mile of my house, / hope you will 
 stop there T Another by the same gentleman is well worth re- 
 cording. Being asked how he accounted for his countrymen 
 making so many bulls, he said : ' I can not tell, if it is not the 
 effect of the climate. I fancy, if an Englishman was born in 
 Ireland, he would make just as many.' 
 
 "This, again, reminds us of that well-known instance of wound- 
 ed Irish pride related of the porter of a Dublin grocer, who was 
 brought by his master before a magistrate on a charge of steal- 
 ing chocolate, to which he could scarcely plead ' Not guilty.' 
 On being asked to whom he sold it, the pride of Patrick was 
 exceedingly wounded. 'To whom did I sell it?' cried Pat. 
 
 * Now, do you think I was so mane as to take it to sell ?' 
 
 * Pray, then, sir,' said the J. P., ' what did you do with it ?' 
 1 Do wid it ? Well, then, since you must know, I took it home, 
 and me and my ould 'oman made tay of it.' 
 
 " A rich bull is recorded of an Irishman at cards, who, on in- 
 specting the pool, found it deficient : ' Here is a shilling short,' 
 said he ; ' who put it in ?' 
 
 " This bull was actually perpetrated ; so also was the follow- 
 ing : Two eminent members of the Irish bar, Doyle and Yel- 
 verton, quarreled one day so violently that from hard words 
 they came to hard blows. Doyle, the more powerful man of 
 the two (at the fists, at least) knocked down his antagonist 
 twice, vehemently exclaiming : ' You scoundrel, I'll make you 
 behave yourself like a gentleman.' To which Yelverton, ris- 
 ing, replied with equal indignation : No, sir, never. I defy 
 you ! You could not do itT 
 
 " The next declaration of independence we record occurred to 
 our knowledge. It was uttered by an exasperated rural lover, 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 285 
 
 y 
 
 whose sweetheart had driven him ' beyond the beyonds ' with 
 her ' courting ' and ' carryings on ' with his rival. ' I will nev- 
 er spake to you more !' he exclaimed, with exceeding vexation. 
 'Keep your spake to yourself, then,' said the provoking girl, 
 coolly ; ' I am sure I can live without either it .or your com- 
 pany.' * I am sure so can I, then,' was the wrathful rejoinder. 
 
 " Most of our readers are familiar with the story of the gallant 
 young Irishman who declared to his sweetheart that he was in 
 such a way about her he couldn't sleep at night for dreaming of 
 her. A parallel instance to this occurred in our own hearing 
 when a poor fellow protested to * his girl ' in the hayfield that 
 his two eyes hadn't gone together all night for thinking about her. 
 ' Very likely they did not,' replied this sweet plague of his life, 
 ' for I see your nose is between them.' 
 
 " The following was perpetrated by a young Irish gentleman, 
 who was exceedingly anxious to meet a certain young Irish 
 lady at the house of a common lady friend, who had expressed 
 her entire readiness (as most ladies would, under similar temp- 
 tations) to perform the amiable part of ' daisy-picker ' to the 
 young couple. 
 
 " ' But,' said the poor fellow, anxiously, ' there is nothing in 
 the world half so embarrassing, you know, as to meet a girl by 
 appointment. I am sure, under the circumstances, I wouldn't 
 be myself- neither would she / Suppose, my dear madam, you 
 could manage it so as to let us meet at your house some even- 
 ing without either of us being aware that the other was present? 
 
 " Still another pair of lovers claims our attention. The young 
 lady, less flustered than her admirer, addressed him in these 
 terms : ' I like you exceedingly, but I can not quit my home. 
 I am a widow's only darling, and no husband could equal my 
 parent in kindness.' 'She may be kind,' replied her wooer, 
 enthusiastically ; ' but be my wife we will live together, and 
 see if I don't beat your mother!' 
 
 " The next sight that we get into the cares and troubles that 
 married life is heir to, is through the remonstrance of a Hiber- 
 nian paterfamilias, who declares to his wife that he really 
 wishes the children could be kept in the nursery while he is at 
 home ; ' although,' -he considerately adds, * 2 'would not object to 
 their noise if they would only keep quiet' 
 
286 Might and Mirtk of Literature. 
 
 " We shall now proceed to Dublin, where doubtless still re- 
 sides that old beggar woman who, while soliciting charity, de- 
 clared she was the mother of six small children and a sick hus- 
 band. 
 
 " We wonder was this lady any relation to the poor Irishman 
 who offered his only old saucepan for sale. His children, gath- 
 ering around him, inquired why he did so. ' Ah, my honeys,' 
 said he, ' sure I wouldn't be after partin' with it if it wasn't to 
 get some money to buy somethin' to put in it.' 
 
 " The next bull that occurs to me was uttered by a poor wom- 
 an who, in all the pride and glory of her maternal heart, was 
 declaring to a kind-hearted listener that since the world was a 
 world there never was such a clever boy as her Bill; he had 
 just made two chairs and a fiddle out of his own head, and 
 had plenty of wood left for another. 
 
 " A similar mechanical genius had that Irish carpenter in 
 America, who, in sending in his little account to a farmer for 
 whom he had been working, informed him that it was ' for 
 hanging two barn doors and himself > seven hours, one dollar 
 and a half.' 
 
 " In direct contradistinction to this acknowledged attempt at 
 self-destruction, we have the story of a certain physician, who, 
 conducting a. post-mortem examination in a case of infanticide, 
 reported that he was unable to discover whether the child was 
 alive at the time of its death or not. 
 
 " It must have been a twin sister of this gentleman, who, hav- 
 ing been nearly drowned by falling into a well, committed a 
 very rich bull, when she piously and thankfully declared that 
 * only for Providence and another woman she never would have 
 got out.' 
 
 "Horace Walpole records in his 'Walpoliana' an Irish bull, 
 which he pronounces to be the best he ever met with. ' I hate 
 that woman,' said a gentleman, looking at a person who had 
 been his nurse 'I hate her, for when I was a child she 
 changed me at nurse.' This was indeed a perplexing asser- 
 tion ; but we have a similar instance recorded in the autobiog- 
 raphy of an Irishman, who gravely informs us that he 'ran 
 away early in life from his father on discovering he was only 
 his uncle.' 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 287 
 
 "Again a poor Irish lad, complaining of the harsh behavior of 
 his father, declares he just treats him as if he were his son by 
 another father and mother. 
 
 " The next bull we record is redolent of the soil, and proves 
 that in Ireland at least the determination to overcome impossi- 
 bilities is not yet extinct. An Irishman having challenged a 
 gentleman to fight a duel, who somehow forgot to attend the 
 appointment, met accidentally that same day the offending par- 
 ty, and thus addressed him : ' Well, sir, I met you this morning, 
 but you did not come ; however, I am determined to meet you 
 to-morrow morning whether you come, or not!' We wonder 
 was the gentleman who displayed such a reluctance to be pres- 
 ent the same who declared he would not fight a duel because 
 he was unwilling to leave his old mother an orphan. 
 
 " An apprentice sailor-boy fell from the * round-top ' to the 
 deck, stunned, but little hurt. The captain exclaimed in sur- 
 prise, ' Why, where did you come from ?' ' From the north of 
 Ireland, yer honor,' was the prompt reply, as the poor fellow 
 gathered himself up. 
 
 " An Irish paper announces the death of a poor deaf man 
 called Gaff. He had been run over by a locomotive, and, adds 
 the paper, * he received a similar injury this time last year.' 
 
 " Another excellent bull of the same kind was perpetrated by 
 a coroner in the county of Limerick. Being asked how he 
 could account for the fearful mortality the last winter, he re- 
 plied : ' I don't know ; there are a great many people dying 
 this year who never died before.' 
 
 " To this we add the story of an Irishman who nearly died, ac- 
 cording to his own account, through the treatment of his physi- 
 cian, who, he declares, drenched him so with drugs during his 
 illness that he was sick for a longtime after he got well.' 
 
 " In practical bulls the Irish are even more famous than in 
 those merely logical ; the richest one we ever heard was about 
 a poor Irish peasant who was floundering through a bog on a 
 small, ragged pony. In its efforts to push on, the animal got 
 one of its feet entangled in the stirrup ; ' Arrah, my boy !' ex- 
 claimed the rider, * if you are getting up, it's time for me to get 
 down.' 
 
 " A good one is related also of a poor Irish servant-maid who 
 
288 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 was left-handed. Placing the knives and forks upon the din- 
 ner-table in the same awkward fashion, her master observed 
 that she had placed them all left-handed. 'Ah, true indeed, 
 sir/ said she, ' and so I have. Would you be pleased to help 
 me to turn the table ?' " 
 
 LXIV. Repetition next urges its claims to attention : 
 a figure admitting of remarkably felicitous use, as we see 
 in the Bible, and in these dear choral repetitions of Old 
 Homer, such a comfort to the beginner in Greek. There 
 are many varieties ; its origin lying deep in human nat- 
 ure, which leads us to utter and utter again a controlling 
 passion or a beloved name. As the crooning over of ex- 
 actly the same words is the simplest mode of repeating, 
 we find this a very favorite practice in ballads, and in all 
 the literary productions of early ages. Matt, v., 3-1 1, 22 ; 
 vi., 19, 20. Gal. i., 8, 9. Luke xi., 42-44 ; xii., 5 ; xiii., 1-5. 
 Isa. Ixv., 13, 14. Ezek. xxxii., 17-32. I Cor. xiii., 4, 7, 8, 
 ii ; xii. ,8-1 1. 2 Cor. xi., 22. I Cor. iii., 21-23 ; i., 20; xv., 
 42,53,54. Phil, iv., 8, 2. 2 Pet. i., 5-7. Rev. ii., 7, 11, 17, 
 29; vii., 5-8; viii., 7-12; xviii.,22, 23; xxii., ii, 17. Isa. ii., 
 1 1-17 ; v., 20. Carefully consult these examples, and dis- 
 cover from Scripture a hundred more. This is one of 
 the greatest of figures ; you should give it plenty of time. 
 Cull from S. a hundred ; from P. L. a hundred. The rhe- 
 tors have laboriously enumerated many varieties. We 
 have not grudged our toil; to expend it has been the 
 summer life of a bee among flowers. 
 
 LXV. Ploce is the repetition of the same word in a 
 different sense, but implying more than in the first state- 
 ment ; of which Lord Chatham, that soul of eloquence, 
 gives a felicitous example : 
 
 " Oliver Cromwell, who astonished mankind by his intelli- 
 gence, did not derive it from spies in the cabinet of every 
 prince in Europe ; he drew it from the cabinet of his own sa- 
 gacious mind. He observed facts, and traced them forward to 
 their consequences." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 289 
 
 LXVI. Gemination occurs when the same emphatic 
 word is repeated immediately ; as 
 
 " The Cross ! the Cross !" 
 
 LXVII. Anaphora, Epanaphora, is the repeating of a 
 word at the beginning of successive clauses, as in an ex- 
 quisite passage in S., " Merchant of Venice," act v., scene 
 i., lines 1-22; or as St. Paul: 
 
 " Where is the wise ? Where is the scribe ? Where is the 
 disputer of this world ?" 
 
 Dr. Masson, in the close of a noble sermon, begins thir- 
 teen sentences with " Come." Psa. xxix., 3, 4. Or accept 
 of a model sentence from the glowing Irish orator, Curran : 
 
 " The heart of an Irishman is by nature bold, and he con- 
 fides ; it is tender, and he loves ; it is generous, and he gives ; 
 it is social, and he is hospitable." 
 
 LXVIII. Epistrophe ; Antistrophe ; Conversion or 
 Epiphora. Here are three Greek names for one fig- 
 ure ; what a proof of the unwearying effort devoted to 
 this theme in the olden time ! This is the repetition 
 of a word, not at the beginning, but at the end of suc- 
 cessive clauses. In this form, and in many other forms, 
 our Demosthenes abounds and excels. Let Dr. Griffin, 
 President of Williams College, lay an epistrophe on your 
 table : 
 
 "Awake, and generously expand your desires to encircle 
 this benevolent and holy kingdom of Christ. God, who has 
 set you an example of exclusive regard to this object, demands 
 it of you. Christ, who purchased the Church with his own 
 blood, demands it of you. The holy angels, who incessantly 
 minister to the Church, demand it of you. The illustrious 
 army of patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs, by their 
 services and sufferings for the Church, demand it of you." 
 
 To our mind and ear there is some peculiar charm and 
 force in this style of repetition, as when a great bell 
 
290 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 swings at midnight or at morrt to announce a fire or a 
 prince's birth, and we lie listening for the return, after a 
 stated interval, of the mighty chime. 
 
 LXIX. Symploce is the repetition of one word at the be- 
 ginning and of another word at the end of two succes- 
 sive clauses. You will understand what is meant by an 
 example : 
 
 "Spring clothes with leaves the trees; Spring leads back 
 the birds of song to the trees." 
 
 LXX. Anadiplosis is the use of the same word at the 
 end of one clause and at the beginning of another, as : 
 
 "He retained his virtues amid all his misfortunes; misfor- 
 tunes which no prudence could foresee or prevent." 
 
 P. L., vii., 25, 26 ; Isa. Ixv., 18. 
 
 LXXI. Epadiplosis, or Epanadiplosis, the use of the 
 same word both at the beginning and end of a sentence, 
 as if we were to venture this line : 
 
 Morn glads the East ; the buds are wet with morn. 
 
 LXXII. Complection we encounterwhen several clauses 
 or members of a sentence both begin with the same word 
 and end with the same, as in Cicero : 
 
 "Who proposed this law? Rullus. Who prevented the 
 greater part of the people from giving their votes ? Rullus. 
 Who presided over the assemblies ? Rullus." 
 
 LXXIII. Epanalepsis is the repetition that occurs 
 when a clause or parenthesis intervenes, as in an ex- 
 ample afforded in Professor Day's book on Rhetoric : 
 
 " The persecutions undergone by the Apostles furnished 
 both a trial to their faith and a confirmation to ours ; a trial to 
 them," etc. 
 
 Or study this from Charles de la Rue's great discourse, 
 " The Dying Sinner." It is with men grown gray in sin 
 that he expostulates : 
 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 291 
 
 " You would be immortal, that you might render your libertin- 
 ism immortal. And can you expect a happy immortality, you 
 who would have placed your happiness in the immortality of 
 your sin." 
 
 LXXIV. Epanodos, or Regression, is the repetition of 
 the same word or words in an inverted order, as thus : 
 
 "Woe to them who call evil, good ; and good, evil." 
 
 LXXV. Polyptolon is the repetition of the same word 
 in different cases or numbers or persons, as thus : 
 
 "Anguish tries the soul many a time of chief and king; and 
 brighter often are the homes of shepherds than of kings." 
 
 Or Henry Kingsley's encouraging sentence : 
 
 "When a man has learned how to learn, he can learn any 
 thing." 
 
 LXXVI. Epizeuxis, or Traduction, is the repetition of 
 a word for the sake of emphasis, as thus : 
 
 ."You call him a man, who, if he had been a man, would not 
 
 so cruelly have sought to slay a man." 
 
 LXXVII. Paregmenon is the use, close together, of 
 several words of similar origin, as by Cicero : 
 
 "He who disapproves the good, approves the wicked." 
 
 Let the student linger on this figure in its varieties ; to 
 do so will bring into closest contact with your mind 
 many of the most rhetorical passages in language not 
 the falsest, but the truest passages. 
 
 LXXVIII. Summation comes next, noble examples of 
 which occur in Scripture. Take that sublimely affecting 
 one in the first chapter of Job. The recurring words 
 
 " And I only am escaped alone to tell thee " 
 
 have a far deeper effect than any variation of expression 
 could have had : returning on the ear and heart like death- 
 
292 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 peals knelled forth at regular intervals of time from a ca- 
 thedral tower, at mirk midnight, over some great disas- 
 ter, that has paled the cheek of thousands, and has made 
 a mighty nation a widow, faint at soul. Job i., 13-19. 
 If the repetition of these words of doom tell not, with 
 a strange force on your soul, your case is hopeless ; your 
 mind is proof against grandeur and gloom. The fact, 
 too, that the Bible figures are so little met in some ser- 
 mons of the day is a most disgraceful fact. Who ever 
 heard a passage in a sermon fashioned on that grand 
 original in Job? The modern pulpit may make three 
 great reforms : First, a chapter of the Bible to begin 
 worship with ; one in the forenoon, one in the afternoon, 
 with explanations which will be very short. Secondly, 
 the most eager attention given that the Bible be read 
 grandly. Thirdly, Christ's mode of oratory imitated, in 
 the use of parables and of illustrations from homely ob- 
 jects. Even Henry Ward Beecher himself, while excel- 
 ling every body in homely illustration has he ever, once 
 in his life, used a parable? In the name of wonder, why 
 not ? And why this neglect of Jesus and his eloquence, 
 O all ye modern preachers ? And why the Bible so often 
 left unexplained, your hearers pining so for brief, syllabic 
 explanations ? And why this neglect of a sublime read- 
 ing of the Bible, full of grand intonations, full of impas- 
 sioned action ? Is it that ye lie under the delusion that 
 a sermon from man can possibly surpass a revelation 
 from Jehovah? The Bible is little read at home a 
 shame if not much read from the pulpit. 
 
 This figure, repetition, reached its dread apotheosis in a 
 place we name with awe in Gethsemane ; in the hour 
 when Hell gathered its clouds around Him, and the Man 
 of Sorrows went aside three times to pray, in His myste- 
 rious agony repeating the same words. Lingers, then, 
 still, the despicable silliness with any one that figures 
 are hollow? artificial? shallow? false? O Gethsemane, 
 rebuke us, and make our thinking more manly ! Sub- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 293 
 
 limely beyond any stroke of art have figures led us. 
 Amos i., 3-15 ; ii., 1-6. 
 
 LXXIX. Choral Chant, in poetry, how delightful its 
 effect ! Far beyond art ; it is very nature itself, as in 
 Homer ; as much so as breeze on Ben Lomond, or gale 
 on the wildest Atlantic. It brings forward a feeling 
 in which all are invited to join; the sentiment coming 
 back on us welcome as an old friend ; the impetus gath- 
 ering impetus at each return of the oscillation. The 
 bard does not laboriously, artificially strain after a new 
 mode of diction each time ; his not doing so is in keep- 
 ing with our idea of that simplicity which should mark 
 the outgushing of a heart which a great emotion fills like 
 a sea, to the exclusion of all thought of the smaller rules 
 and dandyisms of writing. Let us to the ballads of the 
 old time. Of any nation of the florid South, such as 
 Spain ; or of the stern North, such as Sweden or Scot- 
 land ; with their noble rudeness, their simplicity, rapid 
 and careless of adornments. A flash of lightning is 
 little studious of ornament ; just as little is a genuine 
 old ballad. In the " Heir of Linne," when the halter 
 is placed before him, as if by his dead father's hand, it 
 goes on thus : 
 
 " Never a word spake the heir of Linne, 
 Never a word he spake but three." 
 
 Or hasten to read a priceless escape from the smooth 
 commonplaces of the day that masterpiece, "Sir Pat- 
 rick Spens :" 
 
 " They hadna sail'd a league, a league, 
 
 A league but barely three, 
 
 When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew loud, 
 And gurly grew the sea." 
 
 What a depth of woe in the choral chant, " Woe is me, 
 Alhama," of the old Mooro-Spanish ballad, at the close 
 of each verse : it had so strong a spell that the Moors of 
 Grenada were forbidden to sing it on pain of death. 
 
Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Alhama was a town and fortress of the Moors, in a ro- 
 mantic situation between craggy mountains ; it was called 
 the key of Grenada. After a gallant defense, it was sacked 
 by the Spaniards ; and the Moors saw in its fall the death 
 of their magnificent monarchy. We quote from Lock- 
 hart's translation ; be sure to read his Spanish ballads : 
 
 " The Moorish king rides up and down 
 Through Grenada's royal town ; 
 From Elvira's gates to those 
 Of Bivarambla on he goes : 
 
 Woe is me, Alhama !" 
 
 Scotland and Spain, Sweden and Denmark, are the 
 great ballad countries of Europe. The Danish, which 
 has of late years come most deservedly to be reckoned 
 one of the chief literatures of Europe, possesses above 
 1300 ballads, composed for the most part between A.D. 
 1 200 and 1500, the authors unknown. Of the Danish 
 writers recently dead, the three greatest immortals are 
 Ewald, Baggesen, and Oehlenschlager ; while Grundtvig, 
 Ingemann, Heiberg, Winther, and Paludan - Miiller are 
 their still later great authors. From Ewald, we quote 
 one stanza from his " King Christian," the national song 
 of the Danes. Mark its repetitions, at measured inter- 
 vals, sounding, as one has said, " like blow after regular 
 blow upon the anvil ;" an anvil not without grand music 
 in its tone : 
 
 " King Christian stood beside the mast 
 
 In smoke and flame. 
 His liegemen through the battle-blast 
 Sent volley after volley fast, 
 Till sunk each hostile prow and mast 
 
 In smoke and flame. 
 'Flee, flee,' they cry, ' while yet we may; 
 Who dare with Christian wage to-day 
 War's game ?" 
 
 We have for many years admired " The Indian Death- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 295 
 
 song " of Philip Freneau, a leading poet of our Revolu- 
 tionary War. This song was, some forty years ago, very 
 popular in England and Scotland. Its choral chant is 
 woven indissolubly into our memory. In Chambers's 
 " Encyclopedia of English Literature " it is ascribed to 
 Mrs. Hunter, wife of John Hunter, the great surgeon : 
 
 " The sun sets at night, and the stars shun the day, 
 But glory remains when their lights fade away ; 
 Begin, ye tormentors, your threats are in vain, 
 For the son of Alknomack will never complain. 
 
 " I go to the land where my father has gone, 
 His spirit exults in the fame of his son ; 
 Death comes like a friend to relieve me from pain ; 
 And thy son, O Alknomack, has scorned to complain." 
 
 From the Rev. Ralph Hoyt we select two remarkable 
 varieties of choral repetition, the first from his poem 
 
 "New:" 
 
 " Indulgent Heaven, O grant but this, 
 
 O grant but this ; 
 
 The boon shall be enough of bliss 
 A home with true affection's kiss, 
 To mend whate'er may be amiss; 
 
 O grant but this." 
 
 "The Eden won, insatiate still, 
 
 Insatiate still, 
 
 A wider, fairer range he will ; 
 Some mountain higher than his hill, 
 Some prospect fancy's map to fill: 
 A wider, fairer range he will 
 
 Insatiate still." 
 
 There is here a certain quaint effect, altogether inde- 
 scribable, produced by repetition, as by the return on us 
 in Gothic architecture of some queer twist of the ma- 
 sonry. The same writer's poem, " The Old Man on the 
 Mossy Stone," is in the same way very delightful; in- 
 
296 Might and Mirth of Liter atiire. 
 
 deed, the peculiar rhythm and repetition communicate 
 to us an enjoyment perfectly exquisite. Why does not 
 Mr. Hoyt cultivate poesy far more ? 
 
 " By the wayside on a mossy stone 
 
 Sat a hoary pilgrim, sadly musing; 
 Oft I marked him sitting there alone, 
 All the landscape like a page perusing; 
 
 Poor, unknown, 
 By the wayside on a mossy stone." 
 
 William Julius Mickle, translator of Camoens's " Lu- 
 siad," the national epic of Portugal, has a home-song 
 very popular in Scotland ; where a faithful wife hears of 
 the return of her husband from sea. The choral chant 
 is good enough to have been written by Burns. The 
 four last lines are the refrain : 
 
 " Sae wise his words, sae smooth his voice, 
 
 His breath's like caller air ; 
 His very foot has music in't 
 
 As he comes up the stair. 
 And will I see his face again ? 
 
 And will I hear him speak ? 
 I'm downright dizzy wi' the thought, 
 
 In truth I'm like to greet. 
 For there's nae luck aboot the house, 
 
 There's nae luck at a' ; 
 There's little pleasure in the house 
 
 When our gudeman's awa'." 
 
 Beware, however, lest repetition become on your lips 
 a talking without saying any thing. The Irelands, fa- 
 ther and son, are notorious from a presumptuous attempt 
 to pass off " Vortigern," a play by the younger Ireland, 
 as a genuine drama of Shakespeare, discovered by them 
 in old MSS. At Sheridan's desire, it was acted in Drury 
 Lane Theatre. Vortigern, in the tragedy, called out to 
 the soldiers, as they were leading off Rowena : 
 
 " Give her up ! Give her up ! Give her up !" 
 

 Figures of Rhetoric. 297 
 
 The crowded audience, tired and disgusted previously 
 with the insult to Shakespeare's memory, took the hint ; 
 the house resounded from pit to gallery with " Give her 
 up ! Give her up ! Give her up !" Meaning by " her " the 
 tragedy. The curtain fell on the piece forever. 
 
 LXXX. Echo let it be enumerated here a won- 
 drously beautiful form of repetition. From Adelaide 
 Proctor, chosen poetess of the plaintive, daughter of 
 Barry Cornwall, is this taken: 
 
 " Still the wood is dim and lonely; 
 
 Still the flashing fountains play; 
 But the Past and all its beauty, 
 Whither has it fled away ? 
 Hark ! the mournful echoes say- 
 Fled away !" 
 
 S., " Hamlet," act i., scene i., Horatio to the Ghost. 
 
 LXXXI. Redoubled Negation a still farther form of 
 repetition is used with good effect in animated conver- 
 sation, and in oratory, which, in many of its best efforts, 
 throws itself into the very forms of animated conversa- 
 tion, as in the expression : " Never ! no, never !" We did 
 not study Demosthenes long till we met instances of 
 this, as in the First against Philip : 
 
 " If we sit at home listening to the mutual invectives and ac- 
 cusations of our declaimers, there will not happen no, not so 
 much as one of the deliverances we need." 
 
 Again, in the Second against Philip : 
 
 "Universal dominion is his aim not any thing toward peace; 
 not tranquillity; not any thing just." 
 
 Or, again, in the oration on the Crown, he cries : 
 " But these things are not so; they are not so." 
 
 And farther on in the same oration, in a passage that 
 presents you with a specimen of those large axioms, mor- 
 al and political, with which his oratory greatly abounds : 
 
298 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 brief statements of general principles true in all ages, 
 which embalm his speeches with a noble dignity : 
 
 "No one, men of Athens, lavishes his money on a traitor, seek- 
 ing the good of the traitor; nor ever is the traitor admitted into 
 the future confidence of the briber, when once the briber is in se- 
 cure possession of the advantages for which he paid the money. 
 For if a traitor were still valued, no one could be happier than 
 a traitor. But it is not so. No, indeed ; it is impossible. 
 When the lover of rule stands established in the firm mastery 
 of affairs, he is master, too, of those who betrayed things into 
 his hands; and knowing their baseness, then assuredly then, 
 too, he hates them ; and utterly distrusts them ; and heaps mire 
 on them." 
 
 A remarkable instance of redoubled negatives you find 
 in the hymn where the soul protests its resolution never 
 to be false to the Saviour : 
 
 "Whom I'll never, no never, no never forsake." 
 
 P. L., i., 335, 336, a choice example. Thomas Hooker 
 gives you a form of words under this head that would 
 suit well as one of the familiarities of the pulpit : 
 
 " When He calls for fasting and weeping and mourning, who 
 regards it? Abraham, my brethren, did not thus: these were 
 none of his steps; no, no; he went a hundred miles off this 
 course." 
 
 Which is an example of numeration, too ; so frequent 
 are figures in plain, earnest speakers such men as are 
 the most Saxon in their style. S., " Lear," act v., scene 
 iii., line 19 from close. A very homely style has crowds 
 of homely references as its very basis; like a marl soil 
 constituted by the debris of innumerable sea-shells, relics 
 of beauty. 
 
 LXXXII. Redoubled Affirmation, being one other 
 variety of repetition, as much claims notice as the one 
 that has just been catalogued. In the French of Alex- 
 ander Dumas the younger, 1871, we have both: 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 299 
 
 " Is it decidedly necessary, yes or no, that there be a God, a 
 morality, a society, a family, a universal human brotherhood? 
 Ought man to work, to know how to progress ? Ought women 
 to be respected, united, associated with us ? Is truth the end ? 
 Is justice the means ? Is the good absolute ? Yes, yes a 
 thousand times yes ! States, societies, governments, families, 
 individuals, can they, to be useful, durable, fruitful, do away 
 with these elements ? No, no a thousand times no !" 
 
 We have now enumerated seventeen kinds of repeti- 
 tion. No such minute specification has been made in any 
 modern literature. It is quite possible that the number 
 of varieties might be doubled. We challenge the reader 
 to make the attempt. But we hasten to wind up this 
 subject with a specimen from our studies in those four 
 admirable modern languages, to which we have given 
 many a year's attention : 
 
 [Translated by the Author from the German of Kosegartenl\ 
 
 "From gloom to light ! And when dark night enshrouds 
 
 Thee and creation in its pall of fear, 
 Believe ! believe ! After the midnight clouds, 
 The glad mild glories of the dawn appear. 
 
 ii. 
 " Through storm to peace ! And when, on earth and sky, 
 
 Fiercely the thunders and the tempests beat, 
 Believe ! believe ! After the storm's wild cry, 
 The gentle calm comes on, so slow and sweet. 
 
 in. 
 
 " Through snows to spring ! And when the East's keen blast 
 
 The kindly juices of the earth congeals, 
 Believe ! believe ! When winter's rage is past, 
 The vernal breeze around soft whispering steals. 
 
30O Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 IV. 
 
 " Through strife to triumph ! And when, deaths among, 
 
 The arrow, spear, and sword thy life menace, 
 Believe ! believe ! After the fight's fierce throng, 
 The shout of victory comes, and love's embrace. 
 
 v. 
 
 " Through toil to rest ! And when upon thee lie 
 
 The heat and burden of the sultry day, 
 Believe ! believe ! The cool and evening sky 
 Will steal thy soul to sacred rest away. 
 
 VI. 
 
 " Through the dark cross to heaven ! And when life's ills 
 
 With giant strength, unpitying, press thee down, 
 Believe ! believe ! Though grief thy bosom fills, 
 Soon wreaths of deathless joy thy head shall crown. 
 
 VII. 
 
 "Through woe to bliss ! Hath morning weeping found thee? 
 
 Doth midnight water all thy bed with tears? 
 Believe ! believe ! A Father's hand is round thee ; 
 Thy Shepherd King's sweet smile rebukes thy fears. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 " Through death to life ! Through strong temptation's hours, 
 
 Through stinging griefs, press on with dauntless tread ; 
 Love's feast of joy awaits in yonder bowers; 
 
 Thy seat is placed ! Thine evening meal is spread !" 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 301 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 PART TENTH. 
 
 Synonym. Ascription of Value. Doubt. Pretended Dis- 
 covery at the Moment. Aporia, or Pretended Impossi- 
 bility. Pretended Ignorance. Indistinctness. Affirma- 
 tion. Affirmation and Negation. Apostrophe. Denun- 
 ciation. Solemn Appeal. Oath, or Adjuration. Com- 
 mand. Exclamation of Sorroiv. Spiritualization. 
 
 LXXXIII. SYNONYM demands a place next after the 
 great figure Repetition. It is not the same as it, because 
 a different word is used ; but approaches it, as some 
 shade of meaning discriminates the one from the other. 
 It needs to be employed very cautiously, else you be- 
 come guilty of a heaping up of empty words. Yet at 
 times it has good reasons in its behalf; it may cause the 
 mind to look a second time at an object, or it may utter 
 forth the mind twice over ; as when Homer says : 
 
 "Late the prodigy; late coming." 
 
 Nahum ii., 10, 12. The noble Liturgy of the Episcopal 
 Church abounds in this, with a very peculiar end in view : 
 the idea is expressed in a word of Saxon derivation, and 
 then in a word of Latin derivation ; the object being to 
 make the matter plain to the educated and to the un- 
 educated, as when it is said : 
 
 " God forbids and prohibits this." 
 
 Zeph.i., 15; ii.,9- Matt, ii., 13. 
 
 Synonyms may conduce to ludicrous effects ; as when, 
 
302 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 in Shakespeare's " Midsummer-Night's Dream," Quince, 
 in giving out their parts to his comrades, says : 
 
 " Masters, here are your parts : and I am to entreat you, re- 
 quest you, and desire you to con them." 
 
 In Cicero this is met with : 
 
 "I will not bear it; I will not suffer it; I will not permit it." 
 
 By no means to be admired; arising from that unhappy 
 vanity of his, that loved to strut. So true it is that every 
 great virtue is a help to genuine eloquence, and every 
 moral weakness a hinderance. S., " Romeo and Juliet," 
 act iii., scene v., Juliet's 3d speech, line i. This instance 
 proves, however, that in some states of strong feeling the 
 natural, unadulterated tendency is to pile up synonyms. 
 Act iv., scene v., lines 44, 50, 52. 
 
 Well worthy, Professor Coppee's illustration : 
 
 "Although our language is, in its structure and the great ma- 
 jority of its words, Anglo-Saxon, still the large number of 
 French and Latin words which have been brought into it have 
 formed terms synonymous with the original Saxon ; but when 
 they had become naturalized, as we had no use for two words 
 exactly synonymous, wisdom suggested that they should exhibit 
 shades of difference in meaning which did not originally belong 
 to them ; so that few or any words are justly defined by their 
 synonyms. Besides, as a similar idea among any two people 
 would have its differences drawn from their own peculiarities 
 of claim and race, and manner of life and government, the 
 synonyms, when brought into the language, would often express 
 great differences at once, and without any effort on our part to 
 cause them to do so. As a remarkable instance of it, let us 
 see how very wrong it would be to define our English word 
 freedom by its synonym liberty, which comes to us from the 
 Latin ; and yet how many confound the two. Indeed, these 
 are historic words, and give us an insight into the times of their 
 birth, wonderfully illustrative of the people and countries from 
 which they came. Freedom is the personal, individual inde- 
 pendence and right of every man his freedom ; /. ^., free prov- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 303 
 
 ince or jurisdiction from his birth. Coming as it does from 
 the Teutonic element in our language, it tells us of the free and 
 independent Germans, who by their own valor overturned the 
 great fabric of the Roman Empire. They were men of the 
 forest and mountain, inhabiting no cities there were none in 
 Germany till after the eighth century but only roving where 
 were the lordliest spoils. On the other hand, liberty tells us 
 of the Roman cities. We cling like good citizens to our liber- 
 ty, vouchsafed to us by the Constitution of the country as Amer- 
 icans ; yet we much more desire to keep well guarded that 
 freedom of opinion, of speech, of action, which, is our indefeasi- 
 ble right as men." 
 
 LXXXIV. Ascription of Value is a form of utterance 
 which we believe has never caught the notice of any 
 rhetor, yet it has a fine effect. In the " Chronicles of the 
 Schonberg-Cotta Family," Luther is introduced saying 
 that he did not value the Pope's opinion 
 
 " No, not the stalk of a pear." 
 
 In ways very life-like and home-like may this figure be 
 used. In William Congreve's " Love for Love," Ben, 
 the earliest full-drawn English sailor who was ever repre- 
 sented on the British stage, thus addresses a saucy Miss : 
 
 " As for your love or your liking, I don't value it of a rope's 
 end." 
 
 Mark here the fine idiomatic use of " of." S., " Hamlet," 
 act i., scene iv., Hamlet's /th speech, line 2. If you care- 
 fully use these references of ours to S., to P. L., and to 
 Scripture, they will give you an intimacy with these 
 sources highly valuable. 
 
 LXXXV. Doubt, Dubitation, is a real or seeming 
 doubt, which figure the history of eloquence shows us 
 to have been used on some of the grandest occasions, 
 with powerful dramatic effect. As when Thomas Went- 
 worth, afterward Earl of Strafford, of unhappy memory, 
 in those days when he stood with such brilliancy on the 
 
304 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 popular side, 1627-8, thus declaimed against the minis- 
 ters of Charles I. : 
 
 "They have taken from us what shall I say? Indeed, 
 what have they left us?" 
 
 And again : 
 
 " By one and the same thing hath the king and the people 
 been hurt, and by the same must they be cured ; to vindicate 
 what ? New things ? No !" 
 
 So our Demosthenes, in the oration on the Crown, says 
 to ^EschineSj his antagonist : 
 
 "O thou by what name can one properly describe thee?" 
 
 I Cor. xi., 22 ; Lam. ii., 13 ; Psa. cxxxix., 7. Let Hol- 
 yoake, in his valuable little book, " Hints for Public 
 Speaking," treat the figure for us : 
 
 " Those who had the pleasure of hearing Thorn, the weaver- 
 poet, converse, know the Spartan felicity of expression which 
 he commanded. His conversation was often a study in rhetoric. 
 He told a story in the best vein of Scotch shrewdness. He was 
 one day recounting an anecdote of Inverary, or Old Aberdeen, 
 to a coterie of listeners. The point of the story rested on a par- 
 ticular word spoken in fitting place. When he came to it, he 
 hesitated as though at a loss for the term. 'What is it you 
 say under these circumstances ?' he asked ; ' not this nor that/ 
 he remarked as he went over three or four terms by way of 
 trial, as each was endeavoring to assist him. 'Ah,' he added, 
 
 1 we say , for want of a better word.' This of course was the 
 
 word wanted ; the happiest phrase the language afforded. He 
 gained several things by this. He enlivened a regular narra- 
 tive by an exciting digression, which increased the force and 
 point of the climax ; he created a difficulty for his auditors ; 
 for who, when suddenly asked, would be able to find a term 
 which seemed denied to his happy resource ? Or who, finding 
 it, would have the courage to present it to such a fastidious 
 epithetist ? Also, he won a triumph by suggesting what ap- 
 peared out of their power, and he excited an indefinite wonder 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 305 
 
 at his own skill in bringing a story to so felicitous an end by 
 the employment of a makeshift phrase. It was a case analo- 
 gous to that given by Dickens in one of his early papers, where 
 the President, at a loss for a word, asks, 'What is that you give 
 a man who is deprived of a salary which he has received all his 
 life, for doing nothing ; or perhaps worse, for obstructing public 
 improvement?' ' Compensation ?' suggests the Vice, removing 
 the doubt. Only, Thorn was his own Vice-President." 
 
 Holyoake brings out very well the happy offices which 
 this figure, this throwing in of a doubt, can render ; but 
 he believes far too much in tricks and frauds on the part 
 of a speaker. 
 
 Chrysostom, whose name means " The Golden-Mouth- 
 ed," supplies the subjoined, on Abraham's offering of 
 Isaac : 
 
 " What language can describe his fortitude ? He brought 
 forward his son, bound him, placed him on the wood, seized the 
 sacrificial knife, was just on the point of inflicting the stroke. 
 In what manner to express myself properly I know not; he 
 only would know that did these things. For no language can 
 describe how it happened that his hand did not become tor- 
 pid, that the strength of his nerves did not relax, that the af- 
 fecting sight of his boy did not overpower him." 
 
 A beautiful example of Asyndeton, too. 
 
 Let S. give us our next example of a doubt intrud- 
 ing itself, dismissed, returning : 
 
 "Thou speakst it falsely, as I love mine honor, 
 And makst conjectural fears to come to me, 
 Which I would fain shut out. If it should prove 
 That thou art so inhuman ; 'twill not prove so ! 
 And yet I know not. Thou didst hate her deadly, 
 And she is dead." 
 
 What more difficult yet befitting office can this divine 
 gift of language be put to than to play out such play as 
 this, of jarring tides of contending emotions ; now banish- 
 ing a doubt, now tortured by it. 
 
 U 
 
 

 306 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 LXXXVI. Pretended Discovery at the moment is 
 closely connected with doubt. An amusing sample in 
 Burns's lines on " Captain Grose :" 
 
 " It's tauld he was a sodger bred, 
 And ane wad rather fa'n than fled; 
 But now he's quat the spurtle blade, 
 
 And dog-skin wallet, 
 Ar.d ta'en the Antiquarian trade 
 
 I think they call it." 
 Or in Cicero : 
 
 "What name suits him ? I know not any. Yes. Parricide 
 of his country !" 
 
 Evidently this form is well fitted for impassioned ora- 
 tory. The occupants of our pulpits ought to be familiar 
 with all these tools and resources of the orator. But 
 this volume, which we present to them, is really the only 
 book in the world in which the public speaker can find 
 his war-gear described. 
 
 LXXXVII. Aporia, or Pretended Impossibility, is a 
 doubting of a special kind ; a not knowing where to begin 
 or what to say, on account of the confusing wealth of 
 matter. An excellent instance in Paul's Letter to the 
 Hebrews, when he breaks forth, toward the close of that 
 grand enumeration of Heb. xi., into this cry : 
 
 "And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me 
 to tell of Gideon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthah; 
 of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets." 
 
 Our present translation of Paul's letters comes lament- 
 ably short of the force, expressive eloquence, depth, of 
 the great apostle's Greek. Would we had a translation 
 worthy of the divine original. 
 
 LXXXVIII. Ignorance forms another form that can 
 be discriminated from the last three. William Miller il- 
 lustrates it in his successful poem on a well-known Scot- 
 tish subject, " Willie Winkie ; the Genius of Slumber." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 307 
 
 There is a provoking baby that doggedly refuses to go 
 to sleep : 
 
 " Skirlin like a kenna-what." 
 
 LXXXIX. Indistinctness we are naturally led to think 
 of by Doubt and Aporia. A figure it is, very potent in 
 a master's hand. Sublime objects are often shadowy and 
 undefined ; a hazy mist hovers around them ; a vastness 
 is suggested greater far than the eye can measure, and 
 he who paints such objects with the pen should leave 
 around his delineations a similar haze of indistinctness. 
 Accordingly Virgil represents ^Eneas and the Sybil, in 
 their celebrated visit to the lower regions, as entering 
 Hell by a dim light : 
 
 "As when one goes into a wood at the midnight hour, when 
 the moon is clouded in heaven." 
 
 Job iv., 12-16. S., " Coriolanus," act iv., scene i., line 31. 
 From Rogers's " Italy," a poem of much descriptive pow- 
 er, take the following very admirable instance : 
 
 " Nor then forget that chamber of the dead, 
 Where the gigantic shapes of Night and Day. 
 Turned into stone, rest everlastingly, 
 Yet still are breathing, and shed round at noon 
 A twofold influence only to be felt. 
 A light, a darkness, mingling each with each, 
 Both and yet neither. There, from age to age, 
 Two Ghosts are sitting on their sepulchres ! 
 That is the Duke, Lorenzo. Mark him well ; 
 He meditates, his head upon his hand. 
 What from beneath his helm-like bonnet scowls ? 
 Is it a face, or but an eyeless skull ? 
 'Tis lost in shade ; yet like the basilisk 
 It fascinates, and is intolerable." 
 
 Betake we ourselves,once again,to the " Faerie Queene," 
 which is, says the poet Campbell in his " English Poets," 
 refinement itself: 
 
308 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 "We shall nowhere find more airy and expansive images 
 of visionary things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, or a finer flush 
 in the color of language, than in this Rubens of English 
 poetry." 
 
 Mark how Spenser throws a haze of uncertainty around 
 the object which he would have to impress us : 
 
 " And for more horror and more cruelty, 
 Under that cursed Idol's altar-stone 
 A hidden monster did in darkness lie, 
 Whose dreadful shape was never seen of none 
 That lives on earth." 
 
 The "Paradise Lost" offers many instances; let one 
 suffice : 
 
 " By them stood 
 
 Orcus and Hades, and the dreaded Name 
 Of Demogorgon." 
 
 Mr. Proctor thus remarks on this passage, usually 
 passed over unnoticed by the common run of readers 
 and critics : 
 
 " With respect to the ' Name of Demogorgon,' which stands 
 by Orcus and Hades, how can such a phrase be justified by 
 the rules of reason? Nevertheless, it is as magnificent as 
 words can make it. It is clothed in a dark and spectral 
 grandeur, and presses upon our apprehensions like a mighty 
 dream." 
 
 Critique magnificent as its theme. 
 
 A stroke of sublime genius it was when Timanthes 
 (B.C. 400), representing Agamemnon presiding over the 
 sacrifice of his beloved daughter, Iphigenia, whom the 
 gods of Hellas had commanded him to offer up, pictured 
 Agamemnon with his face veiled ; thus grandly hinting 
 that agony of a father's heart which no pencil can por- 
 tray. Yet sublimer far rose the Italian, Tintoretto, who, 
 picturing the crucifixion of Christ, around which throng 
 the Infinities Infinite Holiness, Infinite Justice, Infinite 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 309 
 
 Love, Infinite Hope shrouded the face of the Divine 
 Martyr in the shadow of the great eclipse. 
 
 On this special figure, and on our whole subject of fig- 
 ures, let us once again fortify our general position by 
 the argument of Dr. Bela Bates Edwards on the I39th 
 Psalm : 
 
 "We discover in it a reason why a portion of Scripture is 
 communicated to us in the form of poetry. It is not simply 
 because it is more eloquent than prose, or because figurative 
 language makes a deeper and more vivid impression. It is be- 
 cause it gives a truer and more adequate impression ; because 
 it approaches nearer to the nature of the thing to be compre- 
 hended ; because it is less liable to present false or perverted 
 conceptions. The divine attributes are in their nature illimita- 
 ble, and at the best can be but partially and feebly apprehend- 
 ed, yet those delineations in the Scriptures are the most im- 
 pressive, the most adequate, which are the farthest removed 
 from the language of common life, where the illustrations are 
 the least definite, the least measurable, the least apprehensible 
 by the mere understanding ; those objects in the material uni- 
 verse being selected which can be represented only as it were 
 in outline, necessarily conveying the idea of an indefinite vast- 
 ness, of an immeasurable depth, of unimagined velocity. There 
 is a sense, therefore, in which the best method of representation 
 is the most indefinite, the least cognizable by the mere intellect. 
 We do not discover truth, we do not feel its power, by the aid 
 of one faculty alone. For this purpose we have the principle 
 of faith, the power of emotion, the faculty of imagination. There 
 are delineations, which, because of their indefiniteness, do act- 
 ually impart the most ennobling and satisfying conceptions of 
 God. On such subjects that which is in the highest degree 
 poetical is nearest the truth." 
 
 XC. AfBrmation, when thrown into certain forms, be- 
 comes a figure. As in these lines of Giles Fletcher: 
 
 " Yes, aid implore 
 
 Of Him, the more He gives, that hath the more ; 
 Whose storehouse is the heavens too little for His store." 
 
3io Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Or in Keats : 
 
 " Where are the songs of spring ? Aye, where are they ?" 
 
 What a delicate touch of charm is in that " aye !" 
 Which of our readers can grapple with and analyze the 
 force of that small word ? 
 
 XCI. Affirmation and Negation form, when united, a 
 figure very potent ; too redolent of the heart in its most 
 changeful moods for a written discourse. See it in "The 
 Maniac," by Matthew Gregory Lewis. First she affirms 
 her sanity, then her insanity : 
 
 " O hark ! What mean those yells and cries ? 
 
 His chain some furious madman breaks. 
 He comes ! I see his glaring eyes ! 
 
 Now, now my dungeon grate he shakes ! 
 Help ! Help ! He's gone ! O fearful woe, 
 
 Such screams to hear, such sights to see ! 
 My brain ! My brain ! I know, I know 
 
 I am not mad but soon shall be. 
 
 " Yes, soon ; for, lo you, while I speak 
 
 Mark how yon demon's eyeballs glare ! 
 He sees me! Now with dreadful shriek 
 
 He whirls a serpent high in air. 
 Horror ! The reptile strikes his tooth 
 
 Deep in my heart, so crushed and sad ; 
 Aye, laugh, ye fiends, I feel the truth ; 
 
 Your task is done ! I'm mad ! I'm mad.'' 
 
 A passage like this, a billowy whirl and wild conglom- 
 erate of figures, would nobly suit the pulpit. O give 
 us the men who could abandon themselves to such tor- 
 nado passions, yet could control them at their stormiest, 
 riding on and guiding the whirlwind. 
 
 XCII. The important form Apostrophe comes next : 
 a turning asjkle from the regular course of the subject 
 to address some person or thing. Very frequent in 
 Holy Writ: Job xxxviii., II ; Gen. xlix., 18; Neh. vi., 9; 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 3 1 1 
 
 Matt, xxiii., 37. Apostrophes there are of the imagina- 
 tion,, which may be of considerable length, and of the 
 passions, which generally should be shorter ; each thing 
 addressed being spoken to, suitably to its nature. Blair, 
 in his very correct, finished sermons, exclaims : 
 
 " Adversity ! how blunt are all the arrows of thy quiver in 
 comparison with those of Guilt!" 
 
 John Barbour, the father of Scottish poesy, died about 
 I395> a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, wrote " The 
 Bruce," an historical poem ; he gives us these words to 
 Freedom, lines frequently quoted : 
 
 "Ah, Fredome, thou'rt a nobill thing ! 
 Fredome maiks man to haif liking. 
 Fredome all solace to man giffis ; 
 He levys at ese that frely levys !" 
 
 At first, you perceive, the Scotch was the same as the 
 English, but in Blind Harry's time a difference is plain 
 by the year 1460. 
 
 Turn with us to Ossian's poems, put forth by James 
 Macpherson, who claimed them to be the productions of 
 a blind chief and bard who flourished in the Highlands 
 of Scotland in the fifth century after Christ ; but no sat- 
 isfactory proof of this has been given. The committee 
 of the Highland Society reported that, having made a 
 regular inquiry into the authenticity of these poems, 
 " they have never been able to obtain any one poem the 
 same in title and tenor with the poems published." Dr. 
 Johnson, who detested all things Scottish, afHrmed that 
 they might have been written " by many men, many 
 women, and many children." Napoleon treasured them 
 as his favorite volume, and in his stirring addresses to 
 his soldiers formed his style in great measure upon them. 
 Let us listen to the blind bard's address to the Sun far 
 too polished for the date and locality, but glorious, for all 
 that, and far surpassing aught else of Macpherson : 
 
312 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers ! 
 Whence are thy beams, O Sun, thy everlasting light ? Thou com- 
 est forth in thy awful beauty, and the stars hide themselves in 
 the sky ; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave. 
 But thou thyself movest alone ; who can be the companion of 
 thy course? The oaks of the mountains fall; the mountains 
 themselves decay with years ; the ocean shrinks and grows 
 again ; the moon herself is lost in heaven ; but thou art for- 
 ever the same, rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When 
 the world is dark with tempests ; when thunder rolls and light- 
 nings fly, thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds and laugh- 
 est at the storm. But to Ossian thou lookest in vain ; for he 
 beholds thy beams no more, whether thy yellow hair floats on 
 the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west. 
 But thou art perhaps, like me, for a season, and thy years will 
 have an end. Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds, careless of the 
 voice of the morning." 
 
 In this matter we vote with Napoleon, and against Dr. 
 Johnson. Ossian is a fresh variety in literature, holding 
 a high place entirely its own ; and if ever there were an 
 emblem on earth, this is one: a Highland mountain, with 
 its mists around it a most striking emblem of Ossian. 
 In some indescribable way these poems breathe thy spirit, 
 O sublime land ! whence they emanated. 
 
 One of the most successful modern tragedians of En- 
 gland is Sheridan Knowles. In his " William Tell," thus 
 declaims the Swiss hero : 
 
 "Ye know the jutting cliff round which a track 
 Up hither winds, whose brow is but the base 
 To such another one, with scanty room 
 For two abreast to pass? O'ertaken there 
 By the mountain blast, I've laid me flat along; 
 And while gust followed gust more furiously, 
 As if to sweep me o'er the horrid brink, 
 And I have thought of other lands where storms 
 Are summer flaws to those of mine, and I 
 Have wished me there, the thought that mine was free 
 Has check'd that wish, and I have raised my head 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 3 1 3 
 
 And cried in glad tones to that furious wind, 
 ' Blow on ! This is the land of liberty !' " 
 
 Very nobly does Mrs. Stoddard, of Connecticut, apos- 
 trophize the last great Enemy in her poem, " The Soul's 
 Defiance :" 
 
 " I said to Death's uplifted dart, 
 
 ' Aim sure ! Make no delay !' 
 Thou wilt not find a fearful heart 
 
 A weak, reluctant prey. 
 For still the spirit, firm and free, 
 Unruffled by this last dismay, 
 Wrapt in its own eternity, 
 Shall pass away." 
 
 The Scottish youth, Michael Bruce, who was cut off 
 in early life, gave promise of decided genius. He is like- 
 ly to be long remembered, through the beauty and finish 
 of one poem, his ode to the " Cuckoo." Alluding to 
 this bird's following of spring round the world, he breaks 
 into this apostrophe : 
 
 " Sweet bird ! , Thy bower is ever green, 
 
 Thy sky is ever clear. 
 Thou hast no sorrow in thy song, 
 No winter in thy year." 
 
 James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, is another Scot- 
 tish miracle. Like Caedmon the Saxon, his first occupa- 
 tion was that of a cowherd. His whole schooling lasted 
 but six months, when he got as far as the Bible-class. 
 At fourteen he found himself, after much hard work and 
 half starvation, in possession of five shillings, wherewith 
 he, like an embryo poet, bought a fiddle to play to him- 
 self in the loft of the cow-house. At eighteen he began 
 writing poetry ; as he said himself, " it was bitter bad." 
 With dogged confidence in himself he kept floundering 
 on, publishing two volumes, and a weekly periodical, 
 which nobody would read ; till at last he schooled him- 
 self into shape and grammar, in about his fortieth year ; 
 
314 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 and out came his " Queene's Wake," full of that grandeur 
 of fancy, lifting him into realms beyond the earth, which 
 is Hogg's most remarkable peculiarity. Several of his 
 songs, also, are of the highest excellence ; and this un- 
 taught rough being, with his coarse shepherd's plaid 
 about his brawny shoulders, has taken his place among 
 the poets who use the Doric of our literature, the classic 
 dialect of the Scottish Lowlands, next after Burns, and on 
 the same level with the admirable Allan Ramsay. Let 
 us listen, then, to his apostrophe to the " Skylark :" 
 
 " Bird of the wilderness, 
 Blythesome and cumberless, 
 Sweet is thy matin o'er moorland and lea ! 
 
 Emblem of happiness, 
 
 Blest be thy dwelling-place ! 
 O to abide in the desert with thee! 
 
 " Wild is thy lay and loud, 
 Far in the downy cloud; 
 Love gives it energy ; love gave it birth. 
 Where on thy dewy wing, 
 
 Where art thou journeying? 
 Thy lay is in heaven, thy love is on earth." 
 
 From Dr. Darwin, the elder, author of the " Botanic 
 Garden," and the " Loves of the Plants," poems glitter- 
 ing and polished in their versification, but too artificial, 
 with personification carried to a mania, we draw the fol- 
 lowing, which remind us of the close of Campbell's 
 " Pleasures of Hope :" 
 
 " Roll on, ye stars ! Exult in youthful prime ; 
 Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time. 
 Near and more near your beamy cars approach, 
 And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach ; 
 Flowers of the sky ! Ye too to age must yield, 
 Frail as your silken sisters of the field ! 
 Star afte* star from heaven's high arch shall rush, 
 Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush, 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 3 1 5 
 
 Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, 
 Immortal nature lifts her changeful form ; 
 Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, 
 And soars and shines, another and the same." 
 
 XCIII. Denunciation is so suitable, nay, so indispensa- 
 ble to the pulpit, whose mission it is to brand our sins, 
 that we can not but assign to it a separate place. Sub- 
 lime instances in the Bible thunder upon us: Isa. v., 18, 
 20-22; x., i ; xiv., 12-15. Not with silken touch should 
 the man of God in our day deal with the great sins of 
 the time. Never an age needed more Boanerges, Elijah, 
 and the Baptist. Be it borne in mind, too, that the more 
 merciful a heart is, the more will it detest the causes of 
 those ills that devastate and endanger society; accord- 
 ingly our Saviour was the first to fulminate of eternal 
 woe. No weaker error than to imagine the Old Testa- 
 ment more denunciatory than the New. God's holiness 
 may be defined His infinite hatred of the things that 
 infinitely hate us; never did He give license to the pul- 
 pits of the nineteenth century to be tame. Matt, iii., 7, 
 10; viii., 32; x., 15 ; xxi., 19; xxiii., 1330. 
 
 But to turn to Shakespeare. Lear thus denounces 
 his daughter, Goneril : 
 
 " Blasts and fogs upon thee ! 
 The untented woundings of a father's curse 
 Pierce every sense about thee !" 
 
 This unsurpassed tragedy affords great examples of great 
 and unsurpassed denunciations. 
 
 XCIV. Solemn appeal to the Deity is a figure to be. 
 used only on worthy occasions. Toward the close of the 
 Second against Philip, Demosthenes cries : 
 
 " I, let the gods be my witness, will speak the truth with 
 boldness to you, and will conceal nothing." 
 
 The peroration of Lord Brougham's speech in behalf 
 of Queen Caroline is a fine instance : 
 
316 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Such, my Lords, is the case now before you. Such is the 
 evidence in support of this measure evidence inadequate to 
 prove a debt impotent to deprive of a civil right ridiculous 
 to convict of the lowest offense scandalous if brought forward 
 to support a charge of the highest nature which the Law knows 
 monstrous to ruin the honor, to blast the name of an English 
 Queen. What shall I say, then, if this is the proof by which an 
 act of legislation, a Parliamentary sentence, an ex post facto 
 law, is sought to be passed against this defenseless woman ? 
 My Lords, I pray you to pause. I do earnestly beseech you 
 to take heed. You are standing on the brink of a precipice 
 then beware. It will go forth your judgment, if sentence shall 
 go against the Queen. But it will be the only judgment you 
 ever pronounced which, instead of reaching its object, will re- 
 turn and bound back upon those who give it. Save the country, 
 my Lords, from the horrors of this catastrophe. You have said, 
 my Lords you have willed the Church and the King have 
 willed, that the Queen should be deprived of its solemn service. 
 She has, instead of that solemnity, the heartfelt prayers of the 
 people. She wants no prayers of mine. But I do here pour 
 forth my humble supplications at the throne of mercy that that 
 mercy may be poured down upon the people in a larger meas- 
 ure than the merits of their rulers may deserve, and that your 
 hearts may be turned to justice." 
 
 From Cicero against Verres, be this heard : 
 
 " You, ye Alban mounds and groves, you I implore and call 
 to witness ; and you, ye ruined altars of Alba, equal in sanc- 
 tity to the Roman shrines, destroyed and buried by the mad 
 sacrilege of this man by whom the sacred trees have been 
 cut clown and laid prostrate. And thou, O holy Jove, thou 
 hast at length from thy lofty Latin mount looked down to 
 punish this wretch, whose wickedness and abandoned impu- 
 rity had so often polluted thy lakes, thy groves, thy hallowed 
 bounds." 
 
 From Thomas, Lord Erskine's great oration in defense 
 of Lord George Gordon, arraigned for his life, as guilty 
 of rioting and burning in the city of London, we quote 
 

 Figures of Rhetoric. 3 1 7 
 
 using Lord Campbell's admirable " Lives of the Lord 
 Chancellors " one example more : 
 
 " Now was witnessed the single instance recorded in our ju- 
 dicial annals of an advocate in a court of justice introducing 
 an oath by the sacred name of the Divinity; and it was intro- 
 duced not only without any violation of taste or offense to pious 
 ears, but with the thrilling sensations of religious rapture caught 
 from the lips of the man, who, as if by inspiration, uttered the 
 awful sound. Arguing upon the construction of certain words 
 attributed to Lord George Gordon, he exclaimed : ' But this I 
 will say, that he must be a ruffian and not a lawyer who would 
 dare to tell an English jury that such ambiguous words, hemmed 
 closely between others, not only innocent but meritorious, are 
 to be adopted to constitute guilt, by rejecting both introduction 
 and sequel.' Then, after noticing the offer made to the Gov- 
 ernment by the prisoner himself to quell the disturbance, he 
 ventured upon the following bold and extraordinary sentence ; 
 ' I say, by God ! that man is a ruffian who shall, after this, 
 presume to build upon such honest, artless conduct, as an evi- 
 dence of guilt.'" 
 
 The sensation produced by this daring appeal, and by 
 the magic of the voice, the eye, the face, the action, is 
 related by those present to have been electrical. This 
 was in 1 78 1 . The young nobleman, justly, was acquitted. 
 And at this point let the pulpit orator ask himself why 
 can he never mingle appeal to God or Christ with state- 
 ment or argument. Immense effects could thus be pro- 
 duced. It is never done. It is indefensible that it never 
 is done. The point is a very great one. Even heathen 
 orators put some pulpit orators to shame. 
 
 XCV. Oath, or Adjuration, deserves a separate place, 
 as many another object besides the Deity may be sworn 
 by. Thus, in Shakespeare's "Lear" that unsurpassed 
 storehouse for preachers : 
 
 " For, by the sacred radiance of the sun, 
 The mysteries of Hecate and the night; 
 
318 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 By all the operations of the orbs 
 
 From whom we do exist and cease to be, 
 
 Here I disclaim all my paternal care !" 
 
 In our much-prized modern pulpit, when it vindicates, 
 as ofttimes it doth, its old apostolic fires, this figure 
 is greatly desirable; as if a mighty preacher were to 
 cry: 
 
 By yon heaven, the home of the righteous, I adjure you; and 
 by hell, self-made dungeon of the impure ! You will perish if 
 you persist in this crime ! 
 
 S., " Romeo and Juliet," scene ii., Romeo's nth speech. 
 " Richard II.," act Hi., scene iii., Northumberland's 4th 
 speech, lines 5-11. 
 
 Anathema, a form of condemnation hurled at a crime, 
 can be grandly employed. Throwing aside his papers, 
 walking from side to side of the pulpit, lifting his heart 
 and voice to Jehovah, the speaker can cry to God so as 
 to shake the entire audience. But perhaps thou art dull 
 and tame, and makest amends by being very correct and 
 safe. Well, thou wilt never prove to be Elijah ; and 
 bursts of sham passion in the pulpit would only make 
 you and the pulpit ridiculous. 
 
 XCVI. Command is a form of words much the same 
 as apostrophe ; and very natural to the impassioned 
 mind ; as, Say ! Mark ! Look ! Mrs. Browning's heart- 
 stirring poem, " The Mask," in which her diction is ad- 
 mirably simple, as would it had ever been, affords us this ; 
 with what a racy flavor of the old ballads : 
 
 " Behind no prison-grate, she said, 
 
 Which slurs the sunshine half a mile, 
 Are captives so uncomforted, 
 
 As souls behind a smile. 
 God's pity let us pray, she said. 
 
 " Ye weep for those who weep ? she said 
 Ah fools ! I bid you pass them by ; 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. . 319 
 
 Go, weep for those whose hearts have bled 
 
 What time their eyes were dry ! 
 Whom sadder can I say? she said." 
 
 " The Tempest," by James T. Fields, puts this before 
 us: 
 
 " 'Tis a fearful thing in winter 
 
 To be shattered by the blast, 
 And to hear the rattling trumpet 
 Thunder ' Cut away the mast !' " 
 
 XCVII. Exclamation of Sorrow deserves to be singled 
 out by itself from other forms of exclamation, so prom- 
 inent is it in all forms of writing. Thus in the ludi- 
 crous by that exceedingly successful author, Charles 
 Lever, whose novels are noted triumphs of Irish humor: 
 
 " Did you hear of the Widow Malone, 
 
 Ohone ! 
 Who lived in the town of Athlone, 
 
 Alone ! 
 
 O she melted the hearts 
 Of the lads in them parts ; 
 
 So lovely the Widow Malone, 
 
 Ohone ! 
 So lovely the Widow Malone." 
 
 Samuel Lover, another inimitable Irishman, also deal- 
 eth sorrowfully in widows : 
 
 " Widow Machree, when winter comes In 
 
 Och hone, Widow Machree ! 
 To be poking the fire all alone is a sin 
 
 Och hone ! Widow Machree ! 
 Sure the shovel and tongs 
 To each other belongs, 
 And the kettle sings songs 
 
 Full of family glee ; 
 While alone with your cup 
 Like a hermit you sup 
 
 Och hone, Widow Machree !" 
 
320 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 XCVIII. Spiritualization deserves mention, however 
 shortly ; let us be lubricated by Samuel Ferguson. He 
 speaks of a pretty maid ; we see a material object turned 
 to an ethereal use : 
 
 " She brought us, in a beechen bowl, 
 
 Sweet milk that smacked of mountain thyme; 
 Oat-cake ; and such a yellow roll 
 Of butter it gilds all my rhyme." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 3 2 1 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 
 PART ELEVENTH. 
 
 Irony. Antiphrasis. Ironical Permission, or Ironical 
 Command. Anti-Irony, or Pretended Blame. Mock- 
 Heroic. Personification, or Prosopopeia. 
 
 XCIX. IRONY comes before us next : " the dry mock," 
 quoth old Puttenham. When a speaker expresses him- 
 self contrary to his thoughts, not with the intention of 
 concealing his real sentiments, but of giving greater force 
 to them, he speaks ironically. You can not but be fa- 
 miliar with the instance of its use by the sublime Elijah ; 
 for this figure is stern and indignant, suiting the lips of 
 a great reformer, sent of Heaven to rebuke an oppressive 
 king, an effeminate nation, or a brutal city mob. I Kings 
 xviii., 27. Yet it is to the praise of the books of our 
 faith that irony occurs very seldom in them ; there is 
 too much of contempt in it ; these books have no con- 
 tempt of man, even when they brand his vices. Eccles. 
 xi., 9; Mark vii., 9. We open Mr. Plunkett's speech in 
 the old Irish Parliament against the proposed union of 
 England and Ireland : 
 
 " National pride ! Independence of our country ! These we 
 are told by the minister are only vulgar topics fitted for the merid- 
 ian of the mob, but unworthy to be mentioned to such an enlight- 
 ened assembly as this. They are trinkets and gewgaws fit to 
 catch the fancy of childish and unthinking people like you, sir, 
 or like your predecessors in that chair, but utterly unworthy of 
 the consideration of this House, or of the matured understand- 
 
 X 
 
322 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 ing of the noble lord who condescends to instruct it. Gracious 
 God ! we see a Perry reascending from the tomb, and raising his 
 awful voice to warn us against the surrender of our freedom ; 
 and we see that the proud and virtuous feelings which warmed 
 the breast of that aged and venerable man are only calculated 
 to excite the contempt of this young philosopher, who has been 
 transplanted from the nursery to the cabinet to outrage the feel- 
 ings and understanding of the country." 
 
 To renew our study of Demosthenes a study that 
 characterizes this volume " A fine pretense !" is an ex- 
 pression not unusual with him when exposing a false as- 
 sertion. In the Crown, turning to ^Eschines, he says to 
 him: 
 
 " Manifest it is, forsooth, that you are grieved, ^Eschines, at 
 these events, and that you pity the Thebans; you who have 
 possessions in Bceotia; you who have made their lands your 
 own, thriving on their misery. . . . Any one may see most clear- 
 ly that he who is most vigilant in defense of his country, and 
 most zealous in his opposition to you,^Eschines, and your gang 
 of bought traitors, is after all your best friend, who makes a 
 market for you, making it necessary for the enemy of Athens 
 to pay a good sum for you. But for patriots, and the influence 
 and number and obstinate virtue of patriots, you traitors would 
 not be worth buying. You would bring nothing in the mar- 
 ket." 
 
 Whittier, of much lyric force, lofty moral and political 
 principle, inveighs against the wickedness of imprisoning 
 a debtor for years: 
 
 " What has the gray-hair'd prisoner done ? 
 
 Has murder stained his hands with gore ? 
 Not so. His crime's a fouler one 
 God made the old man poor." 
 
 In the tragedy of " Catiline," by Croly, are passages 
 of great power, expressed in the simplest, that is, the 
 truest language. Mark the broken exclamations, the 
 loud, fearless defiance, the fierce Satanic irony: 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 323 
 
 " * Banished from Rome !' What's banish'd, but set free 
 From daily contact of the things I loathe ? 
 1 Tried and convicted traitor !' Who says this ? 
 Who'll prove it, at his peril, on my head ? 
 Banish'd ! I thank you for't. It breaks my chain. 
 I held some slack allegiance till this hour; 
 But now my sword's my own ! Smile on, my lords. 
 I scorn to count what feelings, wither'd hopes, 
 Strong provocations, bitter, burning wrongs, 
 I have within my heart's hot cells shut up. 
 I leave you in your lazy dignities. 
 But here I stand and scoff you. Here I fling 
 Hatred and full defiance in your face. 
 Your consul's ' merciful.' For this, all thanks ! 
 He dares not touch a hair of Catiline." 
 
 Lord Erskine was told of one who died worth two 
 hundred thousand pounds. He observed 
 
 " What a pretty sum to begin the next world with." 
 
 A certain bishop was notorious for malice and treach- 
 ery. Said Sydney Smith : 
 
 " The bishop is so like Judas Iscariot, that I now firmly be- 
 lieve in the apostolical succession." 
 
 In a word, as satire abounds in irony, we send you to 
 study this figure in our four best American satirical po- 
 ems : Lowell's " Fable for Critics ;" Worth's " American 
 Bards ;" " Truth, a New Gift for Scribblers," by Snelling; 
 "The Quacks of Helicon," by Wilmer; all of which 
 will amuse you greatly, and will put a keener edge on 
 your critical powers. 
 
 C. In leaving this figure, remark that when it lies in 
 a single word, Antiphrasis is the name. This is the use 
 of a word the reverse of what one means as in the 
 expression, " The sacred love of gold ;" or as when we 
 say of a foolish fellow, "What a perfect Solon he is." 
 Puttenham calls it the " broad flout." 
 
324 Might and Mirth of Liter atitre. 
 
 CI. Ironical Permission, or Ironical Command, a figure 
 never before mentioned, is a very fine one, and must be 
 classed as a form of irony. Our attention was first ar- 
 rested by it in the pages of Scripture. Isa. 1., 1 1 ; Eccles. 
 xi., 9; Mark xiv., 41. We have sometimes thought that 
 this figure explains the command of Jesus to his dis- 
 ciples to arm themselves. It was so obviously absurd 
 for such a handful of peasants to think of defying the 
 military might of Rome. John xviii., 10; Luke xxii., 
 36, 38, 49-51. Let the grand lyrics of Isaiah be minute- 
 ly studied in Lowth's translation. Or open the pages 
 of Byron : 
 
 "In vain ! in vain ! Strike other chords; 
 
 Fill high the cup with Samian wine ! 
 Leave battles to the Turkish hordes, 
 
 And shed the blood of Scio's vine ! 
 Hark ! rising to the ignoble call, 
 How answers each bold bacchanal." 
 
 CII. Anti-Irony, or Pretended Blame, is a figure which 
 we have nowhere seen mentioned. Irony lies in pre- 
 tended praise ; this in pretended blame. Our love of 
 blunt, rough honesty of speech makes it popular. There 
 is in Scotland a poem, to which we have already refer- 
 red, by William Millar, on "Wee Willie Winkie," the 
 Genius of Infant Slumber, who is represented as endeav- 
 oring in vain to cause certain baby eyes to wink with 
 sleep : 
 
 " Hey, Willie Winkie, are ye comin' ben ? 
 The cat's singin' gay thrums to the sleepin' hen. 
 The dog's spelder'd on the floor, and disna gie a cheep; 
 But here's a waukrife laddie that winna fa' asleep. 
 Ony thing but sleep, ye rogue glowrin' like the moon ; 
 Rattlin' in an airn jug wi' an airn spoon. 
 Wearie is the mither that has a stoury wean 
 A wee stumpie stoussie that canna rip his lane, 
 That has a battle aye wi' sleep before he'll close an e'e 
 But a kiss frae aff his rosy lips gies strength anew to me !" 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 325 
 
 CIII. The Mock-Heroic comes next in view; where 
 grandiloquent language is purposely selected to set forth 
 small ideas or to depict small men. Whole productions 
 have been written in ithis style, as Tennant's " Anster 
 Fair," and Frere's " Whistle Craft ;" but we introduce it 
 here in reference to single terms and brief turns of dic- 
 tion. Thus, in the " Husband's Petition," by Aytoun: 
 
 " I feel a bitter craving, 
 
 A dark and deep desire, 
 That glows beneath my bosom 
 
 Like coals of kindled fire. 
 The passion of the nightingale, 
 
 When singing to the rose, 
 Is feebler than the agony 
 
 That murders my repose. 
 
 " By that great vow which bound thee 
 
 Forever to my side, 
 And by the ring that made thee 
 
 My darling and my bride, 
 Thou wilt not fail nor falter, 
 
 But bend thee to the task 
 A boil'd sheep's head for Sunday, 
 
 Is all the boon I ask." 
 
 CIV. Personification, or Prosopopeia, the ascribing of 
 life and personality to abstract qualities, such as Hatred 
 or Revenge, or to objects without life. This is a figure 
 than which none is more important or more natural to 
 man's mind. Scripture overflows with the boldest, most 
 beautiful instances: Jer. xlvii., 6; Gen. iv., 10; Rev. vi., 
 8; Mic. vi., 1,2; Hab. iii., 10; Zech.xiii.,/. It is the very 
 province of Passion and Imagination to people the air 
 and the woods, the. hours of morning and the dusk of 
 evening, with living beings. A twofold process is car- 
 ried on: the one, the bodying forth of feelings, senti- 
 ments, ideas of the mind, in beautiful forms ; the other, 
 the ascription of the mind's properties to material ob- 
 jects. In the one case, to the mental is given a body ; 
 
326 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 in the other is given to body a mind. An appearance 
 of joyfulness in a flower gives us intense delight. We 
 personify it, in order to rejoice in it the more. Emi- 
 nently unselfish is this delight. We rejoice to see the 
 flower, not as if it were ministering to us, but as en- 
 joying for itself. The more its play of branches, its 
 smoothness of stalk, its vivid green, are looked on by us 
 as signs of its own happiness, the more enjoyment we 
 have in gazing on it. Personification shows, too, that 
 the thing most interesting to man is man. Even Drake's 
 first-rate production, " The Captive Fay," written as an 
 attempt to keep out every thing of man, owes its in- 
 terestingness to the fay's being, in good measure, actu- 
 ated by feelings like our own. He is a man in all but 
 size : a pocket-edition of ourselves. 
 
 William Dunbar has a grand poem, " The Dance of 
 the Seven Deadly Sins." It is on hell's hot floor they 
 dance. Mahoun Mohammed once a common name 
 for Satan, gives them music. Each of the seven is a ter- 
 rific personage. Anger is introduced into the reel : 
 
 " Then Ire came in, with sturt and strife, 
 His hand was aye upon his knife." 
 
 In the subjoined, Charles Fenno Hoffman has given 
 several personifications : 
 
 "Birds are in woodland bowers; 
 
 Voices in lonely dells; 
 Streams to the listening hours 
 
 Talk in earth's secret cells. 
 Over the gray-ribbed sand 
 
 Breathe ocean's frothing lips ; 
 Over the still lake's strand 
 
 The flower toward it dips. 
 Pluming the mountain's crest, 
 
 Life tosses in its pines ; 
 Coursing the desert's breast, 
 
 Life in the steed's mane shines." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. . 327 
 
 Sir Walter Raleigh, named by his friend " The Shep- 
 herd of the Ocean," calls the flowers 
 
 "You pretty daughters of the Earth and Sun." 
 John Marston describes an army thus : 
 
 " Ghastly Amazement, with upstarted hair, 
 Shall hurry on before, and usher us; 
 While trumpets clamor with a sound of death." 
 
 Peele, another of that brood of undisciplined dramatic 
 giants, in his " David and Bathsheba," a tragedy written 
 before Shakespeare came, speaks thus of a fountain: 
 
 " The brim let be embraced with golden curls 
 Of moss, that sleeps with sounds the waters make." 
 
 When personification goes so far as to ascribe speech 
 to the thing personified, this is its highest point. Far 
 back in our literature, Gawin Douglas presents to us an 
 example in his prologue to his translation of Virgil's 
 "^Eneid :" 
 
 " All the small foulis sang thus on the spray : 
 ' Welcome, the Lord of light and Lampe of day ! 
 Welcome, quickener of flourished flowers sheen ! 
 Welcome, fosterer of tender herbs green. 
 Welcome, support of every root and vein ; 
 Welcome, comfort of all kind fruit and grain ; 
 Welcome, the birds bield upon the brier ; 
 Welcome, master and ruler of the year !' " 
 
 Next let us refer to Matt, vi., 3, and ask you to try on 
 it your skill in figures. Bold it is, but how natural. Yet, 
 after all the many years we have given to this subject, 
 we scarcely know where to place it. Is it^iot a personi- 
 fication of the left hand, and of its next-door neighbor, 
 the right hand ? It is marvelous how numerous are the 
 figures which Jesus uses. He uses them by the score. 
 It is evident that He, a thorough orator and poet ; yet 
 
328 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 oratory and poesy was half silenced in Him by the awe 
 
 of His great aims and mission. 
 
 From William Mason's tragedy of " Caractacus," we 
 
 quote next : 
 
 " Behold yon oak. 
 
 How stern he frowns, and with his broad brown arms 
 Chills the pale plain beneath him. Mark yon altar 
 The dark stream brawling round its rugged base ; 
 These cliffs, these yawning caverns, this wide circus, 
 Skirted with unhewn stone. They awe my soul, 
 As if the very Genius of the place 
 Himself appear'd, and with terrific tread 
 Stalk'd through his drear domain." 
 
 We know of scarcely any thing finer than this from the 
 sermons of Bishop Sherlock, which we now take from 
 him: 
 
 " Go to your Natural Religion lay before her Mohammed and 
 his disciples, arrayed in armor and blood ; riding in triumph 
 over the spoils of thousands, who fell by his victorious sword. 
 Show her the cities which he set on flames, the countries which 
 he ravaged and destroyed, and the miserable distress of all the 
 inhabitants of the East. When she has viewed him in this 
 scene, carry her into his retirement ; show her the prophet's 
 chamber ; his concubines and his wives ; and let her hear him 
 allege revelation and a divine commission to justify his adultery 
 and lust. When she is tired with this prospect, then show her 
 the blessed Jesus, humble and meek, doing good to all the sons 
 of men. Let her see Him in his most retired privacies, let her 
 follow Him to the mount, and hear His devotions and supplica- 
 tions to God. Carry her to His table to view His poor fare, 
 and hear His holy discourse. Let her attend Him to the tribu- 
 nal, and consider the patience with which He endured the scoffs 
 and reproaches^of His enemies. Lead her to His cross ; let 
 her view Him in the agony of death, and hear His last prayer 
 for His persecutors : ' Father, forgive them, for they know not 
 what they do.' When Natural Religion has thus viewed both, 
 ask her,Which is the prophet of God ? But her answer we have 
 already had, when she saw part of this scene through the eyes 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 329 
 
 of the centurion, who attended at the cross. By him she spake 
 and said, ' Truly this man was the Son of God.' " 
 
 Thomas Campbell gives us proof that objects of art do 
 sometimes reach the sublime : 
 
 "Those who have ever witnessed the spectacle of the launch- 
 ing of a ship of the line will perhaps forgive me for adding this 
 to the examples of the sublime objects of artificial life. Of 
 that spectacle I can never forget the impression, and of having 
 witnessed it reflected from the faces often thousand spectators. 
 They seem yet before me. I sympathize with their deep and 
 silent expectation, and with their final burst of enthusiasm. It 
 was not a vulgar joy, but an affecting national solemnity. When 
 the vast bulwark sprang from her cradle, the calm water on 
 which she swung majestically round gave the imagination a 
 contrast of the stormy element on which she was soon to ride. 
 All the days of battle and the nights of danger which she had 
 to encounter ; the ends of the earth which she had to visit; and 
 all that she had to do and to suffer for her country, rose in 
 awful presentiment before the mind ; and when the heart gave 
 her a benediction, it was like one pronounced on a human 
 being." 
 
 To see how differently two gifted minds treat the same 
 subject, take a speech of George Canning, the English 
 statesman and orator, delivered at Plymouth in 1823: 
 
 " Our present repose is no more proof of inability to act 
 than the state of inertness and inactivity in which I have seen 
 those mighty masses that float in the waters above your town 
 is a proof that they are devoid of strength, and incapable of 
 being fitted for action. You well know how soon one of those 
 stupendous masses, now reposing in their shadows with perfect 
 stillness how soon, upon any call of patriotism or i of necessity, 
 it would assume the likeness of an animated thing instinct with 
 life and motion ; how soon it would ruffle, as it were, its swell- 
 ing plumage ; how quickly it would put forth all its beauty and 
 bravery, collect its scattered elements of strength, and awaken 
 its dormant thunders." 
 
330 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 How full our literature of the noblest specimens of 
 this figure of personification. They crowd upon us in 
 starry groups. Spurgeon has this : 
 
 " If Christianity were put down, I would hang the world in 
 mourning, and make the Sea the chief mourner, with its dirge 
 of howling winds, and its wild death -march of disordered 
 waves." 
 
 Says old Fuller sublimely : 
 
 "The Pyramids, doting with age, have forgotten the names 
 of their founders." 
 
 Leigh Hunt, in his "Remains," full of genius, quaint- 
 ness, and admirable word-painting, places before us this 
 dim, strangely striking picture : 
 
 "A ghastly Castle that eternally 
 Holds its blind visage out to the lone Sea." 
 
 Daniel Webster, in his Bunker Hill oration, when the 
 monument was completed, and many thousand specta- 
 tors stood around him, said, pointing to the column : 
 
 " It is itself the orator of this occasion. It is not from my 
 lips, it could not be from any human lips, that that strain of 
 eloquence is this day to flow most competent to move and to 
 excite the vast multitudes around me. That powerful speaker 
 stands motionless before us." 
 
 Take a specimen from Collins, on the graves of heroes 
 and patriots : 
 
 " There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray, 
 To bless the turf that wraps their clay." 
 
 Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, sets before us this 
 lively portrait of War, in his justly famous " Induction " 
 to the " Mirrour of Magistrates:" 
 
 " Lastly, stood War in glittering arms yclad, 
 With visage grim, stern look, and blackly hued \ 
 In his right hand a naked sword he had, 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 33 1 
 
 That to the hilt was all with blood embrued , 
 And in his left (that kings and kingdoms rued) 
 Famine and fire he held, and therewithal 
 . He razed towns, and threw down tower and hall." 
 
 Bayard Taylor tells us how the poet in the East finds 
 life and love in every thing : 
 
 " His feet went forth on the myrtled hills, 
 And the flowers their welcome shed ; 
 
 The meads of milk-white asphodel, 
 They knew the poet's tread ; 
 
 And far and wide, in a scarlet tide, 
 The poppy's bonfire spread. 
 
 " And half in shade, and half in sun, 
 
 The Rose sat in her bower ; 
 With a passionate thrill in her crimson heart, 
 
 She had waited for the hour ; 
 And like a bride's, the poet kiss'd 
 
 The lips of the glorious flower." 
 
 John Cunningham has written many pastoral and de- 
 scriptive pieces, full of a charming ease and simplicity. 
 He thus narrates of a country nymph very dear to him : 
 
 *' Now jocund together, we tend a few sheep ; 
 
 And if, by yon prattler the stream, 
 Reclin'd on her bosom, I sink into sleep, 
 
 Her image still softens my dream. 
 To pomp or proud titles she ne'er did aspire 
 
 The damsel's of humble descent ; 
 The cottager, Peace, is well known for her sire, 
 
 And the shepherds have named her Content." 
 
 Turn we to Tecumseh and his Indians. Armed to the 
 teeth, he came to meet General Harrison. At this coun- 
 cil, by some oversight, no chair had been provided for 
 the chief. He instantly detected the neglect, and his 
 countenance showed his sense of the indignity. Govern- 
 or Harrison saw his displeasure and caused a chair to be 
 brought. The interpreter presented the chair, and said, 
 
332 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 "Your father wishes you to be seated." Tecumseh, 
 haughtily lifting himself to his loftiest stature, looked 
 down upon the interpreter, and, waving the chair from 
 him, in tones of supreme contempt replied : 
 
 " My father ! The Sun is my father, and the Earth is my 
 mother. I will repose upon her bosom." 
 
 Then, with a mien of sovereign dignity that revealed the 
 born king, he disposed himself on the ground, after the 
 custom of his fathers. S., " Antony and Cleopatra," act 
 ii., scene ii., line 23. 
 
 In an exquisite line of the inimitable Catullus 
 
 " Ridere, quidquid est Domi cachinnorum " 
 
 we have the Home-laughers addressed as though they 
 were frank and hearty rural nymphs, untamed by eti- 
 quette, and invoked to make the beloved roof re-echo 
 with their bursts of honest merriment. How impossible 
 to translate such a line. Leigh Hunt turns it thus : 
 
 " Laugh, every dimple on the cheek of Home." 
 
 Verily, a most delightful line. But " cachinnorum " is 
 not nearly so slim as " dimple." 
 
 From Owen Meredith son and successor of Sir E. L. 
 Bulwer, Lord Lytton we gather a quotation from his 
 " Lucille :" 
 
 " There is war in the skies ! 
 Lo the black-winged legions of tempest arise 
 O'er those sharp-splintered rocks that are gleaming below 
 In the soft light, so fair and so fatal ; as though 
 Some seraph burned through them, the thunderbolt searching 
 Which the black cloud unbosom'd just now. Lo ! the lurching 
 And shivering pine-trees, like phantoms that seem 
 To waver above in the dark ; and yon stream, 
 How it hurries and roars, on its way to the white 
 And paralyzed lake there ; appalled at the sight 
 Of the things seen in heaven." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 333. 
 
 Or, hastening to Byron, this noble line rushes on us : 
 " Red Battle stamped his foot, and nations felt the shock." 
 
 Not any thing that Charlotte Bronte has given us is 
 more noble than her Nature, in " Shirley:" 
 
 "Nature is now at her evening prayers; she is kneeling be- 
 fore those red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of 
 her altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea; for travel- 
 ers in deserts ; for lambs on moors ; and unfledged birds in 
 woods. I saw I see now, a Woman-Titan; her robe of blue air 
 spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is 
 grazing ; a veil, white as an avalanche, sweeps from her head 
 to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. 
 Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon ; 
 through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes 
 I can not picture they are clear ; they are deep as lakes ; they 
 are lifted and full of worship; they tremble with the softness 
 of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the ex- 
 panse of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long 
 before dark gathers; she reclines her bosom on the ridge of 
 Stilbro Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So 
 kneeling, face to face, she speaks with God." 
 
 Robert Robinson, Baptist minister at Cambridge, En- 
 gland, thus ventures to begin a sermon on the words 
 " If ye love me, keep my commandments:" 
 
 " If ye love me ! If! O cruel If! Why is this ? Is it possi- 
 ble that this can be a doubt ? If I love Thee ? Why, it would 
 be better for me to have my love to my wife, my children, my 
 parents, my friends, doubtful, than to have this so. O this 
 wicked If! O that I could tear it out of my heart! O thou 
 poison of all my pleasures ! Thou cold, icy hand that touches 
 me so often, and freezes me with the touch ! If! If!" 
 
 O that our young men in the ministry would strive, al- 
 most unto death, to study and pray themselves into 
 mighty orators of God ; and that the pulpit might vin- 
 dicate itself as the most befitting station for Eloquence 
 
334 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 to occupy : standing there, angel-like, between time and 
 eternity, between duty and sin, between God and Satan, 
 between heaven and hell. Ezek. xxxvi., i-io; xxxvii., 
 
 I-IO. 
 
 A distinction, very important here, suggests itself. Cer- 
 tain epithets express personality and its feelings ; those 
 that do so, ascribing emotions to inanimate objects, per- 
 tain to a higher realm than those expressive of a mere 
 literal fact. You may call the oak, aspiring making 
 manifest the very soul of the tree ; or you may term it 
 tall. Sir Walter Scott seldom rises higher than to ad- 
 jectives like the latter. Wordsworth is continually using 
 adjectives such as the former. Your author inflicts on 
 you both classes: 
 
 The moonlight weird, silvers with pale affright 
 The trembling waves ; the tops of beech and pine ; 
 And Awe reigns thron'd amid yon solemn stars. 
 
 "Weird," " pale affright," " trembling," " solemn," are of 
 the emotional impersonating class; the latter half of our 
 second line is merely literal. Shakespeare is a supreme 
 master of both kinds. William Allingham, in his delight- 
 ful ballad, " Lovely Mary Donnelly," gives us this not 
 a bit too absurd : 
 
 "When she stood up for dancing, her steps were so complete, 
 The Music nearly kill'd itself, to listen to her feet." 
 
 Very graceful, as are all his, and light of touch, is Rob- 
 ert Herrick's address to the " Violets :" 
 
 " Welcome, Maids of honor ! 
 You do bring 
 In the Spring, 
 And wait upon her." 
 
 CV. Ascription of Intention to an object incapable of 
 an intention or purpose is one of the most pleasing forms 
 of personification. Thus, in Thomas Davis, the justly 
 celebrated Irish song writer's " Banks of the Lee :" 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 335 
 
 "O so green is the grass, so clear is the stream, 
 So mild is the mist, and so rich is the beam, 
 That beauty should never to other lands roam, 
 But make on the banks of our river its home ! 
 When dripping with dew, 
 The roses peep through, 
 'Tis to look in at you 
 
 They are growing so fast; 
 While the scent of the flowers, 
 Must been hoarded for hours 
 'Tis pour'd in such showers 
 When my Mary goes past." 
 
 CVI. Anti-Personification. To show, curiously, with 
 what opposite instruments the mind can work, let us ob- 
 serve th'at to represent a person as a thing may energet- 
 ically lower or ridicule ; as when, of John Gilpin, Cow- 
 per says at a critical moment of the hero's equestrian 
 experience : 
 
 " The horse who never in such sort 
 
 Had handled been before, 
 What thing upon its back had got 
 Did wonder more and more." 
 
 Or mark the effect in the subjoined lines of Words- 
 worth : 
 
 " How, in the name of soldiership and sense, 
 Should England prosper, when such things, as smooth 
 And tender as a girl, all essenced o'er 
 With odors, and as profligate as sweet, 
 Who sell their laurel for a myrtle wreath, 
 And love when they should fight ; when such as these 
 Presume to lay their hands upon the ark 
 Of her magnificent and awful cause ?" 
 
 A third instance of anti-personification comes before 
 us in Henry Grattan's invective against Mr. Cony, Feb- 
 ruary 14, 1800: 
 
336 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 "Am I to renounce these habits now forever; and at the 
 beck of whom I should rather say of what ? half a minister, 
 half a monkey; a 'prentice-politician, a master-coxcomb." 
 
 See 2 Sam. xvi., 9. Then, what pathos in the cry from 
 the heart of the mighty thinker, Aristotle, amid the 
 gropings of his bewildered reason eagerly seeking for 
 certainty. When baffled in his attempts to discover the 
 cause of the ebbing and flowing of the sea, he cried with 
 anguished voice to the Great One, who, he knew, was; 
 but of whom, as to what he was, he felt that he had as- 
 certained so little : 
 
 " O Thing of Things ! have mercy upon me !" 
 
 Nothing in all antiquity more touching. 
 
 Contrast the feeling which we meet with, in this cry 
 on the part of the mighty intellect of Aristotle, than 
 whom no man that ever lived ruled more widely among 
 men of culture, with the atheism of a few in our day, 
 who are the merest pigmies in comparison with him. 
 Aristotle, unfavored by words from on high, is agonized 
 by that noble aspiration of his to know his Creator, to 
 commune with the Infinite Thinker. In the kingly Gre- 
 cian sage we see intellect pining after the great kindred 
 intellect; heart thirsting after heart. He recognizes not 
 a Power only, but a Person ; not merely a Person, but a 
 Person who can create and plan and interfere ; not mere- 
 ly one who plans and interferes, but one who can be 
 sought in prayer, can answer prayer, can melt in pity. 
 Atheism dwarfs man ; dwarfs, beclouds every thing ; dis- 
 intellects the universe ; dries literature into sandy dust ; 
 but to pine after God with Aristotle, to pray to God 
 with Aristotle and Demosthenes, as in the course of our 
 studies we have naturally come on them doing, is to soar 
 with the noblest minds in their noblest hour. These 
 are facts, for which we have referred you to them. If 
 we had gone craftily, unnaturally, in search of these facts 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 337 
 
 still worse, if we had gone in fabrication of them but 
 no, they beamed on us in the unartificial course of pure 
 literary reading. Mark, too, what you can not but see, 
 that if we had made it a rule to quote nothing that had 
 prayer or worship in it, we would have left unquoted the 
 most sublime things in this volume. How contemptibly 
 blind our atheists are ! How ignorant they of the true 
 science of man's nature ! Not only false to the sublime 
 " Thing of Things," the God who gave them so noble a 
 birth, but false to literature ; false to man, and to the 
 progress of man ; triply false to science. Let them re- 
 member that the Past hath a history, this one of its 
 chapters : that literature, without worship, can not reach 
 its highest. Socrates, Cicero, Plato, Demosthenes, Aris- 
 totle, all the five were men of gigantic mould, overflow- 
 ing with worship and with prayer ; any little finger of 
 theirs more priceless than the whole body of such shal- 
 low souls shallow compared with these five. 
 
 This, too, is the point at which to state not develop- 
 ing them, but in the way of very brief suggestion these 
 three thoughts: 
 
 1. Nothing could have happened better for Christian- 
 ity than the present atheistic raid against God. It will 
 bind together, and is so doing, all who own and ad- 
 mire Aristotle's " Thing of Things." The sincere deist 
 and the devoted Christian will feel themselves drawn 
 toward each other; the Christian seeking and finding 
 Christ in nature, which blooms all over with figures of 
 Emmanuel ; the deist learning; if he kneel humbly at the 
 feet of God, that it is Christ whose bright and sover- 
 eign feet he has been clasping. All lovers of Deity 
 will experience priceless benefits from the Satanic cry, 
 " Away with God !" It is an attempt to fire the com- 
 mon homestead. Would that all the impiety may take 
 that shape. 
 
 2. There is no priestcraft in prayer. In the Old Testa- 
 ment there is no transubstantiation in the Paschal Lamb. 
 
 Y 
 
338 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Why was not the lamb of the passover transubstan- 
 tiated into God? We saw how figurative language, 
 rightly understood, sweeps away this dogma of the Vati- 
 can. Besides, all through the Old Testament the priests 
 are carefully kept in a very secondary place ; while in the 
 New Testament they disappear altogether. No priest- 
 craft in worship ! But to literature, worship and prayer 
 are its very life-blood. You will not be half the lawyer 
 that you might be, if you be not permeated by prayer. 
 Again and again we implore you to think of Demos- 
 thenes and Aristotle. No small smart men they; but 
 archangelic. 
 
 3. Our clergy might be braver than some preachers are. 
 For example, they should not only maintain that there 
 is no priestcraft in Holy Writ a mere negative position ; 
 but they should take this heroic positive position : that 
 man's tendencies are such that he has no safety against, no 
 extirpator of, priestcraft, so mighty as Holy Writ. Man 
 can not crush down priestcraft save through Holy Writ. 
 'Look at Utah : without the Bible, they plunged into a 
 nauseous and tyrannic spiritual despotism. Visit the 
 conclave of the cardinals, and the infallible old gentle- 
 man there. They dread the Bible ; they brand true re- 
 spect for it, and obedience to it, as idolatry ; Bible-idol- 
 atry ; and forthwith, to be consistent, they run to the 
 crucifix and to the Virgin. The Bible, being the great 
 book of figures, we are entitled to speak of it in this vol- 
 ume, nay, we are compelled to speak of it here ; and to 
 say of it, that it is the great rampart of spiritual liberty ; 
 the inspired apostle of free-thinking: such free-think- 
 ing as trains and enables men to breathe mountain air; 
 the mountain air of true disenthrallment from Prejudice. 
 Spite, Bigotry, Priestcraft, and Atheism. 
 
 But it is time to change the subject. Sir Alexander 
 Boswell, son of the Hon. James Boswell, Johnson's unsur- 
 passed biographer, has written very successfully a few 
 pieces of broad humor, in one of which, "Jenny's Bawbee," 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 339 
 
 a suitor in love with the young lady's bawbee, or half- 
 penny that is, figuratively, her fortune cometh to grief: 
 
 " A' spruce frae ban'-boxes and tubs, 
 A Thing cam' neist but life has rubs ; 
 Foul were the roads and fou the dubs; 
 
 Ah ! waes me ! 
 
 * I kent,' said he, ' I could na fail ' 
 She preen'd the dish-clout till his tail, 
 And cool'd him wi' a water-pail, 
 
 And keepit her bawbee." 
 
 S., " Coriolanus," act iv., scene v., Aufidius's 6th speech, 
 line 16; scene vi., Cominius's loth speech. "Antony 
 and Cleopatra," act iii., scene iii., lines 39, 40. 
 
 Jean Ingelow, a poetess of our day, gives us one more 
 anti-personification : 
 
 " Against her ankles as she trod, 
 The lucky buttercups did nod ; 
 
 I leaned upon the gate to see. 
 The sweet thing look'd, but did not speak; 
 A dimple came in either cheek, 
 
 And all my heart was gone from me." 
 
 CVII. Enhancement by Difference, or the Illustration 
 of what is by what is not, merits a place. If we do not 
 name it well, Burns exemplifies it well ; it has been left 
 to us, at this late day, to register and name it : 
 
 "'Tis not the surging billow's roar; 
 'Tis not that fatal, deadly shore ; 
 Though death in every shape appear, 
 The wretched have no more to fear. 
 But round my heart the ties are bound 
 That heart transpierced with many a wound; 
 These bleed afresh, these ties I tear 
 To leave the bonnie banks of Ayr." 
 
 Mr. Stephens, the American traveler, always clear and 
 
34O Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 interesting, in his " Incidents of Travel," places us in an 
 ancient Eastern city, such as Nineveh or Petra : 
 
 " I would that the skeptic could stand, as I did, among the 
 ruins of this city, and there open the sacred book, and read the 
 words of the inspired penman written when this desolate place 
 was one of the greatest cities of the world. I see the scoff ar- 
 rested, his cheek pale, his lip quivering, and his heart quaking 
 with fear, as the ancient city cries out to him, in a voice loud 
 and powerful as one risen from the dead. Though he would not 
 believe Moses and the prophets, he believes the handwriting of 
 God himself, in the desolation and eternal ruin around him." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 341 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 
 PART TWELFTH. 
 
 Egoism. Self-depreciation. Paranomasia. A ntanacla- 
 sis. Soliloquy. Direct A ddress. Dialogue. Predic- 
 tion. A nticipation. Pretended Omission. Paralepsis, 
 or Apophasis. Disparity. Outward Illustration. Ac- 
 companiment. Meeting of Opposites. 
 
 CVIII. EGOISM, the introduction of one's own opin- 
 ion, wants, or experience : the bringing one's self indi- 
 vidually before the audience, is at times necessary to 
 give an air of life to oratory ; or to show befitting ear- 
 nestness : 
 
 " The business I see is advancing," 
 
 cries Demosthenes. Hear the energetic Lord Brough- 
 am : 
 
 " I have read with astonishment, and I repel with scorn, the 
 insinuation that I had acted the part of an advocate, and that 
 some of my statements were colored to serve a cause. How 
 dares any man so to accuse me ? How dares any one, skulk- 
 ing under a fictitious name, to launch his slanderous imputations 
 from his covert ? I come forward in my own person. I make 
 the charge in the face of day. I drag the criminal to trial. I 
 openly call down justice on his head. I defy his attacks. I 
 defy his defenders. I challenge investigation." 
 
 Cowper, the poet of the Cross, thus speaks of certain 
 vain speculations: 
 
342 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Defend me, therefore, Common-sense, say I, 
 From reveries so airy; from the toil 
 Of dropping buckets into empty wells, 
 And growing old in drawing nothing up." 
 
 Dr. John M. Mason, in his deservedly admired ser- 
 mon, " The Gospel for the Poor," gives us this form ; the 
 statement of a personal want common to him with all 
 his hearers : 
 
 " He who pretends to be my comforter without consulting 
 my immortality, overlooks my essential want. The Gospel 
 supplies it. Immortality is the basis of her system. These 
 are Christian views. They stamp new interest on all my re- 
 lations and all my acts. They hold up before me objects vast 
 as my wishes, terrible as my fears, and permanent as my being. 
 And again : If I ask how I am to be delivered, human reason 
 is dumb. The more I ponder the Gospel method of salvation, 
 the more am I convinced that it displays the divine perfection. 
 My worst fears are dispelled ; the wrath to come is not for me ; 
 I can look with composure at futurity; and feel joy springing 
 up with the thought that I am immortal." 
 
 This fine sermon is full of similar forms of egoism, all of 
 them perfectly untainted with egotism. Musing on such 
 sermons as this, we need no other proof of Christ's con- 
 summate wisdom as the Legislator for all nations and 
 ages, than His having given to preaching the leading 
 place He has assigned to it " Go ye into all the world 
 and preach." The pulpit never can be superseded by the 
 newspaper or the printing-press. Nothing like the pow- 
 er of a living voice, which proclaims the conscience- 
 arousing, the heart-satisfying Gospel truths ; and which 
 need not be surpassed, in poesy, in sublimity, in pathos. 
 Psa. Ixvi., 13-20. 
 
 CIX. Self-depreciation may be used at times with good 
 effect. Yet as egoism must not savor of egotism, so self- 
 dispraise would be nauseous if in the least it resembles 
 mock-modesty. The eloquent and tasteful Esprit Fie- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 343 
 
 chier gives us an inoffensive example in his masterpiece 
 on the death of Marshal Turenne : 
 
 " Pardon a little confusion in my treatment of a subject that 
 has caused us so much grief. I may sometimes confound the 
 general of the army with the sage and the Christian. Through 
 the whole I shall strive to win your attention, not by the force 
 of eloquence, but by the reality and greatness of the virtues 
 about which I am engaged to speak." 
 
 In a form somewhat different, Saurin says, at the close 
 of a sermon, very affectingly : 
 
 " Alas ! it is this general influence which these exhortations 
 ought to have over our lives, that makes us fear we have ad- 
 dressed them to you in vain. How often have you sent us 
 empty away, even when we demanded so little. What will you 
 do to-day ?" 
 
 CX. Paranomasia, the Pun, we have at length arrived 
 at: emphatically, the wit of words; a trick of verbal 
 cleverness, founded on the circumstance of two or more 
 words of similar sound having different meanings. A 
 certain law lord in Scotland was noted for his pompous 
 way of speaking. Telling Harry Erskine one day that 
 an acquaintance had fallen from a stile and sprained his 
 ankle, said Erskine : 
 
 " It is a mercy he did not fall from your style, else he would 
 have broken his neck." 
 
 CXI. In the precise language of Rhetoric, when the 
 same word is repeated in a different sense, this species 
 of pun is called Antanaclasis, as in the expression : 
 
 "While we live, let us live;" 
 or in this : 
 
 " Learn some craft while you are young, that when old you 
 may live without craft." 
 
 A person explaining about acids in a very prosy way 
 
344 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 to Charles Lamb, Lamb stopped him with the re- 
 mark: 
 
 " The best of all acids is assiduity." 
 
 Said Hancock, on the sublime occasion when your 
 fathers were signing the Declaration of American Inde- 
 pendence, and when the English king would have hanged 
 them if he could : 
 
 "We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling differ- 
 ent ways." "Yes," said Franklin, "we must all hang togeth- 
 er, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." 
 
 Paranomasia has obtruded itself even on tombstones. 
 Nothing in Greek learning is more difficult than the 
 particles the numerous one-syllabled adverbs and con- 
 junctions. A certain Dr. Walker had won considerable 
 fame by a treatise on these. But the word particles 
 means, too, grains of dust ; so the Doctor ordered this 
 for his epitaph : 
 
 " Here lies Walker's particles." 
 
 In a similar strain, the celebrated Thomas Fuller has 
 this inscription over his dust in Westminster Abbey: 
 
 "Here lies Fuller's earth." 
 
 From the old city of Byzantium there came, as em- 
 bassador to Athens, Leon, a very little and deformed 
 man. He stood up to speak. At sight of him the 
 Athenians burst into violent laughter, so that he could 
 not be heard. At length he said : 
 
 "What would you say, then, did you but see my wife? She 
 hardly reaches to my knees. Yet, little as we are, when we 
 disagree the city of Byzantium is not large enough to hold us." 
 
 Or go once again to the Scottish lawyer and wit, 
 Harry Erskine. Some acquaintances came on him sud- 
 denly as he was digging potatoes in his garden : 
 
 " This is otium cum diggin' a tattle," quoth he 
 (Otium cum dignitate, Ease with dignity). 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 345 
 
 CXII. Soliloquy is the next figure with which we pro- 
 ceed : a dialogue which the writer or speaker carries on 
 with himself. In this, Scripture is peculiarly rich. Luke 
 xii., 1 6-2 1. Psa. vi., 6, 1 1 ; xiv., I ; cxvi., 7, 12, 13. Luke 
 xv., 17-19. Job xxxix., 25. A figure very capable of 
 admirable uses. You remember the expression in one 
 of the Psalms : 
 
 "God is not in all his thoughts." 
 But in the original Hebrew it reads: 
 " All his thoughts are : ' There is no God.' " 
 
 How much more vivid. A fair example of the inferi- 
 orities that abound in our version. Not inaccurate state- 
 ments ; not falsehoods ; but far short it comes in vivac- 
 ity, impressiveness, and a thousand literary charms ; and 
 the grandeurs of many a heroic page. 
 
 CXIII. Direct Address, by a third party, an impor- 
 tant figure, is distinguished from Dialogue by this, that 
 neither the speaker himself nor any other makes any 
 direct reply. Even this, however, is eminently fitted to 
 produce vivacity of style. What higher instance of the 
 sublime than that which we find, appropriately, near the 
 opening of Genesis, when Jehovah is revealed looking 
 forth on chaos, and He said : 
 
 " ' Light, be ! ' and light was." 
 
 See also Rev. vi., 16; Mark xiii., 6, 21. The third per- 
 son introduced speaking utters the very sentiment suit- 
 ed to the circumstances ; what need, therefore, of any 
 reply ? The following is from one of our best poems, by 
 Charles Swain: 
 
 "O the old, old clock, of the household stock, 
 
 Was the brightest thing and neatest ; 
 The hands, though old, had a touch of gold, 
 And its chime rang still the sweetest. 
 
346 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 'Twas a monitor, too, though its words were few, 
 Yet they lived, though nations altered ; 
 
 And its voice, still strong, warn'd old and young, 
 When the voice of friendship falter'd. 
 
 * Tick, tick,' it said ; ' quick, quick to bed ; 
 
 For ten I've given warning; 
 Up, up, and go ; or else, you know, 
 
 You'll never rise soon in the morning.' " 
 
 From Seba Smith, author of " The Letters of Major 
 Jack Downing," the following direct address proceeds : 
 
 "The cold winds swept the mountain-height, 
 
 And pathless was the dreary wild, 
 And mid the cheerless hours of night 
 
 A mother wandered with her child. 
 As through the drifting snow she press'd, 
 Her babe was sleeping on her breast. 
 
 " And colder still the winds did blow, 
 
 And darker hours of night came on, 
 And deeper grew the drifting snow; 
 
 Her limbs were chill'd, her strength was gone. 
 
 * O God !' she cried, in accents wild, 
 ' If I must perish, save my child.' " 
 
 By one special variety of this figure, a vivid effect may 
 be produced ; when the third party is commanded to 
 utter certain words, these being put in his mouth. See 
 Isa. xl., 9. Or, in the way of American humor, take the 
 speech of the treed coon to the sportsman whose gun is 
 pointed at him a promise and a prediction : 
 
 "Don't fire, Colone,!; I'll come down." 
 
 In Abbadie's " Sermon on the Sacrifice of Abraham," 
 the patriarch is introduced expressing in his own words 
 his contending emotions on receiving the command to 
 offer up Isaac a mode of treating the subject that has 
 often been adopted. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 347 
 
 By Edmund Clarence Stedman, a writer deft and orig- 
 inal, we are presented with a speech by the Moon, short 
 but to the purpose, encouraging a youth to an act oscu- 
 latory : 
 
 " A cloud pass'd kindly overhead, 
 
 The Moon was slyjy peeping through it, 
 Yet hid its face, as if it said 
 
 * Come ! Now or never ! Do it ! do it !' " 
 
 CXIV. Dialogue is a fo^m into which, with much ef- 
 fect, an argument or burst of feeling may be thrown. 
 In Demosthenes, on the Crown, he introduces a state- 
 ment by his opponent, ^Eschines, and replies to it. The 
 reply constitutes it dialogue : 
 
 " ' He who reproaches me with the intimacy of Alexander !' 
 I reproach thee with the intimacy of Alexander ! How couldst 
 thou obtain it? How couldst thou aspire to it? I could never 
 call thee Philip's friend, nor Alexander's intimate. I am not 
 so insane ; unless we are to call the menial servants, who toil 
 for their wages, the friends and intimates of those who deign to 
 hire them." 
 
 Here the dialogue is between the speaker or writer and 
 another ; but it may take place between other two per- 
 sons or more, the speaker not taking part in it. Why 
 this so seldom in our pulpits ? This form of language is 
 admirably fitted to give energy and impassioned life to 
 oratory or argument. Carefully scan the inspiring ex- 
 amples: Isa. xl.,6; Lukexii., 20; xiii., 25-27; Isa. Ixiii., 
 1-6. By dialogue is not meant dramatic writing, where 
 the whole is dialogue, but the introducing of a short di- 
 alogue in a piece non-dramatic. Take Alexander Coch- 
 ran's " Pilot :" 
 
 "The waves are high, the night is dark, 
 
 Wild roam the foaming tides, 
 Dashing around the straining bark, 
 As gallantly she rides. 
 
 
348 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 1 Pilot, take heed what course you steer; 
 
 Our bark is tempest-driven !' 
 Stranger, be calm ; there is no fear 
 
 For him who trusts in Heaven." 
 
 For the pulpit, a dialogue might often be introduced 
 between the Preacher and Eternity : 
 
 O dread Eternity, I ask thee to tell, how can man live in 
 safety on earth ? 
 
 And Eternity, looking down on me from heaven, speaks 
 and says : 
 
 Despise the bribes of sin ! Give not up thy soul to things 
 perishable ? Give God the chief place in thy heart ! 
 
 Or Life and Death might be made the interlocutors ; or 
 Sin and Hell ; or, as by Bourdaloue on Christ's death, 
 Conscience and Passion. Of course, this implies strong 
 emotion, and therefore such dialogues should be short 
 and rapid. Well-conducted, they might be used with 
 noble effect by a Christ-made man worthy of the Chris- 
 tian pulpit that loftiest home of eloquence. Or the 
 audience before him might be addressed, and the re- 
 ply, which they would be ashamed not to give, might 
 be put in their lips. You are, we dare say, familiar with 
 the example from the greatest of mere human orators, 
 because so virtuous, Demosthenes: 
 
 " For I " thus he addresses ^Eschines " and all these with 
 me, call you a hireling, first of Philip, and now of Alexander ! 
 If you doubt, ask these present ; but I will rather do it for you. 
 Does it seem to you, Athenians, that ^Eschines is a hireling, or 
 a guest of Alexander ? Do you hear what they say ?" 
 
 In this case, the audience itself shouted " Hireling !" 
 A dangerous experiment for an inferior orator. Be pity 
 for him whose cry in his heart is " Let me always be 
 tame ! no grand effort come ever from my commonplace 
 lips." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 349 
 
 In a speech of Brougham in the House of Lords, he 
 supposes his audience to reply to the question he had 
 just put to them. He was urging the necessity of Par- 
 liamentary reform : 
 
 " Among the awful considerations which now bow down my 
 mind, there is one which stands pre-eminent above the rest. 
 You are the highest judicature in the realm ; you sit here as 
 judges, and decide all causes, civil and criminal, without ap- 
 peal. It is a judge's first duty never to pronounce sentence in 
 the most trifling cause without hearing. Will you make the 
 exception? Are you really. prepared to determine, but not to 
 hear, the mighty cause upon which 'hang a nation's hopes and 
 fears ? You are ? Then beware of your decision !" 
 
 The reverend and eccentric Rowland Hill was preach- 
 ing in the open air, in that suburban part of London de- 
 nominated Moorfields, from the Song of Solomon, i., 5 
 " I am black but comely;" which he explained as having 
 reference to the Church of Christ, which in the sight of 
 the world was black black as the tents of Kedar, but in 
 the sight of her glorified Head was comely comely as 
 the curtains of Solomon. While enlarging on the sub- 
 ject, Lady Anne Erskine happened to pass that way. 
 She asked her servants what was the cause of the very 
 large assemblage of people. They replied that it was 
 the renowned Rowland Hill, who was addressing the peo- 
 ple. Lady Anne said she had long cherished a desire to 
 hear that eccentric man preach, and should now have it 
 fully gratified, and desired her charioteer to bring her as 
 near as possible, that she might hear every word he said. 
 She was soon in the rear of the temporary pulpit, the 
 only place where it was possible to get near him. The 
 gorgeous accession that had taken place to the congrega- 
 tion, and the brilliant and sparkling appearance of Lady 
 Anne, attracted the attention of the congregation more 
 than the preacher, but Rowland Hill's observant eyes de- 
 tected the movements, and he resolved on a hazardous 
 but effective remedy. He paused, and then said : 
 
350 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Brethren, I bespeak your attention for a few moments. I 
 am now about to hold an auction or vendue. I have here a 
 lady and her whole equipage to expose to public sale, but the 
 lady is the principal and only object I wish to dispose of at 
 present. Well, there are already three earnest bidders in the 
 field. The first is the World : well, and what will you give for 
 her ? I will give honors, wealth, and pleasure. That won't do 
 she's worth more than that, for she shall continue to live 
 when the honors, wealth, and pleasure you have it in your 
 power to bestow shall vanish as the darkness of night before 
 orient beams : you can't have her. The next bidder is the 
 devil : well, and what will you give for her ? I will give all the 
 kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. That won't do 
 either,, for she shall continue to exist when the kingdoms of the 
 world and the glory of them shall have vanished as a snow- 
 wreath beneath a vernal shower : you can't have her. But list ! 
 I hear the voice of another it is the Lord Jesus Christ : well, 
 and what will You give for her ? I will give an inheritance that 
 is incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away, eternal in 
 the heavens. Blessed Jesus ! Just as I expected just like 
 the liberality that Thou art wont to display! Well, I will place 
 her at Thy disposal she is black but comely and Thou shalt 
 be the purchaser. Let Heaven and Earth attest this irrevo- 
 cable contract." 
 
 Turning to Lady Anne, he said 
 
 " Madam, have you heard this contract that Heaven and 
 Earth hath irrevocably attested? Remember that from this 
 time forth and for evermore you are the property of the Lord 
 Jesus." He died to redeem you you are purchased with His 
 blood. Can you, dare you reject it ?" 
 
 The arrow thus sped at a venture found its way to the 
 heart of Lady Anne, and she became emineritly useful. 
 
 In an intensely beautiful piece by George Herbert, 
 he describes himself as wholly abandoning his soul to 
 unbelief and rebellious utterances against God and self- 
 denial. The piece, however, concludes with this inim- 
 itable bit of dialogue : 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 351 
 
 " But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild, 
 
 At every word, 
 
 Methought I heard One calling, ' Child !' 
 And I replied, ' My Lord !' " 
 
 This figure is to us so fascinating that we find a dif- 
 ficulty in leaving it. It is astonishing to us that it is so 
 rare in the pulpit. You will thank us for this example 
 from De la Rue. It is supposed to be your own death- 
 bed, to which you have let yourself come unprepared 
 alas ! unprepared ! 
 
 " How will your mind be prepared when all these embarrass- 
 ments together shall overwhelm you at death ? When all the 
 parts of your frame shall say to you, by the exhaustion of your 
 death, ' Think of us !' When your domestics shall say to you, 
 by their feebly acknowledged and ill-requited services, * Think 
 of us !' When your affairs shall say to you, by the disorder 
 into which you have thrown them, * Think of us !' When your 
 creditors shall say to you. at the sight of their goods confound- 
 ed with yours, ' Think of us !' When those persons who are 
 dear to you shall say, by 'their sighs, alas ! for the last time, 
 ' Think of us !' Torn on every side ; distracted by so many 
 different cries, your reason, at its last gasp, shall cry from the 
 bottom of your conscience, ' Think of thyself, miserable man ! 
 Think of thyself. Leave every thing besides, and think only 
 of thyself.' My dear brother, my dear friend, will your feeble 
 reason be able to make itself heard ?" 
 
 Directing your attention to our great model, Demos- 
 thenes, to whom we are ever referring, though our read- 
 ers know that we have a greater still in our Saviour, there 
 is the passage in his First against Philip, which Longinus 
 quotes as a fine instance of those figures which give life 
 and energy to an oration. Mark how he continually 
 uses the interrogation also : 
 
 " When, then, men of Athens when will you do what is nec- 
 essary ? When roused by some startling event ? When forced, 
 O Heaven, by some fatal necessity ? What, then, are we to 
 
352 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 judge of our present condition ? In my opinion, to freemen 
 the disgrace attending on misconduct is the most urgent ne- 
 cessity. Or tell me, is it your ambition, wandering the pub- 
 lic places, to inquire each of the other, ' What news ?' What 
 more new can there be than a man of Macedonia conquering 
 Athenians, and giving laws to the Greeks ? ' Is Philip dead ?' 
 'No, by Heaven, but he is in bad health.' What difference 
 does that make to you ? For even if he should meet some fatal 
 stroke, you would soon, by this neglect of your interests, raise 
 up another Philip." 
 
 Here every sentence, every half sentence, contains a fig- 
 ure ; yet nothing could be freer from the artificial and 
 the tawdry. 
 
 But perhaps the most sublime instance of this figure is 
 in John Leland's astonishing sermon, " The Jarrings of 
 Heaven reconciled by the Blood of Christ," in which 
 Holy Law, Truth, Justice, Holiness, Omnipotence, Wis- 
 dom, Love, Grace, Mercy, the Great I Am, the Son of 
 God, the Angels, Hell, all take part as speakers in the 
 unsurpassed discussion. You will find this unique and 
 stupendous drama in Fish's " Masterpieces of Pulpit Elo- 
 quence," vol. ii., page 454. We consider this to be the 
 grandest drama ever produced by' man ; beyond even 
 what Shakespeare ever gave us. 
 
 Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1109, a theologian 
 of the most remarkable depth, clearness, force, and living 
 piety, wrote a most important little treatise in Latin, 
 " Cur Deus, Homo," translated in the " Bibliotheca Sacra," 
 October, 1854, and January, 1855. We quote the follow- 
 ing from another of his writings, a direction for the visit- 
 ation of the sick. Blessed are we if, sick or in health, we 
 follow this direction : 
 
 " Dost thou believe that thou canst not be saved but by the 
 death of Christ ? The sick man answereth, ' Yes.' Then let 
 it be said to him : ' Go to, then, and while thy soul abideth in 
 thee put thy confidence in this death alone ; place thy trust in 
 no other thing; commit thyself wholly to this death; cover thy- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 353 
 
 self wholly with this alone ; cast thyself wholly on this death ; 
 wrap thyself wholly in this death; and if God would judge thee, 
 say, ' Lord, I place the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between 
 me and Thy judgment.' And if He shall say unto thee that 
 thou art a sinner, say, ' I place the death of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ between me and my sins.' If He shall say unto thee, 
 1 Thou hast deserved damnation,' say, ' Lord, I put the death of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ between Thee and all my sins; and I offer 
 His merits instead of my own, which I ought to have, but have 
 not.' If He shall say, ' I am angry with thee,' say,* Lord, I place 
 the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between me and all Thy 
 thunderbolts.' " 
 
 How impetuous does the German Korner's " Sword- 
 song " ring with dialogue between the hero and his 
 iron bride: 
 
 " Sword, on my left side gleaming, 
 What means thy bright eye's beaming? 
 It makes my spirit dance 
 To see thy friendly glance 
 Hurrah!" 
 
 " And I to thee, by Heaven, 
 My light steel-life have given ; 
 When shall the knot be tied? 
 When wilt thou take thy bride ? 
 Hurrah!" 
 
 CXV. Prediction, the pointing out of the consequen- 
 ces ; the brandishing, before the party addressed, the 
 dread results, is a figure natural to the mind when in an 
 excited state, and when firm in the faith of what it urges. 
 Lord Chatham is calling on the British House of Lords 
 to repeal the acts obnoxious to the Americans : 
 
 " I say we must necessarily undo these violent, oppressive 
 acts. They must be repealed. You will repeal them. I pledge 
 myself for it that you will, in the end, repeal them. I stake 
 my reputation on it. I will consent to be taken for an idiot 
 
 Z 
 
354 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 if they are not finally repealed. Avoid, then, this humiliating, 
 disgraceful necessity." 
 
 A prediction that was verified. After a war of three 
 years' duration the acts were repealed. But it was then 
 too late. This figure especially befits the highest form 
 of oratory, as again and again we have exultingly called 
 it ; that which we should hear from the Christian pulpit. 
 In the commanding confidence of faith, let the sacred 
 orator unveil the future before the eye of conscience, the 
 heaven of sublime work, progress, and purity; the hell 
 of fathomless and burning remorse. As Theremin, in his 
 priceless essay on " Eloquence as a Virtue," tells the 
 preacher : 
 
 " You are weak and fearful so long as you would rest upon 
 yourself; dare to regard yourself as the organ of a higher 
 Being, and you are all power and all courage. Faith plants 
 you firm and sure ; your teaching is no longer that of the Phari- 
 sees, unmeaning sound and useless hair-splitting ; you teach 
 with power like Jesus himself; for He spake the words of His 
 Father, and you speak His." 
 
 The incorruptible Irish patriot, Henry Grattan, on 
 moving a declaration of Irish Right, April 19, 1780, thus 
 concluded, in three sentences noted for their slow and 
 dignified rhythm : 
 
 "I never will be satisfied so long as the meanest cottager in 
 Ireland has a link of the British chain clanking to his rags. 
 He may be naked; he shall not be in irons. And I do see 
 the time at hand the spirit is gone forth the Declaration of 
 Rights is planted ; and though great men should fall off, yet 
 the cause shall live ; and though he who utters this should die, 
 yet the immortal fire shall outlast the humble organ who con- 
 veys it, and the breath of liberty, like the word of the holy man, 
 will not die with the prophet, but survive him." 
 
 So Dr. Griffin, at the close of an appeal for Missions, pre- 
 dicts the success of his appeal: 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 355 
 
 " But the heathen shall not reproach us. It shall be known 
 in heaven that we could pity our brethren. We will send them 
 all the relief in our power, and will enjoy the luxury of reflect- 
 ing what happiness we may entail on generations yet unborn, 
 if we can only effect the conversion of a single tribe." 
 
 CXVI. Anticipation, a figure not before catalogued, is 
 very near of kin to the last. It is one of the most felici- 
 tous. " The murdered man," spoken of by Keats in the 
 following, has not yet been slain, but his death is planned; 
 a glare of the ghastly is thrown over the whole passage ; 
 the more, if the events amid which he plays his part be, 
 as yet, joyous. It is as though a figure draped in the 
 habiliments of the grave were to stalk through a ball- 
 room : 
 
 " So the two brothers and their murdered man 
 Went on their way to Venice." 
 
 CXVII. Paralepsis; CXVIII. Apophasis, or Pretended 
 Omission, is our next : in which the speaker pretends not 
 to mention circumstances which yet all the while he is 
 mentioning. Paul gives a fine example in his elegant 
 and courteous letter to Philemon. How admirably what 
 Paul saith to Philemon, in behalf of Onesimus, may Christ 
 say to God the Father for each of us sinners : 
 
 " If he hath wronged thee or owed thee aught, put that, O 
 God the Father, on mine account." 
 
 Then mark how Paul mentions not what services he had 
 done for Philemon. 
 
 In Scott's almost perfect poem, " The Lady of the 
 Lake," an example of pretended omission, in the form of 
 interrogation and of consultation with the reader, occurs 
 in his picture of the daughter of the Douglas : 
 
 " Her kindness and her worth to spy, 
 You need but gaze on Ellen's eye; 
 Not Katrine in her mirror blue 
 Gives back the shaggy banks more true, 
 
356 Might and Mirth of Liter atiire. 
 
 Than every free-born glance confess'd 
 The guileless movements of her breast ; 
 Whether joy danced in her dark eye, 
 Or woe or pity claim 'd a sigh, 
 Or filial love was glowing there, 
 Or meek devotion pour'd a prayer, 
 Or tale of injury call'd forth 
 The indignant spirit of the North. 
 One only passion, unreveal'd, 
 With maiden pride the maid conceal'd, 
 Yet not less purely felt the flame 
 O need I tell that passion's name?" 
 
 Let Demosthenes speak once again ; it is in his Second 
 Philippic, reminding the Athenians of the glory of their 
 ancestors : 
 
 " He finds out, I ween, and hears that these your ancestors, 
 it being in their option to rule the other Greeks, if but they 
 would obey the Persian king, not only would not tolerate this 
 proposal when Alexander, the ancestor of these Macedonians, 
 came as the hireling herald of these terms ; but that they pre- 
 ferred to abandon Athens, and to suffer, enduring patiently 
 whatever might befall ; and that thereafter they did such deeds 
 as all men, through all ages, are eager to recount, but which no 
 one is able eloquently enough to tell; wherefore I too shall 
 pass them by. Justly so. For greater the deeds of these your 
 forefathers than that any one can utter them in any words." 
 
 We feel quite sure that if you are familiar with the 
 style of Paul, you have not but been struck by its simi- 
 larity to the style of Demosthenes, as when the apostle 
 cries : 
 
 "And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to 
 tell of Gideon, and of Barak," and of others. 
 
 The similarity of tone in the Greek is very striking. 
 
 CXIX. Disparity claims the next place. Most anxious 
 we, not needlessly to increase the number of figures; yet 
 we are convinced that disparity deserves, for the first 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 357 
 
 time, a place ; the opposite of simile. Scripture, teem- 
 ing with all varieties of figures, comes to our aid : Matt, 
 vi., 29; viii., 20; xi., 7-9, 23, 24. Or listen to Shake- 
 speare speaking in his kingly way, on recommending a 
 humble state: 
 
 " Often to our comfort shall we find 
 The sharded beetle in a safer hold 
 Than is the full-winged eagle." 
 
 " Romeo and Juliet," act iii., scene iii., Romeo's 5th 
 speech, lines 2-5 ; act iv., scene v., Nurse's 6th speech, 
 lines 8-10. " Macbeth, "act iv., scene ii., lines 9-11. " Mer- 
 chant of Venice," act ii., scene vi., Gratiano's 3d speech. 
 " Richard II.," act iii., scene iii., King Richard's 4th 
 speech, lines 5-11. Very much has been done with Simi- 
 larities. Now let us use Dissimilarities. A forest teem- 
 ing with illustrations waits upon you. A forest unsur- 
 veyed by any writer. 
 
 CXX. Outward Illustration is another arousing figure, 
 not previously enumerated : an illustration drawn from 
 some present outward object or objects, as when Horatio 
 says to Hamlet : 
 
 " The apparition comes ! I know your father. 
 These hands are not more like." 
 
 Holding forth his two hands, and comparing the one 
 with the other. That can not be called an incident, or 
 sudden present occurrence. It is not an occurrence at 
 all. No nobler ever than that by Paul ; lifting up in 
 presence of Agrippa his hands on which the fetters 
 clanked, and exclaiming: 
 
 "Would ye were altogether such as I am, except these 
 bonds." 
 
 S., " Henry IV.," part i., act i., scene iii., Hotspur's 'iith 
 speech, line 4 ; " Henry IV.," part ii., act iv., scene i., the 
 
358 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Archbishop's loth speech, line 16. To this figure, drawn 
 from, not an occurrence, but an object, belongs what has 
 been termed " the most magnificent passage in our 
 oratory." The tapestry of the House of Lords repre- 
 sented the English fleet led by the ship of the Lord Ad- 
 miral Efrmgham Howard, ancestor of Lord Suffolk, to 
 engage the Spanish Armada. Lord Suffolk had under- 
 taken to defend the employment of the Indians against 
 the Americans in the War of Liberty. Lord Chatham 
 thus rebuked him : 
 
 "These abominable principles, and this more abominable 
 avowal of them, demand the most decisive indignation. I call 
 upon that right reverend Bench, those holy ministers of the 
 Gospel and pious pastors of our Church; I conjure them to 
 join in the holy work, and vindicate the religion of their God. 
 I invoke the Genius of the Constitution. From the tapestry 
 that adorns these walls, the immortal ancestor of this noble 
 lord frowns with indignation at the disgrace of his country. 
 In vain he led your victorious fleets against the boasted Arma- 
 da of Spain ; in vain he defended and established the honor, the 
 liberties, the religion the Protestant religion of this country 
 against the arbitrary cruelties of Popery and the Inquisition, if 
 these more than Popish cruelties and inquisitorial practices are 
 let loose among us to turn forth into our settlements, among 
 our ancient connections, friends, and relations, the merciless 
 cannibal, thirsting for the blood of man, woman, and child; to 
 send forth the infidel savage against whom ? Against your 
 Protestant brethren ; to lay waste their country, to desolate 
 their dwellings, and extirpate their race and name with these 
 horrible hell-hounds of savage war hell-hounds, I say, of sav- 
 age war." 
 
 Mark the egoism with which this unsurpassed orator 
 closes. 
 
 To a speech at Liverpool, January 10, 1814, by Mr. 
 Canning, we betake ourselves. Britain was springing 
 forward to take her place as a leading potentate in land 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 359 
 
 warfare. On the wall of the room in which he spoke 
 there was a figure of Neptune : 
 
 " That fabled deity, whom I see portrayed upon the wall, 
 was considered as the exclusive patron of British prowess in 
 battle; but in seeming accordacne with the beautiful fiction of 
 ancient mythology, our Neptune, in the heat of contest, smote 
 the earth with his trident, and up sprang the fiery war-horse, 
 the emblem of military power." 
 
 What an elegant classical allusion, too, is this ! 
 
 Although this impressive figure suits a speaker best, 
 yet even a writer may avail himself of it in his study ; 
 as in this sentence of Dr. Paley in his " Natural Theol- 
 ogy," a book to be bought: 
 
 " Every single feather is a mechanical wonder. I know few 
 things more remarkable than the strength and lightness of the 
 very pen with which I am now writing." 
 
 The close of Bossuet's " Funeral Sermon on the Prince 
 of Conde ' ; furnishes a noble instance of outward illus- 
 tration : 
 
 " Instead of deploring the death of others, great Prince, I 
 would henceforth learn from you to render my own death 
 holy. Happy I, if reminded, by these white locks of mine, of 
 the account which I must give of my ministry. I reserve 
 for the flock which I have to feed with the Word of Life the 
 remnants of a voice that falters and an ardor which is fading 
 away." 
 
 How much ingenuity can a preacher display, in discov- 
 ering innumerable outward facts that can be made use 
 of, to impress the truths which he sets forth ! 
 
 CXXI. Accompaniment is a kind of Outward Illustra- 
 tion. You meet it in noble exemplification in " O'Con- 
 nor's Curse" (Matt, iii., 17!) what may be termed In- 
 cidentalism of the moment: 
 
360 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " A bolt that overhung our home 
 
 Suspended till my curse was given, 
 Soon as it pass'd my lips of foam, 
 Peal'd in the blood-red heaven." 
 
 CXXII. Meeting of Opposites in one subject deserves 
 a special name. S., " Macbeth," act L, scene iii., 1st and 
 2d Witch, iQth speech, 2Oth, and 2ist. We have an ap- 
 proach to this at the close of scene v. : 
 
 " Look like the innocent flower, 
 But be the serpent under it." 
 
 Burns puts mice and men as dissimilars: 
 
 " The best laid schemes o' mice and men 
 Gang aft agley." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 361 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 FIGURES O.F RHETORIC. 
 
 PART THIRTEENTH. 
 
 Sound Resembling Sense, or Onomatopy. Interrogation, or 
 Rrotesis. Question and Answer Re sponsion or Re- 
 sponding. Exclamation, Ecphonesis, or Epiphonema. 
 Nomination. 
 
 CXXIII. OUR next rhetorical figure is Onomatopy, 
 where the sound resembles the sense. There is a re- 
 semblance between the sound of the language you em- 
 ploy and the sounds or movements made by the object 
 described; or else the words you use produce by their 
 sound or their cadence a state of feeling similar to the 
 feeling produced by the thing spoken of. Fine ex- 
 amples abound in the sonorous Greek of Homer, him 
 through whose deep soul the ocean billows resounded. 
 When Goldsmith speaks of 
 
 " The varnish'd clock that click'd behind the door," 
 
 the tick, tick, tick carries us back to the old years and 
 deathless memories. Byron tells us of Lake Leman, 
 how on the ear 
 
 " Drops the light drip of the suspended oar, 
 And chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more." 
 
 Southey's " Lodore Waterfall " is a very talented 
 imitation of the confusion, the intermingling, the ever- 
 varying din and brawl and unresting varieties of a cas- 
 cade: 
 
362 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " How does the water 
 Come down at Lodore ? 
 Rising and leaping, 
 
 Sinking and creeping; t 
 
 Dividing and gliding and sliding, 
 And falling and brawling and sprawling, 
 And bubbling and troubling and doubling, 
 And rushing and flushing and. brushing and gushing, 
 And flapping and rapping and clapping and slapping, 
 And thumping and plumping and bumping and jumping, 
 And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing, 
 All at once and all o'er, with a mighty uproar 
 And this way the water comes down at Lodore." 
 
 The following by Dyer, in his heavy pastoral, " The 
 Fleece," now hopelessly forgotten, represents well a 
 tower's sudden, quick fall, the dash of some parts in the 
 gurly dark river flowing at the base ; the rough sound 
 of other parts of the edifice on the mountain-side ; the 
 crash of the main bulk : 
 
 " The pilgrim oft 
 
 At dead of night 'mid his oraison hears, 
 Aghast, the voice of time-disparted towers, 
 Tumbling all precipitate down dash'd, 
 Rattling around, loud thundering to the moon." 
 
 Pope writes ably of the importance of making the 
 verse picture the theme : 
 
 " Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows, 
 And the smooth strain in smoother numbers flows. 
 But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, 
 The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar. 
 When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, 
 The line too labors and the words move slow ; 
 Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain, 
 Flies o'er the unbending corn and skims along the main." 
 
 Campbell lets us hear the cry of the wolf: 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 363 
 
 "There comes across the waves' tumultuous roar 
 The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore." 
 
 Let us surrender ourselves to Coleridge's mystery, in 
 " Christabel i" 
 
 " The night is chill, the forests bare ; 
 Is it the wind that moaneth bleak ? 
 There is not wind enough in the air 
 To move away the ringlet curl 
 From the lovely lady's cheek 
 There is not wind enough to twirl 
 The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 
 That dances as often as dance it can, 
 Hanging so light, and hanging so high, 
 On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky." 
 
 Spenser, to him next. He, the first who rolled forth 
 our English melody: 
 
 "The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade, 
 Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet; 
 Th' angelical, soft, trembling voices made 
 To the instruments divine respondence meet. 
 The waters' fall, with difference discreet, 
 Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call ; 
 The gentle warbling wind low answered to all." 
 
 In his " Penseroso," Milton is exquisite : 
 
 " Oft on a plot of rising ground 
 I hear the far-off curfew sound, 
 Over some wide-water'd shore 
 Swinging slow with sullen roar." 
 
 Or contrast, in " Paradise Lost," the opening of Heav- 
 en's gates with the opening of Hell's gates. First, Hell's 
 gates open : 
 
 " On a sudden open fly, 
 ' With impetuous recoil and jarring sounds, 
 The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate 
 Harsh thunder." 
 
364 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Listen then to Heaven's gates opening: 
 
 " Heaven opens wide 
 
 Her ever-during gates, harmonious sounds, 
 On golden hinges turning." 
 
 P. L., ii., 1021, 1022, 948, 950 ; vi., 546. In the last, mark 
 the r's. 
 
 In Shakespeare the representative power of u, a, and 
 o are admirable : 
 
 " And thou, all-shaking Thunder, 
 Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world." 
 
 Tennyson's famous line is familiar to you : 
 
 " The league-long roller thundering on the reef." 
 
 It is, however, but a small victory to represent in 
 sounds the voices and movements of things outward 
 the dash on the beach ; the rustling of forest leaves ; the 
 melodies of the birds ; the roar of the Afric lion; but 
 the victory is great when the varying states of the mind 
 are represented. Observe how beautifully the reluctant 
 parting from life is expressed in the last line of the sub- 
 joined, from Gray's " Elegy," which utters every body's 
 feeling : 
 
 " For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey, 
 
 This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned ; 
 Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, 
 Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind ?" 
 
 Who so torpid as not to feel how different the state of 
 the mind represented by Bishop Corbett in his pleasant 
 " Farewell to the Fairies," when he is telling what serv- 
 ices they rendered in their time, now gone forever, to 
 the housewives : 
 
 " At morning and at evening both, 
 
 You merry were and glad, 
 So little care of sleep or sloth 
 These pretty ladies had. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 365 
 
 When Tom came home from labor, 
 
 And Cis from milking rose, 
 Then merrily went their tabor, 
 
 And nimbly went their toes." 
 
 We refer you to two great poems, Dryden's " Ode on 
 St. Cecilia's Day," and Collins's " Ode to the Passions," 
 for some admirable instances of mental conditions, fitly 
 set forth by changes in the rhythm and in the words. 
 But to conclude with a slighter example in a would-be 
 satirical vein, take Dr. Darwin's allusion : 
 
 " Hear the pretty ladies talk- 
 Tittle tattle, tittle tattle ! 
 Like their pattens when they walk 
 Pittle pattle, pittle pattle." 
 
 We close this figure by stating that in Mr. Gladstone's 
 opinion, in his " Homer and the Homeric Age," Homer, 
 Shakespeare, and Dante excel all others in expressing 
 the nature of their thought by the flow and rhythm of 
 their verse ; and that, seemingly, without effort. 
 
 CXXIV. Interrogation we consider next. It is one 
 of those rhetorical forms that is of the highest virtue 
 and of wonderful variety, and which admirably suits 
 the impassioned orator; our Demosthenes employs it 
 perpetually often a number of them together ; and so do 
 Paul and the Master. It reminds us at times of some 
 sudden turn, some muscular grasp and crush of a mighty 
 wrestler in the wrestling-ring ; but on the lips of Him 
 who died for us its aim is higher, and is intensely char- 
 acteristic of Christianity. The fact to which we refer 
 has never been named before : Christ's favorite figures 
 are Implication and Interrogation ! Ponder what lies in 
 this matter. The very soul of Christianity is in this. 
 When you put a thing to a man's own sense of right and 
 wrong ; when by a question you call forth the man and 
 make him judge, you take for granted that, fallen though 
 
366 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 he be, there are yet invaluable germs of truth, sound 
 judgment, and right conscience within him. Our Lord, 
 therefore, in effect says so, when He uses interrogation 
 and implication so very often. Not false and despot- 
 ic He, anathematizer of private judgment ; His every 
 question calls on private judgment to put forth all its 
 energies. No despiser He of man. He as much as 
 cries : 
 
 In man linger rays of God; in him broken fragments of 
 the divine ; ruinously clouded he, yet capable of glorious new 
 birth. I will build him again, very mainly, by calling himself 
 forth ; by setting his own feelings and faculties into intensest 
 action. Private Judgment, if but I can get thee to act fairly, 
 thou art one of my chief allies. 
 
 Assuredly a new view. Is it not valuable and incontro- 
 vertible? To employ implied metaphors and similes, as 
 He did continually, was to call on man to summon him- 
 self into judgment ; to lighten up in flames man's own 
 breast, as his own Sinai and awful bar of doom. O man, 
 summon thyself before thyself! 
 
 When George Whitefield, whose printed sermons give 
 no suitable idea of his matchless power as an orator, 
 preached to the sailors of New York, he thus address- 
 ed them ; the Long-boat he referred to meaning the 
 Saviour: 
 
 " Well, my boys, we have a clear sky and are making fine 
 headway, over a smooth sea, before a light breeze; and we 
 shall soon lose sight of the land. But what means this sudden 
 lowering of the heavens? Hark! Don't you hear distant 
 thunder? Don't you see those flashes of lightning? There is 
 a storm gathering ! Every man to his duty ! Now the waves 
 rise and clash against the ship. The air is dark ; the tempest 
 rages ! Our masts are gone ! The ship is on her beam-ends ! 
 What next ?" 
 
 At this impassioned interrogation the seamen were com- 
 pletely carried away by the sublime acting of the mod- 
 
Figiires of Rhetoric. 367 
 
 ern apostle ; and, imagining themselves in the very rage 
 of the tempest, they rose in a body, shouting : " Take to 
 the Long-boat !" 
 
 Dr. Thomas Burnet has in his " Sacred Theory of the 
 Universe " a passage or two of high eloquence ; as that 
 on the final conflagration of the earth, quoted in the 
 Spectator, No. 146: 
 
 " Where are now the great empires of the world and their 
 imperial cities ? their pillars and monuments of glory ? Show 
 me where they stood ; read the inscription ; tell me the victor's 
 name !" 
 
 Matt, xi., 7 ; xvii., 17. Judges v., 28. Gen.xii., 18. Psa. 
 Ixxvii., 7. I Sam. ii., 27. Job x., 3-6. Mark ii., 9, 19, 25 ; 
 iii., 4, 23, 33. Nothing will more convince you that there 
 is no figure of higher importance than interrogation better 
 than the following from Rev. J. C. Ryle's pamphlet, his 
 priceless pamphlet on " Prayer." A young pastor, feeling 
 keenly his want of experience, could not do better than 
 buy ten dollars' worth of this pamphlet and circulate 
 them among his people. The following is the commence- 
 ment : " I have a question to offer you. It is contained 
 in three words, Do you pray?" 
 
 " The question is one that none but you can answer. Whether 
 you attend public worship or not, your minister knows. Wheth- 
 er you have family prayers in your house or not your relations 
 know. But whether you pray in private or not is a matter be- 
 tween yourself and God." 
 
 Of vast moment is it to secure in a sermon the hearer's 
 attention as soon as ever you can ; and there is no more 
 successful way than by taking Ryle's plan of commenc- 
 ing your sermon by putting a question a question that 
 can not be parried, and that transpierces your hearer's 
 very heart with the very subject on which you are preach- 
 ing. Which may well convince you that figures of speech 
 are weapons of oratory and of doom. 
 
368 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 We quote next from lines of great finish and original- 
 ity, written in the church-yard of Richmond, Yorkshire, 
 England, by Herbert Knowles, an orphan boy of the 
 lowest station, who died in his igth year, cut off in his 
 youth, like Henry Kirke White : 
 
 " Methinks it is good to be here ; 
 
 If thou wilt, let us build ! But for whom ? 
 Nor Elias nor Moses appear; 
 
 But the shadows of eve, that encompass with gloom 
 The abode of the dead and the place of the tomb ! 
 
 " Shall we build to Ambition ? Ah no ! 
 
 Affrighted, he shrinketh away; 
 For see, they would pin him below, 
 In a dark, narrow cave, and begirt with cold clay, 
 To the meanest of reptiles a peer and a prey. 
 
 " To Beauty ? Ah no ! She forgets 
 
 The charms which she wielded before; 
 Nor knows the foul worm that he frets 
 The skin that but yesterday fools could adore 
 For the smoothness it held or the tint which it wore." 
 
 The novel of Goethe, the great German, his " Wilhelm 
 Meister's Apprenticeship," is well known through good 
 English translations ; a book containing a singular mixt- 
 ure of the finest genius and the weakest trash. Mig- 
 non is a young girl of a noble family, stolen in childhood 
 from her magnificent home ; exposed to severe fortunes, 
 yet still haunted by a dim recollection of the splendors 
 that shone around her infancy. She is supposed to have 
 been the original of Scott's Finella, in " Peveril of the 
 .Peak;" and Byron has written an imitation of her song 
 in his " Bride of Abydos." Here is part of Mignon's 
 song: 
 
 " Know'st thou the land where the lemon-trees bloom ? 
 Where the gold orange glows in the deep thicket's gloom ? 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 369 
 
 Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows, 
 And the groves are of laurel, and myrtle, and rose ? 
 
 Know'st thou it ? Thither, O thither, 
 My dearest and kindest, with thee would I go." 
 
 The following much-admired paraphrase of the Greek 
 poet, Alcaeus, is from the learned pen of Sir William 
 Jones, the eminent Oriental scholar; who begins with 
 interrogation : 
 
 " What constitutes a state ? 
 Not high-raised battlement or labored mound, 
 Thick wall, or moated gate." 
 
 When this figure is employed simply to affirm or deny 
 more strongly they call it Erotesis ; but far beyond that 
 it goes. Since it speaks the soul of passion, what scene 
 can better suit it than a great fire? A mother rushes 
 with her babe in her arms to a window in a doomed 
 dwelling. She must be rescued as Eliza Cook tells us, 
 
 " Save ! O save ! the people cry. 
 
 But who plucks the human brand ? 
 Who will do the deed or die ? 
 'Tis a fireman of the land !" 
 
 Erotesis does Dr. Charles Mackay turn to good use: 
 
 " Tell me, my secret soul, 
 
 O tell me, Hope and Faith, 
 Is there no resting-place 
 
 From sorrow, sin, and death ? 
 Is there no happy spot 
 
 Where mortals may be blest? 
 Where grief may find a balm, 
 
 And weariness a rest ? 
 
 Faith, Hope, and Love, best boons to mortals given, 
 Wav'd their bright wings and whisper'd, ' Yes, in heaven.' " 
 
 With reference to the strut with which some men of 
 science walk in our day, Albert Barnes, in his valuable 
 
 AA 
 
370 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 
 " Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity in the Nine- 
 teenth Century," refers to Whewell's admirable " His- 
 tory of the Inductive Sciences," and observes that one 
 rises from the perusal of that work more disposed to 
 liken the sciences that have actually been on the earth 
 to the sands on the shore than to the fixed and everlast- 
 ing hills. He then remarks on the great amount of un- 
 certainty that is mixed up with modern science, and 
 hastens into a series of questions : 
 
 " On what points, outside of the small circle of the mathe- 
 matical demonstrations, is science certain? What is light? 
 What is matter ? What is galvanism ? What is gravitation ? 
 What is heat ? What is life ? How many are the original ele- 
 ments of matter ? In what proportions do they combine ? and 
 by what power are they held in combination ? How many are 
 the worlds that roll above us ? What is the duration of our 
 own globe ? On the one subject of geology, so eafly as the 
 year 1806 the French Institute counted more than eighty the- 
 ories hostile to Scripture history, not one of which has stood to 
 the present day. How many such theories have appeared and 
 vanished since ?" 
 
 From good St. Bernard, the herald of the second cru- 
 sade, take an example of erotesis : 
 
 " It is ignorance of God which produces despair. I assert 
 that all who are unwilling to turn to God are ignorant of Him. 
 They refuse, because they imagine Him austere, who is gentle; 
 terrible, who is altogether lovely. Thus iniquity lies to itself, 
 framing to itself an idol. What fear ye ? That He will not 
 forgive your sins ? But he hath nailed them to the Cross with 
 his own hands. That ye are tied with the chain of evil habits ? 
 But he looseth them that are bound. What more would ye 
 have ? What hinders you from salvation ? This that ye are 
 ignorant of God !" 
 
 From one of our oldest writers, John Lydgate, let us 
 select ; showing how aptly interrogation closes a topic. 
 He is speaking of an infant : 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 371 
 
 rt Ah, well a day, most angel-like of face, 
 A childe, young, in his pure innocence ; 
 Tender of limbs, God wote full guiltiless, 
 The goodly fair that lieth here speechlesse, 
 A mouth he hath, but wordes hath he none; 
 Can not complain, alas ! for none outrage ; 
 He grutcheth not, but lies here all alone, 
 Still as a lambe, most meke of his visage. 
 What heart of steele could do him damage? 
 Or suffer him die, beholding the manere 
 And look benign of his twin eyen clere." 
 
 Turning to the rich literature of Italy, we quote Mac- 
 chiavelli's prediction of a Garibaldi, in his renowned " II 
 Principe," chap. xxvi. Mark the various figures here : 
 
 " I can not express with what love he would be received in 
 all the provinces which have suffered from these foreign inun- 
 dations; with what a thirst for vengeance, with what steadfast 
 fidelity, with what affection, with what tears ! What gates 
 would close themselves against him ? What people would re- 
 fuse him their obedience? What envy would oppose itself to 
 him ? What Italian would deny him homage ?" 
 
 Study next the very celebrated sonnet of Blanco 
 White, wonderful in itself, and more so as written by a 
 native of Spain : 
 
 " Mysterious Night ! When our first parent knew 
 Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, 
 Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, 
 
 This glorious canopy of light and blue ? 
 
 Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, 
 
 Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, 
 Hesperus with the host of heaven came, 
 
 And lo ! creation widen'd in man's view. 
 
 Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd 
 Within thy beams, O Sun ? Or who could find, 
 
 Whilst fruit, and leaf, and insect stood reveal'd, 
 That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind ? 
 
 Why do we, then, shun Death with anxious strife ? 
 
 If Light conceals so much, wherefore not Life ?" 
 
372 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Let Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer, Lord Lytton, in his 
 admirable papers on " Life, Literature, and Manners," in 
 Blackwood, conclude for us our discussion of this figure : 
 
 "Elaborate though Cicero's orations are, they are markedly 
 distinct in style from his philosophical prelections. The essay- 
 ist quietly affirms a proposition ; the orator vehemently asks a 
 question. ' You say so and so,' observes the essayist, about 
 to refute an opponent. * Do you mean to tell us so and so ?' 
 demands the impassioned orator. The writer asserts that ' the 
 excesses of Catiline became at last insupportable even to the 
 patience of the senate.' ' How long will you yet abuse our pa- 
 tience, Catiline ?' exclaims the orator; and an orator who could 
 venture to commence an exordium with a burst so audaciously 
 abrupt needs no other proof to convince a practiced public 
 speaker how absolute must have been his command over his 
 audience. What sympathy in them, and what discipline of 
 voice, manner, countenance in himself, were essential for the 
 successful license of so fiery a burst into the solemnity of form- 
 al impeachment !" 
 
 We give but one additional quotation, from William 
 Lillo, the author of " Fatal Curiosity " an original gen- 
 ius, mighty in English. He introduces a person who is 
 gloating over money belonging to another : 
 
 " 'Tis here 'tis mine I have it in possession ! 
 Must I resign it ? must I give it back ? 
 Am I in love with misery and want, 
 To rob myself and court so vast a loss ? 
 Retain it, then ! But how? There is a way ! 
 Why sinks my heart ? Why does my blood run cold ? 
 Why am I thrill'd with horror?" 
 
 No one feels these seven thick-coming interrogatives as 
 being too numerous. 
 
 CXXV. Question and Answer Responsion or Re- 
 sponding ; is an important twofold figure for purposes 
 oratorical. Jesus, whose view was that man's own con- 
 science is man's judgment-throne, was habitually putting 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 373 
 
 question and answer. We continually find a writer in- 
 troducing a query, which he himself immediately replies 
 to. Nothing can be more natural. Take a memorable 
 instance from Sterne's inimitable story of Le Fevre. 
 " My Uncle Toby " is offering to the dying lieutenant, 
 Le Fevre, a home under his roof: 
 
 " Before my Uncle Toby had half finished the kind offers he 
 was making to the father, had the son insensibly pressed up 
 close to his knees, and had taken hold of the breast of his coat, 
 and was pulling it toward him. His vital spirits, which were 
 waxing cold and slow within him, and were retreating to the 
 last citadel, the heart, rallied back; the film forsook his eyes 
 for a moment; he looked up wishfully in my Uncle Toby's face, 
 and then cast his look upon his boy; and that ligament, fine as 
 it was, never was broken. Nature instantly ebbed again ; the 
 film returned to its place; the pulse fluttered stopped went 
 on throbbed stopped again moved stopped. Shall I go 
 on ? No 1" 
 
 In Scott's " Lay of the Last Minstrel," which every 
 one should read, we find an example at the close of the 
 poem ; the author replies to his own query. Such is the 
 twofold figure : 
 
 " Hush'd is the harp the Minstrel gone ! 
 And did he wander forth alone ? 
 Alone in indigence and age, 
 To linger out his pilgrimage ? 
 No; close beneath proud Newark's tower 
 Arose the Minstrel's lowly bovver. 
 There would he sing achievements high, 
 And circumstance of chivalry. 
 And noble youths the strain to hear 
 Forsook the hunting of the deer; 
 And Yarrow, as he rolPd along, 
 Bore burden to the Minstrel's song." 
 
 The twofold method of question and answer is ever 
 occurring in the speeches of Mr. Fox, as thus : 
 
374 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " But, sir, the high sheriff was threatened and how ? Was 
 it by threats of assaulting him ? No. Was it by holding up 
 the fear of danger to him by mobs or riots ? No. Was it by 
 a menace of taking away his books, breaking the peace of the 
 hustings, and interrupting him in the discharge of his duty ? 
 No, no ; but it was by warning him of the consequences of un- 
 just partialities, false or corrupt decisions." 
 
 CXXVI. Exclamation, Ecphonesis, or, CXXVIL, Ep- 
 iphonema, are of very frequent occurrence. Under this 
 may be ranged very minute points in style, such as the 
 throwing in of terms like " quotha," " on my word," " to 
 be sure," " I tell you," " my life on it," " forsooth." 
 Only let every thing vulgar be avoided. But this figure 
 goes greatly beyond this. Alexander Wilson, author of 
 "American Ornithology," in eight volumes, a work of 
 great value, supplies in his " Watty and Meg" an ani- 
 mated specimen of oratory in the scolding way. Maggy 
 surprises her worse half in the village ale-house; she 
 thus harangues: 
 
 "Nasty, gude for naething being; 
 
 O ye snuffy, drucken sow ! 
 Bringing wife and weans to ruin, 
 
 Drinkin' here wi' sic a crew ! 
 Rise ! ye drucken beast o' Bethel! 
 
 Drink's your night and day's desire. 
 Rise ! this precious hour; or faith I'll 
 
 Fling your whisky in the fire ! 
 Ye'll sit wi' your limmers round ye ; 
 
 Hang you, sir, I'll be your death ! 
 Little hauds my hands, confound ye, 
 
 But I'll cleave ye to the teeth." 
 
 The difference in words between an exclamatory way 
 of statement and simple narrative may often be slight, 
 yet the effect is very perceptible ; as if Grahame, in his 
 excellent poem, " The Sabbath," had written : 
 
 " Still is the morning of the hallowed day," 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 375 
 
 instead of writing as he has done, in a way much more 
 animated : 
 
 " How still the morning of the hallowed day !" 
 
 Nothing in all literature is more celebrated than the 
 morsel of the Greek poetess Sappho, on the sweetness 
 of the " Evening Hour." Only a few lines have re- 
 mained of hers altogether; judging from them, she seems 
 to deserve her rank as the greatest of all ancient female 
 poets, " the tenth Muse." Byron thus paraphrases her 
 words : 
 
 " O Hesperus, thou bringest all good things ! 
 
 Home to the weary; to the hungry cheer. 
 To the young bird the parent's brooding wings; 
 
 The welcome stall to the o'erlabored steer. 
 Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings ; 
 
 Whatever our household gods protect of dear, 
 Are gather'd round us by the look of rest; 
 
 Thou bring'st the child-, too, to the mother's breast." 
 
 In the following passages Pope shows the ruling pas- 
 sion in death : 
 
 a ', 
 
 Odious ! In woolen ! 'Twould a saint provoke !' 
 Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke. 
 ' No, let a charming chintz and Brussels lace 
 Wrap my cold limbs, and shade my lifeless face. 
 One would not, sure, be frightful when one's dead; 
 And, Betty, give this cheek a little red.' " 
 
 " ' I give and I devise,' old Euclio said 
 And sigh'd, 'my lands and tenements to Ned.' 
 ' Your money, sir ?' * My money, sir ? What ! all ? 
 Why, if I must (then wept), ' I give to Paul ' 
 ' The manor, sir ?' * The manor ? Hold !' he cried; 
 ' Not that I can not part with that !' and died." 
 
 Your author ventures : 
 
376 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 What strange, wild lure oft the Forbidden hath, 
 Whereto the joys of duty seem but tame ! 
 
 As sea boy who prefers grim Ocean's wrath 
 
 To the hush'd wood-side cottage whence he came ; 
 
 The spray-swept deck ; the wave with crest of foam, 
 To all the calm of home. 
 
 CXXVIII. Nomination is the title we presume to give 
 to that figure which consists in the enumeration of the 
 names of specific places Proper Names, in which is often 
 a strange charm ; a witching, noble music and suggest- 
 ive power. We feel this charm in good Bishop Heber's 
 lines to his wife : 
 
 " If thou wert by my side, my love, 
 
 How fast would evening fall, 
 In green Bengala's palmy grove, 
 
 Listening the nightingale. 
 Then on ! then on ! Where duty leads 
 
 My course be onward still ; 
 On broad Hindostan's sultry meads, 
 
 Or bleak Almorah's hill." 
 
 You will find very many and admirable instances in the 
 Scriptures: see Solomon's Song iv., 8 ; vi.,4; Isa. xvi., 9; 
 xxxiii., 9; xxxiv.,6; Ixii., 4; Ixvi., 19. 
 
 It sometimes happens also that the mere name of a 
 place may be the very climax of the ludicrous. Many 
 years ago, a preacher in Newburyport, whose warm im- 
 agination drank in the nautical beauties of the locality, 
 was descanting before a large audience upon the perils 
 of unrepentant sinners as they drifted down the stream 
 of time. He compared them to a tempest-tossed bark, 
 bowing under the hurricane, every bit of canvas torn 
 from its spars, and driving furiously upon adjacent break- 
 ers. At the climax of his skillfully elaborated metaphor, 
 the minister shouted, 
 
 " And how, O how shall the poor mariner be saved ?" 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 377 
 
 An old salt in the gallery, with his whole soul absorbed 
 in the scene, sprang to his feet and screamed, 
 
 "Let him put his helm hard down, and bear away for 
 Squam." 
 
 Milton's very lists of names are assonant with the no- 
 blest music, as in P. L., i., 396-411. Or as thus mark 
 the end-cuts : 
 
 % " And what resounds 
 
 In fable or romance of Uther's sons, 
 
 Begirt with British and Armoric knights ; 
 
 And all who since, baptized or infidel, 
 
 Jousted at Aspramont or Montalban, 
 
 Damasco or Morocc' or Trebizond; 
 
 Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore, 
 
 When Charlemain and all his peerage fell 
 
 By Fontarabia." 
 
378 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 
 9 
 
 PART FOURTEENTH. 
 
 
 
 Technicality. Indication. Vision. Hypotyposis> or Vis- 
 ible Presentation. Present Occurrence. Hearing. Mo- 
 ti on ^ Climax, or Ladder. Increment. Amplification. 
 Epiploce. Anticlimax. Less to Greater. Greater to 
 Less. 
 
 CXXIX. THIS chapter begins with a figure very brief- 
 ly discussed Technicality; yet by no means unimpor- 
 tant. Such as are of a nautical sort are often used. 
 Only do not take us land-lubbers too far to sea. " The 
 Storm," by G. A. Stevens, is spirited ; but is somewhat 
 enigmatical : 
 
 "Fore and aft the sprit-sail yard get; 
 
 Reef the mizzen, see all clear; 
 Hands up ! Each preventive brace set ! 
 Man the fore-yard; cheer, lads, cheer !" 
 
 CXXX. Indication well deserves a place. It is of 
 very great value ; of frequent occurrence in oratory, the 
 subject discoursed of being pointed out by the finger of 
 the speaker; as when the pulpit orator exclaims: "He 
 hath gone to yonder heavens !" " There sits the breaker 
 of the law." " On this side stand the sheep ; on that 
 the goats." A figure, life-like ; making us feel that the 
 speaker is really addressing us at the moment ; not dis- 
 cussing a subject, essay-wise, in his study. The beauty 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 379 
 
 and importance of this figure is well shown in the Rev. 
 Charles Wolfe's lines " To Mary," in her death : 
 
 " If thou wouldst stay, even as thou art, 
 
 All cold and all serene, 
 I still might press thy silent heart, 
 
 And where thy smiles have been ! 
 While e'en thy chill, bleak corpse I have, 
 
 Thou seemest still mine own ; 
 But there I lay thee in thy grave, 
 
 And I am now alone." 
 
 Turn to any faithful translation of the Hebrew of the 
 Old Testament; such versions are abundant enough to 
 make this branch of reading a field of study in rhetoric 
 that will prove original; fresh as May-day in a mount- 
 ain glen, and of wondrous variety. Open the Scripture 
 at Psalm Ixviii. : 
 
 "The earth shook, this Sinai, at the presence of God." 
 
 Mark how the style thrills at the expression " This 
 Sinai." Alexander's " Isaiah" and his "Psalms" offer 
 you vast advantages, of which few avail themselves, to 
 invigorate your English style ; as if by a climb up the 
 Catskills, or by a walk on the beach when the gale is out 
 and the sea is open. 
 
 It is told of Larned, a youthful American preacher of 
 great promise, who died in New Orleans at an early age, 
 that in Garden Street Church, in his second sermon in 
 New York, when speaking of the crucifixion, he turned 
 round toward the back of the pulpit, and sketched on it 
 with his finger an imaginary cross, with its nails and its 
 crown of thorns. This daring piece of rhetorical action, 
 which would have made some men ridiculous, he carried 
 through with great and solemnizing effect. Let all the 
 modes of effort be familiar to you ; use them as often as 
 honesty and tact guide you ; weak and shameful to be 
 ignorant of them. When Jesus said, " Behold the lilies," 
 
380 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 did He not point to them ? When He cried, " In my 
 Father's house are many mansions," pointed He not to 
 the starry hosts ? Matt, iii., 9 ; xii., 49. 
 
 A certain touch of effrontery, of challenge and defiance, 
 is sometimes conveyed by the word " there ;" as when 
 holy George Herbert says to Conscience : 
 
 " Call in thy death's head, there ! Tie up thy fears." 
 
 It is in the use of this figure, too, that we fancy Henry 
 Vaughan pointing upward when he places us on the 
 Mount of Faith : 
 
 " From whence the enlightened spirit sees 
 That shady City of palm-trees." 
 
 CXXXI. Vision we are led to next ; by which an ob- 
 ject is spoken of as actually seen at the time, though it 
 be absent. This figure, closely allied to indication, shows 
 strongly the power of deep feeling over the mind in 
 bringing a thing before us, how far soever removed it 
 may be by distance of place or time, or by barriers of 
 the grave. It can thus restore to us the absent or the 
 dead ; the scenes of boyhood ; of the village or the 
 clachan ; though the ocean may flow between us and 
 them, and we shall never see them more with the bodily 
 eye ; or old friends with whom no more we shall take 
 council ; or perhaps those whom we have wronged, and 
 who have passed away where reparation can not be made 
 to them. A power of the mind, to the good a source 
 of bliss ; to the bad a source of hell of a hundred hells. 
 The Bible abounds in sublime examples, as when John 
 exclaims in the unsurpassable Revelation v., 6 ; vii., 9 ; 
 x., i. Tameness in the modern pulpit, how inexcusable! 
 Go to the pages of Giles Fletcher, to his " Christ's Vic- 
 tory," in which is here and there an exquisite stanza. 
 The close of our Saviour's temptation is thus descanted 
 on: 
 

 Figures of Rhetoric. 381 
 
 "The birds' sweet notes, to sonnet out their joys, 
 
 Attempered to the lays angelical ; 
 And to the birds the winds attune their voice ; 
 And to the winds the waters hoarsely call ; 
 And echo back again revoiced all, 
 
 That the whole valley rung with victory. 
 But now our Lord to rest doth homeward fly, 
 See how the Night comes stealing, from the mountains high !" 
 
 It is with this, as with all powerful usages of language, 
 bombast is much tempted to abuse vision to its own ab- 
 surd purposes ; as in the dramatist Congreve's " Ode " 
 on the singing of Mrs. Arabella Hunt : 
 
 " And lo ! Silence himself is here ! 
 Methinks I see the midnight god appear, 
 In all his downy pomp arrayed ! 
 Behold the venerable Shade ! 
 An ancient sigh he sits upon, 
 Whose memory of sound is long since gone, 
 And purposely annihilated for his throne." 
 
 This stupendous operation of sitting on an ancient sigh, 
 as if it were a three-legged stool, reminds one of the 
 question so much debated among the learned monks of 
 the Middle Ages, " How many angels could dance, at one 
 and the same time, on the point of a needle ?" 
 
 From the interesting life of Dr. Archibald Alexander, 
 by his son, we take the following account of an " Action 
 Sermon " that is, a sermon before the communion : 
 
 "As he passed from the description of the Jewish passover 
 to the sacrifice of Christ, he said, bending forward and looking 
 intently on the communion-table spread before him, where the 
 bread and wine lay covered, ' But where is our Lamb ?' At 
 these words, so impressively uttered, and accompanied by a 
 gesture so significant, an old French dancing - master, who 
 scarcely ever entered the church, rose from his seat near the 
 pulpit, and gazed intently, to see if there were not something on 
 the communion-table which he had not yet seen. An intelli- 
 
382 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 gent little girl, who sat before him, after she returned home, 
 
 said: 'Aunt H ,did you ever hear such a man? When he 
 
 said, " Where is our Lamb ?" he seemed as if he was looking 
 for a lamb on the communion-table.' " 
 
 Take we our next quotation from the eloquent pen 
 of Mr. Everett, whose orations and addresses need no 
 recommendation : 
 
 " Methinks I see it now that one solitary, adventurous ves- 
 sel, the Mayflower of a forlorn hope, freighted with the pros- 
 pects of a future state, and bound across the unknown sea. I 
 behold it pursuing with a thousand misgivings the uncertain, 
 the tedious voyage. I see them now, scantily supplied with 
 provisions ; crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored 
 prison; delayed by calms; pursuing a circuitous route. The 
 awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging; the labor- 
 ing masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of 
 the pumps is heard ; the ship leaps, as it were madly, from bil- 
 low to billow; the ocean breaks and settles with ingulfing 
 floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening, shiver- 
 ing weight against the staggering vessel." 
 
 Alexander Montgomery, an old Scottish poet, in a very 
 spirited piece, has this : 
 
 " I see the flags flowing 
 The warriors all glowing, 
 And snorting and blowing 
 
 The steeds rushing on. 
 The lances are crashing, 
 Out broad blades come flashing; 
 Mid shouting and dashing 
 
 The night is nigh gone." 
 
 Be it remarked, at this point, that nothing whatever 
 is more propitious to oratory than the habit of writing 
 as if your audience were before you in your study. Dr. 
 Thomas Guthrie, of Edinburgh, was eminent for this in- 
 valuable power of writing as if speaking, and of having 
 

 Figures of Rhetoric. 383 
 
 this presence as a continual stimulus and moulder of 
 thought and expression. Thus many of his freshest, 
 noblest utterances, which sounded as the suggestion of 
 the moment, were really prepared in the study and com- 
 mitted to memory. What he wrote down was as if the 
 subject were immediately before the speaker's eye. He 
 wrote, too, as if he were realizing the presence of a 
 crowd before him. Let each speaker cultivate this 
 power. 
 
 Blair, in his standard poem, " The Grave," carries you 
 to the death-bed of the saint : 
 
 "The last end 
 
 Of the good man is peace ! How calm his exit ! 
 Night-dews fall not more gently to the ground, 
 Nor weary worn-out winds expire so soft. 
 Behold him ! in the evening tide of life 
 A life well spent, whose early care it was 
 His riper years should not upbraid his green. 
 By unperceiv'd degrees he wears away ; 
 Yet, like the sun, seems larger at his setting. 
 High in his faith and hope, look how he reaches 
 After the prize in view." 
 
 The style of Blair is now and then disfigured by a 
 coarse expression, such as " prodigious," " clap," " slim," 
 "solder;" or as thus: 
 
 "A victim tumbled flat upon its back." 
 
 CXXXII. Hypotyposis, or Visible Presentation, is near- 
 ly allied to vision. Visible presentation is so to describe 
 an object as to make it visible to the eye ; it seizes on 
 and points out those qualities of an act or object which 
 we would see prominent if the act were done before us, 
 or if we were gazing at the object. Quintilian gives 
 this illustration from Cicero : 
 
 "He came into the Senate-house; his eyes gleamed fire; 
 from his whole countenance cruelty was flashing." 
 
384 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Well it suits a pulpit speaker, when he presents a Bible 
 character or some Church worthy, to describe the linea- 
 ments of such a personage ; as when we are enabled to 
 see Elijah up-soaring to heaven ; or as when the Baptist 
 head is lying on the gory charger ; or as when the Wal- 
 denses were sheltered by the Alpine cliffs and pines. 
 
 CXXXIII. Present Occurrence actual presentation 
 of an event as now occurring is allied to vision, yet 
 may easily be distinguished from it. The verbs are 
 used in the present tense : incidents rush forth into ful- 
 fillment ; it* is no longer past or future, but is all the 
 glowing Now we who hear or read are on the spot, 
 are made witnesses of an event that flashes into reality 
 before us. Assuredly a noble figure. Listen, as De la 
 Rue places you in the room where an impenitent world- 
 ling, struggling to turn to God, is dying sin-chained, is 
 dying before you : 
 
 "Let one single sin, a sin of habit, a sin of the heart, present 
 itself to the sinner's mind, to his feeble imagination ; let the 
 heart, yet more feeble, indulge this phantom with a parley but 
 for a moment, and express but one single sentiment of regret. 
 But ah ! he abandons himself he abandons himself to return to 
 himself no more ! t It is done ! It is the last movement of that 
 heart, the last breath of life, the decisive sigh of a wretched 
 eternity. Ye zealous ministers! Ye sympathizing friends! 
 Pray, weep, bear to his deaf ears the name of the Saviour ! 
 Show him that Saviour on the cross ! Redouble your aspira- 
 tions and your cries ! You see not the bottom of that mind 
 nor of that heart. God sees it. God condemns it ! He is 
 dead ! He is undone !" 
 
 S., " Julius Caesar," act ii., scene i., lines 108-1 18 ; act iii., 
 scene ii., lines 73-81. How natural it would be to de- 
 scribe the death-scene of some one of the congregation, 
 or some one present, led astray before a temptation. 
 
 CXXXIV. Hearing, occurring much seldomer than 
 vision, is the speaking about some sound as though the 
 person heard it at the moment or just before. We take 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 385 
 
 an example from Blackwood's Magazine, No. 560, of Queen 
 Victoria's sudden journey to Scotland on the eve of the 
 opening of the second great exhibition, in May, 1862, 
 soon after Prince Albert's death : 
 
 " Hush ! Speak low. Last night, when the darkness fell 
 over her widow's veil and her tears, have not you heard how 
 she went away softly out of Windsor, .maybe to cheat her heart 
 with the silent haste of her journey, and blunt the keenness of 
 the anguish in merciful fatigue and weariness; traveling through 
 all the dewy night, through the rich midland country, by the 
 gray Cumberland hills, mistress of all the wealth and all the 
 love of England ; but all that wealth and all that love can not 
 buy back her crown of joy." 
 
 One other example of this figure, from Byron's Water- 
 loo, in his " Childe Harold :" 
 
 " There was a sound of revelry by night, 
 And Belgium's capital had gather'd then 
 Her beaiity and her chivalry, and bright 
 The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men ; 
 A thousand hearts beat happily; and when 
 Music arose with its voluptuous swell, 
 Soft eyes look'd love to eyes which spake again, 
 And all went merry as a marriage-bell ; 
 But hush ! Hark ! A deep sound strikes like a rising knell. 
 
 " Did ye not hear it ? No ! 'Twas but the wind 
 Or the car rattling o'er the stony street ; 
 On with the dance ! Let joy be unconfined ; 
 No sleep till morn, when youth and pleasure meet 
 To chase the glowing hours with flying feet. 
 But hark ! That heavy sound breaks in once more, 
 As if the clouds its echo would repeat; 
 And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before ; 
 Arm ! arm ! it is, it is the cannon's opening roar." 
 
 We have recourse next to the great Welsh preacher, 
 Christmas Evans: 
 
 BB 
 
386 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 "Verily, the misery of man is great upon him. Conscience 
 is chastising him with scorpions. See how he writhes ! Hear 
 how he shrieks for help ! Mark what agony and terror are in 
 his soul and on his brow ! Death stares him in the face, and 
 shakes at him his iron spear. He trembles, he turns pale, as a 
 culprit at the bar, as a convict on the scaffold. Terrors gather 
 in battle array about him. He looks back, and the storms of 
 Sinai pursue him; forward, and hell is moved to meet him; 
 above, and the heavens are on fire; beneath, and the world is 
 burning. He listens, and the judgment trump is calling; again, 
 and the brazen chariots of vengeance are thundering from afar; 
 yet again, and the sentence pierces his soul with anguish un- 
 speakable : ' Depart, ye cursed !' " 
 
 Dr. Johnson was guilty of preferring the subjoined 
 to any thing in Shakespeare, from William Congreve, in 
 whose single tragedy, " The Mourning Bride," you will 
 find it : 
 
 "Almeria. It was a fancied noise, for all is hush'd. 
 
 "Leonora. It bore the accent of a human voice. 
 
 "Almeria. It was thy fear; or else some transient wind 
 Whistling through hollows of this vaulted aisle. 
 We'll listen ! 
 
 "Leonora. Hark ! 
 
 "Almeria. No ! All is hush'd and still as death. 'Tis dreadful ! 
 How reverent is the face of this tall pile, 
 Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads 
 To bear aloft its arch'd and ponderous roof, 
 Looking tranquillity. It strikes an awe 
 And terror on my aching sight. The tombs 
 And monumental caves of death look cold, 
 And shoot a chillness to my trembling heart. 
 Give me thy hand, and let me hear thy voice. 
 Nay, quickly speak to me, and let me hear 
 My own affrights me with its echoes." 
 
 In the famous Marseillaise Hymn, by Rouget de Lisle, 
 we obtain, in the opening burst, both vision and hear- 
 ing: 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 387 
 
 " Ye sons of France, awake to glory ! 
 
 Hark ! Hark ! What myriads bid you rise ! 
 Your children, wives, and grandsires hoary; 
 Behold their tears, and hear their cries." 
 
 Or again, your author translating from the Spanish : 
 
 \f. 
 
 " The farmer, while he drives his plow, 
 When keen November twirls the bough, 
 Hears the rich autumn's yellow grain 
 Rustle around the reaper train ; 
 And sees the blest and bounteous sod, 
 All glistening with the gold of God." 
 
 CXXXV. Motion, never before catalogued as a figure, 
 does nevertheless much deserve a place. It occurs when 
 we speak of journeying or moving to some scene. Thus 
 De la Rue, speaking of the death of an aged sinner : 
 
 " Let us approach the bed of this sinner, who is so bold that 
 he encourages the hope of life even at the very gate of death, 
 and yet so timid respecting his health that he dare not so much 
 as think upon God, lest he should impair it by some gloomy 
 thought Ah, what darkness of mind ! What trouble of heart ! 
 Let us enter into both into his mind and into his heart and 
 let us see what is their disposition toward God." 
 
 Abbadie, again, thus speaks in his sermon on Abra- 
 ham's offering up of Isaac : 
 
 " Go to Moriah, and you will find there a victim who follows 
 the priest without knowing at first whither he is going. Go to 
 Calvary, and you see Jesus Christ, who, perfectly acquainted 
 with His destiny, says to God, ' Lo, I come to do Thy will, O 
 God !' There, angels are sent from heaven to direct the arm 
 of Abraham. Here, devils issue from beneath to hasten the 
 death of Jesus." 
 
 Saurin, the eminent French Protestant divine, thus di- 
 rects one struggling to scare his passions into subjuga- 
 tion: 
 
388 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Let him go down in thought into that gulf where the wicked 
 expiate in eternal torments their momentary pleasures ; let him 
 often approach the fire that consumes them." 
 
 Thomas Hooker, an old New England preacher, thus 
 speaks : 
 
 "Go thy way home, and read but this text, Rom. iv., 12; and 
 consider seriously but this one thing in it, that whosoever is a 
 son of Abraham hath faith, and whosoever hath faith is a walk- 
 er, is a marker; by the footsteps of Faith you may see where 
 Faith hath been." 
 
 In Plutarch, whose " Lives " form one of the world's 
 choicest books, this is given a statement of a fact that 
 can not be too much pondered : 
 
 " Pass over the earth ; we may discover cities without walls, 
 without literature, without monarchs, without wealth or palaces, 
 where the theatre and the school are not known ; but no man 
 ever saw a city without temples and gods, where prayers and 
 oaths and oracles and sacrifices are not used for obtaining 
 good or for averting evil." 
 
 Again, Dr. Gregory T. Bedell places this figure before 
 you in somewhat of a different phase, asking permission 
 to move on, or urgently demanding that permission. 
 He speaks of the society that will be in heaven : 
 
 "This communion of saints is thrown entirely into the shade. 
 Let me pass, ye prophets, ye apostles, ye martyrs ! A greater 
 than you all is yet to be discovered ! That society is blessed 
 with the peculiar presence of the great God himself." 
 
 Turn now to Psalm cxxxix., 7-10 ; and thence to 
 Richard Watson : 
 
 "Go to the heavens which canopy man with grandeur, cheer 
 his steps with successive light, and mark his festivals with 
 their chronology; go to the atmosphere which energizes his 
 spirits, and is to him the breath of life; go to the smiling 
 fields decked with verdure for his eye, and covered with fruit 
 for his sustenance; go to every scene which spreads beauty 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 389 
 
 before his gaze, which is made harmoniously vocal to his ear, 
 which fills or delights the mind by its glow or by its greatness ; 
 we travel with you, we admire with you, we feel and enjoy with 
 you, we adore with you ; but we stay not with you. We hasten 
 on in search of a demonstration more convincing that God is 
 Love, and we rest not till we press into the strange, the mourn- 
 ful, the joyous scenes of Calvary; and amid the throng of in- 
 visible and astonished angels, weeping disciples, and mocking 
 foes, under the arch of the darkened heavens, and with earth 
 trembling beneath our feet, we gaze upon the meek, the re- 
 signed, the suffering Saviour, and exclaim, ' Herein is Love!' " 
 
 Another form of this most noble figure we have, when 
 an important object is introduced in the act of drawing 
 near to us, or going away. Thus from Vinet's " Out- 
 lines of Theology," a book of the most delicate beauty, 
 and of the greatest richness of thought. It is of obe- 
 dience he discourses: 
 
 " One would say, in a certain sense, that the present genera- 
 tion has lost it altogether nor has this loss in any manner ad- 
 vanced the cause of freedom ; for freedom, if true and worthy, is 
 always proportioned to obedience, their principle in the depths 
 of the soul being one and the same, and the two streams flow- 
 ing, so to speak, from the same source. The true principle of 
 obedience is liberty. Liberty alone is able to obey; he who 
 is not free can not render true obedience to a law. He may 
 yield, bend ; he can not obey. It is in order that we may have 
 power to obey that we have been made free. This considera- 
 tion gives us the measure of the moral decline of our epoch ; 
 Obedience is retiring rapidly, drawing after her her sister Lib- 
 erty. They are not yet, thank God, out of sight, but he who 
 wishes to reach them must make haste their majestic figures 
 have already half vanished beneath the horizon." 
 
 In Milton's First Book, very perfect, occurs, at line 
 283, a form of expression which to motion owes its 
 strange charm, difficult to analyze : 
 
 " He scarce had ceased when the superior Fiend 
 Was moving toward the shore." 
 
390 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Both Homer and Virgil produce fine effects by the 
 ascription of rapid motion to god or to goddess : 
 
 " But she to Olympus had gone;" 
 
 instead of 
 
 " She to Olympus went," 
 
 in Book First of the " Iliad," line 221. Altogether, the 
 man who will not labor, for many a year, to make him- 
 self exceedingly familiar with all these exquisite weap- 
 ons of oratory is too mean-minded to deserve to be let 
 into a pulpit. To know at all how great God is, we need 
 to know how great a thing language is. God hath made 
 no greater thing than language is; neither is there any 
 miracle made by God nearer to us than language; and 
 he who is very familiar with these lovely and mighty 
 figures will find these figures springing as naturally to 
 his lips as breath springs to his lungs. 
 
 CXXXVI. Climax is the next figure. From the Greek 
 it is, meaning Ladder. In this figure the orator builds 
 up idea on idea till a grand apex crowns the whole pyra- 
 mid ; as in Rom. viii., 38. There is thus afforded a grat- 
 ification similar to what we receive in ascending a hill 
 situated in the centre of a rich and varied landscape, 
 where at every climbing step a grander prospect bursts 
 on the eye. It greatly contributes to energy, but is 
 apt to seem overlabored ; as thus : 
 
 " O thou, Dalhousie, thou great god of war, 
 Lieutenant-Colonel to the Earl of Mar !" 
 
 In the warning which John Wesley gave from the 
 pulpit to certain light-fingered gentry, who were watch- 
 ing their chance in a crowded congregation, he thus 
 spake : 
 
 " I am told several pickpockets are here. Let them remem- 
 ber that the eye of God is on them ; and also that there are a 
 number of policemen in the house." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 391 
 
 But it is a genuine climax we have from the Irish law- 
 yer Curran : 
 
 " I speak in the spirit of the British law, which makes lib- 
 erty commensurate with and inseparable from British soil; 
 which proclaims even to the stranger and the sojourner, the 
 first moment that he sets foot upon British earth, that the 
 ground upon which he treads is holy, and consecrated by the 
 genius of universal emancipation. No matter in what lan- 
 guage his doom may have been pronounced ; no matter what 
 complexion, incompatible with freedom, an Indian or an Afri- 
 can sun may have burned upon him ; no matter in what disas- 
 trous battle his liberty may have been cloven down ; no mat- 
 ter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the 
 altar of slavery the moment he touches the sacred soil of 
 Britain the altar and the god sink together in the dust; his 
 soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells beyond 
 the measure of the chains that burst from around him ; and he 
 stands regenerated and disenthralled by the irresistible genius 
 of universal emancipation." 
 
 In that very pleasant work, by the great chemist, Sir 
 Humphrey Davy, " Salmonia, or Days of Fly-fishing," 
 we meet with what follows ; it is a true chief in science 
 who speaks : 
 
 " I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others not 
 genius, power, wit, or fancy; but if I could choose what would 
 be most delightful and I believe most useful to me, I should 
 prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing; for it 
 makes life a discipline of goodness; creates new hopes when 
 all earthly hopes vanish; throws over the decay, the destruc- 
 tion of existence, the most gorgeous of all lights ; awakens life 
 even in death; from corruption and decay calls up beauty and 
 divinity, and makes the very Cross, that instrument of torture 
 and of shame, the ladder of ascent to Paradise." 
 
 In a sermon by the eloquent W. J. Fox occurs this 
 panegyric on Greece, richly swelling into climax : 
 
 " From the dawn of intellect and freedom, Greece has been 
 a watchword on the earth. There rose the social spirit to 
 
392 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 soften and refine her chosen race, and shelter, as in a nest, her 
 gentleness from the rushing storm of barbarism ; there liberty 
 first built her mountain throne, and shouted across the waves 
 a proud defiance to despotism's banded myriads; there the 
 arts and graces danced around humanity, and stored man's 
 home with comforts, and strewed his path with roses, and bound 
 his brows with myrtle, and fashioned for him the breathing 
 statue, and summoned him to temples of snowy marble, and 
 charmed his senses with all forms of eloquence, and threw over 
 his final sleep their veil of loveliness. There sprung poetry, 
 like their own fabled goddess, mature at once from the teem- 
 ing intellect, gilt with the arts and armor that defy the assaults 
 of time and subdue the heart of man. There matchless orators 
 gave the world a model of perfect eloquence the soul being 
 the instrument on which they played, and every passion of our 
 nature being but a tone, which the master's touch called forth 
 at will. There lived and taught the philosophers of bower and 
 porch, of pride and pleasure, of deep speculation and of useful 
 action : who developed all the acuteness and refinement and 
 excursiveness and energy of the -mind, and were the glory of 
 their country when their country was the glory of the earth." 
 
 Strictly speaking, climax occurs when each successive 
 clause of a sentence begins with the conclusion of the 
 preceding, the sense swelling all the time ; as in this of 
 Cicero : 
 
 " What hope is there for liberty if what these men wish to 
 do the law permits them to do; if what the law permits them 
 to do they are able to do ; if what they are able to do they 
 dare do; and if what they dare do gives you no offense." 
 
 But under climax we have included also what the 
 rhetors term strictly Incrementum that is, Amplifica- 
 tion, that increases as the sentence advances. In con- 
 nection with climax is epiploce, by which one striking 
 circumstance is added in due gradation to another, as : 
 
 " He not only spared his enemies, but continued them in 
 employment; not only continued them in employment, but ad- 
 vanced them." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 393 
 
 Then the climax may be so arranged as to breathe 
 strongly of irony, contempt, sarcasm ; as when Richard 
 Brinsley Sheridan, in his magnificent oration against a 
 great ruler, Warren Hastings, thus speaks : 
 
 "It was after the angry dispensations of Providence had, 
 with a progressive severity of chastisement, visited the land 
 with a famine one year, and with a Colonel Hannah the next." 
 
 William Hayley bestows on us the subjoined epitaph 
 on Cowper a sentiment ascending to the close : 
 
 " Ye who with warmth the public triumph feel 
 Of talents dignified by sacred zeal, 
 Here to devotion's bard devoutly just, 
 Pay your fond tribute due to Cowper's dust. 
 England, exulting in his spotless fame. 
 Ranks with her dearest sons his favorite name. 
 Sense, fancy, wit, suffice not all to raise 
 So clear a title to affection's praise; 
 His highest honors to the heart belong, 
 His virtues form'd the magic of his song." 
 
 Chief-Justice Story, that ornament of American juris- 
 prudence, enriches us with one more specimen, on Lord 
 Mansfield. Junius has violently attacked Mansfield, who, 
 however, was a lawyer to whom England and America 
 are under the deepest obligations. The following pane- 
 gyric from such a quarter as Story may well put us on 
 our guard against trusting Junius implicitly : 
 
 " Wherever commerce shall extend its social influences ; 
 wherever justice shall be administered by enlightened and lib- 
 eral rulers; wherever contracts shall be expounded upon the 
 eternal principles of right and wrong; wherever moral delicacy 
 and judicial refinement shall be infused into the municipal code, 
 at once to persuade men to be honest and to keep them so; 
 wherever the intercourse of mankind shall aim at something 
 more elevated than that groveling spirit of barter, in which 
 meanness and avarice and fraud strive for the mastery over 
 ignorance, credulity, and folly, the name of Lord Mansfield will 
 
394 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 be held in reverence by the good and the wise ; by the honest 
 merchant, the enlightened lawyer, the just statesman, and the 
 conscientious judge." 
 
 CXXXVIL Anticlimax, in fine opposition to climax, 
 may be defined " a ladder to get down by." Lord Ro- 
 chester, meeting a bishop in the antechamber of Charles 
 II., said, bowing low, ironically : 
 
 "I am yours, my Lord Bishop, to my shoe-ties." "I am 
 yours," said the Bishop, " to the ground." 
 
 Rochester continued : 
 
 " I am yours to the centre." 
 Rejoined the Bishop : 
 
 " I am yours to the antipodes." 
 
 Vexed at his defeat by a clergyman and a man of piety, 
 Rochester cried : 
 
 "I am yours to the lowest pit of destruction." "There," 
 finished the divine " there, my lord, I leave you." 
 
 This figure is named Catabasis. 
 
 CXXXVIII. From Less to Greater. Under the head 
 of climax may be classified that form of words by which 
 we illustrate an object by moving from the less to the 
 greater. S., "Julius Caesar," act iv., scene iii., Brutus's 
 47th speech. Thus in Bourdaloue's great sermon on 
 Luke xxiii., 27, 28: 
 
 " Here, Christians, is one of the essential foundations of that 
 terrible mystery of the eternity of the punishments with which 
 faith threatens us, and against which our reason revolts. ' This 
 blood,' saith St. Chrysostom, 'when -profaned and rejected by 
 us, is enough to make eternity, not less frightful, but less incred- 
 ible.' This blood, if we destroy ourselves, will cry eternally 
 against us at the tribunal of God. This blood, falling upon lost 
 souls, will fix a stain upon them which shall never be effaced. 
 Ah, if the blood of the prophets has drawn down the scourge 
 of God upon man, what may we not expect from the blood of 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 395 
 
 Jesus Christ ? If the blood of martyrs is heard crying out of 
 heaven against the persecutors of the faith, how much more 
 will the blood of the Redeemer be heard !" 
 
 Acts xx., 10-13. Matt, vii., 11; vi., 30. S., "Othello," 
 act iv., scene i., lines 20, 21. " Henry IV.," part ii., act 
 iv., scene iv., King's 5th speech, lines 13, 14. 
 
 The gradual growth and development of character 
 may also be ranged under climax. For this, study Shake- 
 speare. He differs from almost all other dramatists, in 
 that his characters are not introduced as complete fig- 
 ures at first: they alter, grow, and develop under our 
 eye a high process ; we had almost said, godlike. 
 
 CXXXIX. From the Greater to the Less. The move- 
 ment of the mind from a greater thing to a less, the op- 
 posite of the foregoing, is very often most beautiful. 
 Very noble uses can the most trivial things thus be put 
 to; yes, the most trivial that you can think of; their 
 very commonness making the illustration all the more 
 distinct and pungent, as when the Volscian general 
 speaks of Coriolanus : 
 
 " Breaking his oath and resolution, like 
 A twist of rotten silk." 
 
 And Coriolanus replies: 
 
 " Like an eagle in a dove-cote, I 
 Flutter'd your Voices in Corioli." 
 
 Again, we read : 
 
 " Holding Corioli in the name of Rome, 
 Even like a fawning greyhound in the leash." 
 
 " Coriolanus," act i., scene vi., 5th speech of Marcius. 
 " Julius Caesar," act iv., scene i., lines 24-30. " Measure 
 for Measure," act iii., scene i., Isabella's I2th speech. 
 "Winter's Tale," act ii., scene i., Leontes's 7th speech, 
 line 4. " Henry V.," act ii., scene ii., King Henry's 8th 
 speech, line 5. Search into this minutely. You will be 
 amused and delighted to find to what noblest uses 
 
396 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Shakespeare can turn the commonest and meanest 
 things. This is very striking ; and is at once an encour- 
 agement and a humiliation a humiliation, if you can 
 not speak forcibly ; yet, for your encouragement, the 
 materials of powerful writing lie thick strewn around 
 you, in the very homeliest objects you can look upon : 
 in minnow or midge ; in mouse or cheese-paring. God 
 works with the tiniest things, and so can genius. If you 
 use, in illustration, chiefly stars, oceans, avalanches, and 
 such like, -it begets the suspicion that your tendency is 
 to rant and bombast. Shakespeare, the unsurpassed, 
 proves to you that objects which common minds over- 
 look or despise are invaluable to a man of genius. No 
 remark more momentous than this can be urged upon 
 you. Gather from Shakespeare a hundred cases of a 
 noble use of common things. Why, even objects that 
 are disgusting can be used in connection with themes 
 the loftiest: Prov. xi., 22; xv., 17, 19; Isa. vii., 20; Psa. 
 lii., 2 ; Ixviii., 2. 
 
 When we name the intellect-arousing name of Christ, 
 we are reminded how specially He used to think and 
 feel in the mould of these two figures last mentioned 
 as His work dictated ; for He came to link the Greatest 
 and the Holiest with man in man's weakest and most 
 depraved condition; and the lowest with the most ele- 
 vated. It was, besides implication and interrogation, a 
 great law of Christ's intellect and heart, to use these two 
 figures the greatest linked to the least, the least linked 
 to the greatest. Think of it, how He compared the 
 Deity to a hen ! Why, perhaps half an hour before 
 He saw a hen ill-used ! Mark well how our Master's il- 
 lustration, so far from degrading His subject, throws a 
 tender sheen around the Deity which is unsurpassed ; 
 while, on the other hand, the domestic fowl obtains a 
 deeper interest and a sweeter eloquence than even she 
 previously had. At one touch of His intellect and of 
 His heart, our Jesus threw a mild lustre over at once the 
 
Figures of Rhetoric: 397 
 
 most sublime height and over scenes the most unpre- 
 tending. There is something here far higher than genius, 
 though there is that, too. Throughout Scripture a ten- 
 der feeling is shown for dumb creatures a feeling which 
 must have reached its highest in Jesus. We go so far as 
 to fancy that there was a benign intention and reference 
 in Jesus's being born among cows and horses. What 
 other of the world's greatest chiefs was born in a stall ? 
 Ponder this point, which is assuredly a new reflection. 
 
 And what sort of a follower of Jesus is he who, being 
 a pulpit orator, scarcely ever makes use of this figure of 
 the less to the greater, or of the greater to the meanest 
 and less ? Shame to such a man ! These two figures 
 deserve each a volume. Most momentous, they. In 
 every sermon make use of them though we believe 
 they have never been enumerated before. They are in- 
 valuable ; the more especially as they offer you instances 
 by the thousand. Turn to the instances to which we 
 have sent you in Shakespeare be very careful to study 
 them ; and of this be sure, that you can make the noblest 
 use of hundreds and hundreds of trivial, common, nay, 
 ugly things, for the most splendid and triumphant ends 
 sought for in the blessed Christian pulpit. Wisely will 
 you do, to seek after this for your next twenty years. 
 
 Further, we implore you to turn to every passage we 
 have pointed out. This book will be shorn of one half 
 its value if you skip them by. We have spent much 
 time and care in obtaining them. Turn to the passages 
 in Shakespeare, and you will be forced to admit that 
 you never half appreciated that most masterly writer 
 before. So, too, our passages in P. L. and in Scripture 
 will very richly reward you. 
 
398 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 
 PART FIFTEENTH. 
 
 t 
 
 Parallelism. Numeration. Sudden A ddress. Surprisal. 
 Reservation. Pause. Double Meaning. Mimesis, or 
 Mimicry. Archaism. Concession. Paramologia. 
 Synchorosis, or Permission. Prohibition. 
 
 CXL. PARALLELISM demands separate mention, as a 
 very important form of climax, of especial value in the 
 history of language, of poesy, and of religious thought ; 
 owing to its being the favorite model into which the 
 grand, inspired Hebrew poesy throws itself: a modei in- 
 trinsically nobler than the arrangement, merely musical, 
 according to feet, as among the Greeks and Romans, or 
 according to rhyme, as with us and the modern European 
 nations. To study parallelism, open the Psalms, the 
 Proverbs, the lyrics of Isaiah ; for example, at the open- 
 ing of the first Psalm, with its three distichs, in which 
 shape our Bibles should arrange such verses : 
 
 " Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the 
 
 ungodly; 
 
 Nor standeth in the way of sinners, 
 Nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful." 
 
 First, an example from Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, 
 pupil of Tertullian, and martyr: 
 
 " When the battle comes, for His name and honor, maintain 
 in words that constancy which utters confession, in torture that 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 399 
 
 confidence which joins battle; in death that patience which re- 
 ceives the crown." 
 
 Then one from Tertullian : 
 
 "If thou placest a wrong in God's hand, He is the avenger; 
 if a loss, He is the restorer; if pain, He is a physician; if death, 
 He is the resurrection." 
 
 This we take from his beautiful discourse on " Patience." 
 While Chrysostom whose name is so emphatic, " Gold- 
 en Mouth " is continually availing himself of parallels, 
 he whom no one of the fathers surpasses in eloquence. 
 
 CXLI. Numeration next we mention ; arranging un- 
 der this head every specification of numbers for the sake 
 of making a deeper or more graphic impression. This 
 is very triumphant in Holy Writ ; study the specimens 
 to which we refer: Prov. ix., i; xxx., 21,29; Solomon's 
 Songv.,4; Matt, xviii., 12, 21, 22 ; xix., 28, 29. So in the 
 "^Eneid," ii., 126: 
 
 " Silent was he for twice five days." 
 
 It is plain in all such passages that rhetorical and not 
 mere arithmetical effects are sought. It is evident 
 that with some " the first red cent " plays no unimpor- 
 tant part, while others of equal refinement come down 
 on their foes " like a thousand of bricks." In the Scot- 
 tish song, sixpence is of great influence, especially when 
 located in a specified way : 
 
 " When I hae saxpence under my thoom, 
 I can get credit in ilka toon ; 
 But when I am poor, they bid me gang by; 
 O poverty pairts guid companie !" 
 
 In another far-famed Scottish ballad, "Auld Robin 
 Grey," by Lady Anne Bernard, we find this instance : 
 
 " Before he had been gane a twelvemonth and a day, 
 My faither brak his airm, our cow was stown away." 
 
 It was a remark of the elder Matthews that the Ameri- 
 
4<3O Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 cans do every thing, and expect every thing to be done, 
 in about twenty minutes. 
 
 But this figure rises at times into the region of the 
 sublime. As in nature, the scientific observer detects 
 certain numbers recurring, the Deity delighting in arith- 
 metic and the geometrical: a crystal of quartz having in- 
 variably six sides, and a garnet twelve, while duality is 
 seen every where, as in the two lobes of the brain, lungs, 
 liver, and heart. So in Holy Scripture there are favorite 
 numbers ; as if to hint to us that in the varied operation 
 of God's free will on nature, and in the wise and fatherly 
 dispensations of grace on the grand remedial plan of 
 Christianity, there are fixed laws, given to the Divine 
 Will by the Divine Nature, which are kept by and hon-. 
 ored by God with a kind of sublime obedience that is 
 mastery and empire. At this point it affords us much 
 gratification to introduce to your life-long acquaintance 
 a work than which this century has produced none more 
 truthful, massive, eloquent Dr. Bushnell's volume on 
 " Nature and the Supernatural ;" a book to be read 
 again and again : 
 
 " Nature is the realm of things, the supernatural is the realm 
 of powers. The Revelation of John contrives in so many ways 
 to intimate, by the using of exact numbers in the seven an- 
 gels, and seven trumpets, and seven vials; in the four living 
 creatures, and four-and-twenty elders; in the hundred and forty 
 and four thousand of them that are sealed ; in the city, the 
 New Jerusalem, that is four square, having its height, length, 
 and breadth equal ; with twelve gates tended by twelve angels, 
 resting on twelve foundations, that are twelve manner of pre- 
 cious stones by such images, and under such exact notations 
 of arithmetic, does this man of vision put us on conceiving the 
 glorious and exact society God is reconstructing out of the 
 fallen powers." 
 
 This figure, numeration, enters deeply into the great 
 doctrine of the credibility of the Scriptures. It is fre- 
 quently seen that the old Oriental habit of desiring to 
 

 Figures of Rhetor it. 401 
 
 impart as memorable a form as possible to genealogical 
 lists and chronological or statistical tables, has led the 
 sacred writers to throw the matter they were handling 
 into a shape that appears to us strained and fantastic, 
 as in the fourteen generations, thrice occurring, specified 
 in Matt, i., 17. This digesting of the generations, three 
 times over, into fourteen, could* not have arisen from 
 ignorance, falsification, or oversight, but from rhetorical 
 intention. So in the account of the numbers who went 
 down with Jacob into Egypt, in Gen. xlvi. Here is an 
 evident regard to certain numbers, seven and ten, the 
 symbols of sacredness and completeness ; an intensified 
 symbol when multiplied together. Such habits of 
 thought prevailing in the Hebrew mind demand as much 
 to be considered as do idioms in a language ; which also, 
 to a narrow consideration, seem in a high degree outre. 
 Many of Dr. Colonso's objections to Scripture involve 
 this shallow overlooking of old and very interesting 
 modes of thought. Similar modes of thought are in the 
 Deity Himself; for they show themselves continually in 
 botany, when a flower smiles; in chemistry, when a gem 
 glistens ; in astronomy, as when Bode's Law evolves it- 
 self in the paths of sublime planets. 
 
 Proceeding to a vastly different quarter, in Dr. Prior's 
 two valuable volumes of translations of the ancient 
 Danish ballads, there is a ballad, " Thor of Asgard," in 
 which Thor, the god of thunder, disguised as a strapping 
 maiden, comes to the wedding-feast prepared for the 
 bride by the bridegroom-king, where Thor thus exert- 
 eth his appetite : 
 
 " A whole ox carcass the maid ate up, 
 
 And thirty sides of swine; 
 And took to her meat seven hundred loa-ves, 
 Before she would taste of wine. 
 
 " A whole ox carcass the maid ate up, 
 Her loaves and her bacon first, 
 Cc 
 
402 Might *and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 And then twelve barrels of ale she drank, 
 Before she could quench her thirst." 
 
 To balance this achievement, in the ballad of Sir Gen- 
 selin, the lovely Lady Brynild, after a light lunch of two 
 oxen, five tuns of ale, and seven of porridge, winds up 
 the evening's disport by slaying, with the end of her stay- 
 lace, the exact number cf fifteen champions. The ballad- 
 writers love to be pre.cise and scrupulous, in their statis- 
 tics of the marvelous. Their absurdities are delightful. 
 
 William Chillingworth offers us our next illustration. 
 He is regarded as being a most eminent model of manly 
 argumentation, in his " Religion of Protestants a safe 
 Way to Heaven," of which two editions were sold in two 
 months. Locke recommends its constant perusal. From 
 one of his nine sermons, let us quote : 
 
 "Who is there ever so madly in love with a present penny 
 as to run the least hazard of the loss of 1000 a year to gain 
 it, or not readily to part from it, or upon any probable hope or 
 light persuasion, much more a firm belief, that by doing so he 
 should gain 100,000 ? Now, beloved, the happiness which the 
 servants of Christ are promised in the Scriptures, we all pre- 
 tend to believe that it exceeds the conjunction of all the good 
 things of the world, and much more such a proportion as we 
 may possibly enjoy, infinitely more than 10,000 a year, or 
 100,000, doth a penny; for 100,000 is but a penny so many 
 times over, and 10,000 a year is worth but a certain number 
 of pence; but between heaven and earth, between finite and in- 
 finite, between eternity and a moment, there is utterly no pro- 
 portion. And therefore, seeing we are so apt upon trifling oc- 
 casions to hazard this heaven for this earth, this infinite for 
 this finite, this all for this nothing, is it not much to be feared 
 that though many of us pretend to much faith, we have indeed 
 but very little or none at all." 
 
 Mark the climax here, and the pleonasm ; and how they 
 impart force and liveliness. While in P. L., i., 74, Milton 
 puts Hell as far 
 
 "As from the centre thrice to the utmost pole;" 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 403 
 
 that is, to the pole of the universe. Homer is satisfied 
 to put it as far beneath earth's deepest as heaven is above 
 the earth ; while Virgil puts it twice as far. 
 
 Still farther, numeration may contain within it a form 
 of wit; thus ancient Joseph Miller mentions an Irish- 
 man who enlisted into the Fifth Regiment, so as to be 
 near his brother, who was in the Fourth. S., " Romeo and 
 Juliet," act iii., scene iii., the Friar's i$th speech, line 46. 
 
 From an old mystic of the Middle Ages, Suso, we 
 quote the following: 
 
 " O separation ! Separation from God and bliss, how pain- 
 ful art thou ! O the wringing of hands ! O sobbing, sighing, 
 and weeping; unceasing lamentation, yet never to be heard. 
 1 Give us a millstone,' say the lost, ' as large as the whole earth, 
 and so wide in circumference as to touch the sky all around, 
 and let a little bird come once in a hundred thousand years 
 and pick off a small particle of the stone, not larger than the 
 tenth part of a grain of millet; after another hundred thousand 
 years let him come again, so that he would pick off as much as 
 a grain of millet, we wretched sinners would ask nothing but 
 that, when this stone has an end, our pains might cease.' Yet 
 even this can not be." 
 
 The comedies of Congreve, most unfortunately very 
 immoral, are admirably witty. , Saith the jocund land- 
 lord, Boniface : 
 
 " Sir, I have now in my cellar ten tun of the best ale in 
 Staffordshire. 'Tis smooth as oil, sweet as milk, clear as am- 
 ber, and strong as brandy ; and will be just fourteen years old 
 the fifth day of next March, old style." 
 
 Robert Henryson, in his " Borrowstown Mouse and 
 Landward Mouse," runs into this figure: 
 
 " To eek the cheer, in plenty furth they broucht 
 A plate of groatis, and a dish of meal ; 
 A threif of cakes I trow she spared them nought." 
 
 A " threif" is a lot of twenty. 
 
404 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CXLII. In farther proceeding with our subject, we 
 hope to be found duly observant of the difference be- 
 tween figures of speech and modes of argument. With 
 the latter we have in this volume nothing to do. The 
 two occasionally approach each other. We have endeav- 
 ored to avoid mistaking the one for the other. Rhetoric, 
 not Logic, is our department ; though they are often near 
 neighbors and kinsfolk. A powerful figure is many a 
 time a resistless argument that flashes to the heart. 
 
 Sudden Address is a form into which words are thrown 
 by eager desire to gain to our object the assent of our 
 hearers as quickly as possible. In Julius Charles Hare's 
 "Sketch of the Life of John Stirling" is found this an- 
 ecdote of Stirling's boyhood at school : 
 
 " He was standing near the head boy, when a new usher 
 asked some question about a small closed book-case. The 
 boy answered that it contained a collection for the use of the 
 school, which had for some reason been locked up and disused. 
 ' Formerly,' he said, ' it was managed by a committee of the 
 boys ; and though on a small scale, was conducted, I assure 
 you, sir, with all the regularity that would be found in the larg- 
 est institutions.' The elegance with which these clauses were 
 put together and varied, and the spirit of the personal address 
 in the middle, struck him as admirable, and though it expressed 
 no thought or image, lingered in his mind, after much that was 
 more memorable had passed away." 
 
 How significant a proof of the heart-reaching force of 
 such a usage of speech, when it lingers in the memory 
 of a youth of genius from boyhood till death. How im- 
 portant to be so familiar with such usages, that they will 
 come without an effort to recall them, as soon as the 
 passion and exigency of the moment need them. 
 
 From the Rev. W. L. Bowles accept of an illustration : 
 
 " I was a child when first I heard the sound 
 Of the great sea ! 'Twas night, and, journeying far, 
 We were belated on our road, mid scenes 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 405 
 
 New and unknown, a mother and her child, 
 Now first in this wide world a wanderer; 
 My father came, the pastor of the church 
 That crowns the high hill crest above the sea. 
 When as the wheels went slow, and the still wind 
 Seem'd listening, a low murmuring met the ear 
 Not of the winds. My mother softly said: 
 ' Listen ! It is the sea !' With breathless awe 
 I heard the sound, and closer press'd her hand." 
 
 Here a universal feeling is brought out, the feeling of 
 awe in presence of ocean, and brought out more vividly 
 by sudden address than it could in any other way. This 
 figure suits pulpit oratory well ; only beware that every 
 strong figure you use have a strong feeling under it ; 
 and then even the use of " Sirs " in address, instead of 
 the too usual " My friends," will help to give liveliness 
 to a sermon. 
 
 In an amusing and instructive volume, " The Greyson 
 Letters," by Rogers, this lively piece of writing occurs : 
 
 "What is it?" says Reason, earnestly gazing at a piece of 
 chalk. " Is it any thing out of me, or is it in me? Is it part of 
 'the me' or 'the not me' objective, or merely subjective?" 
 Now methinks Sense would say, if it had the command of the 
 tongue, "What a puzzle friend Reason seems to be in ! Halloo, 
 there ! Haven't I told you a thousand times that it is out of you ; 
 that it is a part of your ' not me,' as you call it in your incom- 
 prehensible jargon; it's chalk, man, chalk, and nothing else." 
 
 A close study of Rogers's " Eclipse of Faith " will 
 bring you into contact with thorough reasoning and 
 genial humor. 
 
 We have a slight touch of this figure of sudden ad- 
 dress in Shakespeare's snatch of song, in his u Winter's 
 Tale:" 
 
 "A merry heart goes all the day, 
 Your sad tires in a mile-a." 
 
 He is little sensitive to the slighter charms of language 
 
406 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 who feels not a certain indescribable charm in the word 
 " your." 
 
 Mr. Geare, a youthful poet, one of the most recent, 
 thus breaks forth in an address to the dearest of friends : 
 
 " O mother mine ! I scarcely dare 
 
 To call thee thus ! I know thy place 
 Before the loving Master's face; 
 Thou art my mother even there ! 
 
 CXLIII. Surprisal is nearly connected with sudden 
 address, with dubitation, aporia, and pretended discov- 
 ery. In the Latin and Greek models, the important 
 word is continually kept to the end of the sentence ; and 
 the English and American orators often keep their se- 
 cret in the same way. In the First Philippic of our 
 matchless, ever-dear, thrice-honored Athenian, we find 
 this: 
 
 " Let us but engage in the enterprise, and, men of Athens, 
 the weak points of this man will be discovered to you by the 
 war itself." 
 
 But the figure may be carried to a far greater length, 
 so as to impart to a statement much of the interest of a 
 skillfully postponed denouement in a novel ; or so as to 
 carry home to the hearer's soul an irresistible conviction. 
 Every one who knows his Bible will bethink him of the 
 inimitable address of Nathan to David ; when burst the 
 thunder. You will search iii vain the Socrates of Xeno- 
 phon or Plato for any thing so fine as this. It may be 
 added, that to put a case so that your audience will be 
 irresistibly prompted to implore an explanation, which 
 explanation you have at hand, and which will clinch 
 your argument or hurry home your appeal, is one of the 
 boldest forms of oratory. This occurs frequently in the 
 addresses of Jesus ; a fact that of itself goes far to prove 
 Him a master of persuasion. Luke viii., 9 ; xii., 41 ; xvii., 
 37. Every one who aspires to be a great speaker should 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 407 
 
 study, far more closely than ever he has done, the speeches 
 of Jesus. 
 
 How nobly is this figure employed by the great Bour- 
 daloue, in his masterpiece of pulpit eloquence, which thus 
 opens. Being preached before the king yet with little 
 of popery in it it begins with the word "Sire;" and it 
 is to our own sin he refers, his text being the words of 
 Jesus in Luke xxiii., 28: " Weep not for me, but weep 
 for yourselves, and for your children." 
 
 " Sire, is it then true that the passion of Jesus Christ of 
 which we celebrate to-day the august but sorrowful mystery is 
 not the most touching object which can occupy our minds and 
 excite our grief? Is it true that our tears can be more suitably 
 and more holily employed than in weeping over the death of 
 the God-man ; and that another duty, more pressing and more 
 necessary, suspends, so to speak, the obligation to sympathize 
 in the sufferings of our divine Redeemer? Never could we 
 have supposed it, Christians; and yet it is Jesus Christ who 
 speaks to us. Jesus Christ not only refuses to accept of your 
 tears for His death, but He even expressly forbids them; be- 
 cause to weep for it might prevent you from weeping for an- 
 other evil which much more nearly affects you, and which is 
 indeed more deplorable than even the death of the Son of God 
 your own death in impenitence." 
 
 Let our clergymen study, aye, for the twentieth time, 
 this unsurpassable Roman Catholic oration, that hath so 
 very many figures in it a figure or more in every sen- 
 tence ; and august sublimities to which Demosthenes 
 never reached, for the Greek son of liberty had never 
 so divine a theme to discuss. Be the Protestant rostrum 
 never drossy and torpid ! Some French Roman Catho- 
 lic sermons may teach you many a peal of thunder, than 
 which never lightened from Sinai bolts more arousing. 
 
 CXLIV. Reservation can be catalogued separately, 
 though it never has been before. Thus by William 
 Wirt, in his speech for Blennerhasset. He is narrating 
 Aaron Burr's Satan-like advent into the Irishman's home : 
 
408 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " He comes to turn this paradise into hell. Yet the flowers 
 they do not wither at his approach. No monitory shudder- 
 ing passes through the bosom of their unfortunate possessor, 
 to warn him of the ruin that is coming." 
 
 This mentioning of what has not occurred is many a 
 time -very effective; enabling the orator to specify the 
 full amount of blessings or curses that have only half or 
 not even half shown their depth. Let the pulpit orator 
 state the self-inflicted miseries that we, alas, are apt to 
 bring on ourselves; or let him reveal to us that dawn 
 of grandeur and peace which awaits the sincere ; many 
 such a statement will suit Christian eloquence. 
 
 CXLV. Pause is worth putting on our list. As a figure 
 it may be used in a great variety of ways. S., "Julius 
 Caesar," act iii., scene ii. In Antony's speech is this : 
 " My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, 
 And I must pause till it come back to me." 
 
 From Dr. John H. Livingston's so influential sermon, 
 " The Flight of the Angel with the everlasting Gospel " 
 the sermon which stimulated the missionary zeal of 
 Mills, Hall, and Richards, of Williams College let this 
 be taken : 
 
 "Why are convulsed nations rising in a new and terrific 
 form to exterminate each other? Must the blood so long cov- 
 ered and forgotten by men now come in remembrance and be 
 disclosed? Must this generation we forbear ! Judge ye !" 
 
 Or let us go to the death-bed of Pope, the poet : 
 
 " I have known him these thirty years," said St. John, Lord 
 Bolingbroke, to Spence, as they stood together at the dying-bed 
 of the poet, " and value myself more for that man's love than " 
 here the narrator adds, "St. John sank his head, and lost his 
 voice in tears." " The sob which finishes the epitaph," Thack- 
 eray remarks, " is finer than words. It is the cloak thrown over 
 the father's face in the famous Greek picture, which hides the 
 grief and heightens it." 
 
 Death may often be painted by a pause. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 409 
 
 CXLVI. Double Meaning, the figure that comes next, 
 is susceptible of skillful treatment ; sly humor is especial- 
 ly fond of it. There was malice prepense in an apology 
 once made in the British House of Commons. A mem- 
 ber had given the lie to another member, for which of- 
 fense being compelled to apologize, he did so in these 
 words : 
 
 " I said the honorable gentleman was a liar. It is so. I am 
 sorry for it." 
 
 It will be seen at once that this figure might almost be 
 classed under paranomasia, or pun, only that in pun we 
 usually have two different words the same in sound ; 
 whereas in double meaning there is one word. Thus, 
 says Macaulay, book 1st, chap. i. : 
 
 " A divine of that age, the close of James's reign, who was 
 asked by a simple country gentleman what the Arminians 
 held, answered with as much truth as wit that they held all the 
 best bishoprics and deaneries in England." 
 
 For Scripture examples, Matt, viii., 22 ; John xiii., 10, 1 1 ; 
 Luke xvi., 8; xxi., 3; John iv., 10, 32, 35 ; vi., 53-57, 
 
 63. 
 
 CXLVII. Mimesis, or Mimicry, consists in mimicking 
 the mode of spelling and in the use of peculiar words of 
 certain districts, periods, or individuals, in order through 
 the spelling or use of such peculiar word or words to give 
 a lively idea of certain characteristic modes of speaking. 
 Thus Falconer, himself a seaman, doomed to a seaman's 
 death in the storm, in his meritorious poem, " The Ship- 
 wreck," which deserves a place in every sailor's library, fills 
 many of his lines unmercifully with sea terms as thus: 
 
 " Bow-lines and halyards are relax'd again, 
 Clew-lines haul'd down, and sheets let fly amain, 
 Clewed up each top-sail, and by-braces squar'd, 
 The seamen climb aloft on either yard." 
 
 This is worse than Greek to the most of us ; nay, is as 
 
410 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 hard to understand as the names of figures of speech. 
 However, Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount makes the 
 law lingo of his time how simple : 
 
 " Marry, I lent my gossip my mare to fetch home coals, 
 And he her drounit into the quarry holes. 
 And I ran to the Consistory for to pleinyie, (complain) 
 And there I happenit amang ane greidie meinyie; (crew) 
 They gave me first ane thing they call citandum ; 
 Within aught days I gat but libellendum ; 
 Within ane month I gat ad opponendum ; 
 In half ane year I gat inter-loquendum; 
 And syne (then) I gat, how call ye it ? Ad replicandum ; 
 But I could never ane word yet understand him. 
 Of pronunciandum they made me wonder fain ; 
 But I gat never my gude gray mare again !" 
 
 It delights us to introduce a noble-hearted beggar, 
 who deserves to be an old acquaintance Edie Ochiltree, 
 the real hero of Scott's " Antiquary," a character of a 
 hundred years ago, authorized by the law to beg over a 
 certain district. He is descanting on certain wallflowers 
 that, growing in the neglected garden of the old monas- 
 try of Aberbrothic, now called Arbroath, are shedding a 
 pleasant fragrance on the grim midnight : 
 
 " I am thinking they'll be like some folks' gude gifts, that 
 often seem maist precious in adversity; or may be it's a para- 
 ble, to teach us no to slight them that are in the darkness o' 
 sin, since God sends odors to refresh the mirkest hour, and 
 flowers and pleasant bushes to clothe the ruined buildings. 
 And now I would like a wise man to tell me whether Heaven 
 is maist pleased wi' the sight we are looking upon these pleas- 
 ant and quiet and lang streaks o' moonlight that are lying sae 
 still on the floor o' this auld kirk, and glancing through the 
 great pillars and stanchions o' the carved windows, and danc- 
 ing on the leaves o' the dark ivy, as the breath of winds shakes 
 it; I wonder whether this is mair pleasing to Heaven than when 
 it was lighted up with lamps, and wi' frankincense, and wi' or- 
 gans, and all instruments o' music." 
 

 Figures of Rhetoric. 411 
 
 CXLVIII. Archaism is a form which consists of old 
 modes of spelling, and so might perhaps be catalogued 
 more fitly under figures of Etymology, were it not that 
 it includes many words now out of use, as well as pres- 
 ent words spelled differently from now. As the mosses 
 on an old bridge, or the stains of time on an abbey wall, 
 are interesting, so are graceful archaisms. Indeed, we 
 are apt to value mere antiquity too highly; as Pope 
 has it: 
 
 " Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old ; 
 It is the rust we value, not the gold." 
 
 A certain tone of old days may pervade a whole work 
 like a subtile essence, as it doth Spenser's " Faerie 
 Queene ;" but " Childe Harold's Pilgrimage " soon be- 
 came tiresome ; Byron threw aside the archaisms as soon 
 as the first canto was concluded. Thomson's exquisite 
 " Castle of Indolence " is, however, finely haunted by 
 moon-rays and by ivies : 
 
 " Joined to the prattle of the purling rills 
 
 Were heard the lowing herds along the vale ; 
 And flocks loud bleating from the distant hills, 
 
 And vacant shepherds piping in the dale ; 
 
 And now and then sweet Philomel would wail, 
 Or stock-doves 'plain amid the forest deep, 
 
 That drowsy rustled to the sighing gale ; 
 And still a coil the grasshopper would keep 
 Yet all these sounds, yblent, inclined all to sleep." 
 
 CXLIX. Concession; CL. Paramologia ; CLI. Syncho- 
 resis, or Permission, is the granting of all or of much 
 that an opponent can advance, and then overbalancing 
 all this by decisive considerations, rendered still more 
 decisive by the very concessions that have been made. 
 Eccles. xi., 9; Josh, xxiv., 14, 15; James ii., 19; Luke 
 xii.,49-53. 
 
 The famous statement, long since proverbial, of the 
 
412 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 elder William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham, the very soul 
 of grandeur and intensity, is an instance : 
 
 " The poorest man in his cottage may bid defiance to all the 
 forces of the Crown. It may be frail ; its roof may shake ; the 
 wind may blow through it; the storm may enter it; but the 
 King of England can not enter it. All his power dares not 
 cross the threshold of that ruined tenement." 
 
 Here let us be permitted to point out one chief source 
 of the commanding eloquence of Chatham : 
 
 " Not content," says Lord Lyttelton, " to correct and instruct 
 his imagination by the works of men, he borrowed his noblest 
 images from the language of inspiration." 
 
 In which respect he was imitated by Burke, Junius, and 
 other distinguished writers and speakers of that day. 
 Says Dr. Goodrich, in his valuable " Compend of British 
 Eloquence :" 
 
 " At no period in later times has secular eloquence gathered 
 so many of her images and allusions from the pages of the 
 Bible." 
 
 It is what Daniel Webster also habitually did. 
 
 From our much-admired Fisher Ames select we an 
 additional instance: On April 28, 1796, the House of 
 Representatives debated whether the laws should be 
 passed that were necessary for carrying a certain treaty 
 with Britain into effect, a treaty duly ratified by the 
 President and the Senate. A party were against ratify- 
 ing; they termed it coercion to have to give effect to 
 the treaty. Ames thus spoke : 
 
 " I can not lose this opportunity to remark that the coercion 
 so much dreaded and complained against appears at length to 
 be no more than the authority of principles, the despotism of 
 duty. Gentlemen complain we are forced to act in this way 
 we are forced to swallow the treaty. It is very true unless 
 we claim the liberty of abuse, the right to act as we ought not. 
 There is but one right way open for us, the laws of morality 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 413 
 
 and good faith have fenced up every other. It is for tyrants 
 to complain that principles are restraints ; and that they have 
 no liberty, so long as their despotism has limits." 
 
 Let his speech on the British Treaty be studied, sen- 
 tence by sentence. No finer example in our language 
 how to utter a rich variety of great general principles 
 without once passing from an orator into an essayist. 
 Concession has often a strain of irony in it. Thus Ames, 
 farther on in this speech, shows that those who objected 
 to the particular treaty with Britain would have object- 
 ed to every treaty with that country: 
 
 " No treaty, exclaim others, should be made with a monarch 
 or a despot ; there will be no naval security while these sea- 
 robbers domineer on the ocean ; their den must be destroyed ; 
 that nation must be extirpated. I like this, sir, because it is 
 sincerity. With feelings such as these, we do not pant for 
 treaties. Such passions seek nothing, and will be content with 
 nothing, but the destruction of their object. If a treaty left 
 King George his island, it would not answer, not if he stipu- 
 lated to pay rent for it. It has been said the world ought to 
 rejoice if Britain were sunk in the sea; if where there are now 
 men, and wealth, and laws, and liberty, there were no more than 
 a sand-bank for the sea-monsters to prowl on, a space for the 
 storms of the ocean to mingle in conflict. I object nothing to 
 the good-sense or humanity of all this. I yield that this is a 
 proof that the age of reason is in progress. Let it be philan- 
 thropy, let it be patriotism, if you will ; but it is no indication 
 that any treaty would be approved." 
 
 This last quotation prepares the way for saying that 
 the word " let " may be regarded as often introducing 
 this figure, a very common one ; thus from Isaac Watts : 
 
 " Let all the baneful planets shed 
 Their mingled curses on my head : 
 How vain their curses, if the eternal King 
 Look through the clouds, and bless me with His eyes." 
 
 Dr. South, whose sermons abound in genius, some- 
 
414 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 times awoke the feeling of the ludicrous, in a way that 
 must have weakened solemn feelings in his audience, 
 unless he spake such passages in a severely ironical tone. 
 He represents one as thus expressing himself: 
 
 "I am a great hearer and lover of sermons; it is the very 
 delight of my righteous soul ; indeed, I am so entirely devoted 
 to the hearing of them that I have hardly any time left to prac- 
 tice them ; and will not all this set me right for heaven ? Yes, 
 no doubt; if a man can be pulled up to heaven by the ears." 
 
 It is a privilege to introduce to you here Dr. John 
 Gumming, whose works, none rising to genius, but many 
 highly useful for purposes of practical piety, and writ- 
 ten in a plain, easy, perspicuous style, may be read with 
 much profit his " Scripture Readings," for example. 
 The following is from the very excellent volume on 
 Luke: 
 
 "Do away with soldiers, and your homes would not be safe; 
 disband our army, burn our navy, and in a few years all the 
 glory of England would depart, all your merchandise would 
 soon be taken from you, and this great and powerful nation 
 would become a poor helpless province." 
 
 This form of concession, or permission, in which the 
 concession is made, and its evil consequences are imme- 
 diately pointed out, is often very effective. An instance 
 from Vinet, the Chalmers of Switzerland : 
 
 " The Gospel, we will say to its enemies, is, then, an absurd- 
 ity; you have discovered it. But behold what a new species 
 of absurdity that certainly is, which attaches man to all his du- 
 ties ; regulates human life, better than all the doctrines of sages; 
 plants in his bosom harmony, order, and peace; causes him joy- 
 fully to fulfill all the offices of civil life ; renders him better fit- 
 ted to live, better fitted to die; and which, were it generally 
 received, would be the support and safeguard of society. If 
 these things have not entered the heart of man, it is not be- 
 cause they are absurd, but because they are divine." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 415 
 
 Nowhere can a more lively and beautiful example of 
 this figure be found than that given by the woman of 
 Canaan in the Gospel. Christ, to provoke her humility 
 and her persevering trust into exercise, had said to her : 
 
 "It is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to 
 the dogs." 
 
 To which her reply was : 
 
 " Truth, Lord ; yet the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from 
 their master's table." 
 
 For once Jesus was refuted, and that by his own figure; 
 and he wished to be refuted. " Truth, Lord ;" there 
 was the concession. An instance, too, of the fact, one 
 that enters deep into the nature of figurative language, 
 that often the best figures are uttered by those who are 
 thinking least about them, they being struck out by a 
 glow of mind. Yet, if you have made yourself very 
 familiar with them, your familiar knowledge of fig- 
 ures is sure to put all manner of weapons rhetorical 
 into the hand of your passion, without aught of the far- 
 fetched and the artificial ; just as a thorough skater 
 moves over the ice inartificially. 
 
 The Rev. John Angell James, a writer of great elo- 
 quence and refinement, eminent advocate he of the re- 
 ligion of the heart, has the subjoined : 
 
 " Eternal things ! Do you believe them ? If not, abjure 
 your creed; abandon your belief. Be consistent, and let the 
 stupendous vision which, like Jacob's ladder, rests its foot on 
 earth and places its top in heaven, vanish in thin air." 
 
 CLII. Prohibition deserves a place : the utter forbid- 
 ding a thing, as not to be done at all, when all that is 
 meant is that while it should be done, something else 
 is far more urgent. Luke xxiii., 27, 28. A figure so 
 genuine ; dictate of a mind much impassioned ! Take a 
 form of it, more simple, from John Chrysostom, renowned 
 
41 6 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Patriarch of Constantinople, " the Homer of orators/' 
 whose was "a tongue flowing like the Nile:" 
 
 " Tell me not of grief, nor of the intolerable nature of your 
 calamity. Rather consider how, in the midst of bitter sorrow, 
 you may rise superior to it." 
 
 Read his excellent sermon on " Excessive Grief at the 
 Death of Friends." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 417 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 PART SIXTEENTH. 
 
 Indirect Statement, or Coverture, or Gentle Hint. Specifi- 
 cation. Plurals. Optation, or Wish. Anaccenosis. 
 Supposition. Isolation. Unification. Assumption of 
 Agreement. Pretended A ssent. Interpolation . Cata- 
 chresis. A nacoluthon. Affirmative Negation. Nega- 
 tive Affirmation. Community. Proprietorship. Pro- 
 lepsis or Procatalepsis. 
 
 CLIII. INDIRECT STATEMENT, or Coverture, or The 
 Gentle Hint, is the name that may be given to a weap- 
 on of speech that many times can be used with mighty 
 effect ; often when open statement would involve the 
 speaker in personal danger. It is covert praise or blame ; 
 menace or hope. Lord Chatham had quoted Lord Som- 
 ers and Chief-Justice Holt, on certain points of law, 
 against Lord Mansfield ; and drew their characters in 
 masterly style ; he then pronounced them " honest men, 
 who knew and loved the Constitution," laying much 
 stress on the important term " honest." Then, turning 
 to Mansfield, he said : 
 
 " I vow I think the noble lord equals them both in abilities." 
 
 Then, complaining of the motion he was opposing being 
 pushed by Lords Marchmont and Mansfield at so un- 
 seasonable an hour, it was after midnight, he cried : 
 
 " If the Constitution must be wounded, let it not receive its 
 DD 
 
4i 8 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 mortal stab at this dark and midnight hour, when honest men 
 are asleep in their beds, and when only felons and assassins 
 are seeking for prey !" 
 
 Coverture is often the best way of reminding people 
 of their duty, and of asking a favor. An indirect state- 
 ment sets the hearer's mind pleasantly at work to fill up 
 for itself the facts that are referred to, while there may 
 be a compliment, also, to our historical or other infor- 
 mation. In a speech to his constituents at Liverpool, 
 March 18, 1820, George Canning refers to the following 
 resolution of the House of Commons of 1648 previous 
 to the war against Charles I., and his death on the scaf- 
 fold: 
 
 "Resolved, that whatsoever is enacted and declared law by 
 the Commons assembled in Parliament hath the force of law, 
 although the consent of the king and House of Peers be not 
 had thereto." 
 
 On this, Canning thus commented : 
 
 "Such was the theory; the practical inferences were not 
 tardy in their arrival after the theory. In a few weeks the 
 House of Peers was voted useless. We all know what became 
 of the Crown." 
 
 But no instance of indirect statement will be more ad- 
 mired by American readers than that renowned one of 
 the eloquent patriot, Patrick Henry, in 1765. In the 
 debate introduced by him in the House of Burgesses in 
 Virginia, on the Stamp Act, he exclaimed, in a voice of 
 thunder: 
 
 " Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell ; 
 and George the Third " " Treason !" cried the Speaker ; 
 " Treason ! treason !" echoed from every part of the House. 
 Henry faltered not for an instant ; but, rising to a loftier atti- 
 tude, and fixing an eye of determined fire on the Speaker, he 
 finished his sentence with the firmest emphasis " may profit 
 by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 419 
 
 In Everett's oration on Webster, at the inauguration 
 of the Webster statue in Boston, September 17, 1859, he 
 had these words : 
 
 " Do you ask if he had faults ? I answer, he was a man." 
 
 An indirect way at once of admitting his faults and apol- 
 ogizing for them. But it is in Shakespeare's " King 
 John" you will find the example that can not be sur- 
 passed. Taking it for granted that every student of this 
 volume has a Shakespeare in his hands, we refer him to 
 " King John," act iii., scene iii. Or mark the repartee of 
 the Spanish embassador to Henry the Fourth of France, 
 as given in Tully's " Memoirs." The king was boasting 
 that he would go to breakfast at Milan, hear mass at 
 Rome, and dine at Naples ; the embassador answered : 
 
 " Sire, if your Majesty go so fast, perhaps you may go to 
 vespers in Sicily." 
 
 Every reader has history enough to understand the allu- 
 sion, to a great slaughter perpetrated on the French. 
 
 . From Miss Strickland's valuable work, " The Queens 
 of England," we obtain this, from volume vii., chapter 
 ix. Sir Walter Raleigh was staying at the house of a 
 great lady in the west of England, who was a notable 
 housewife, and before she made a grand appearance at 
 dinner, she arranged all matters in her household. Sir 
 Walter's apartment was next to hers, and he became pri- 
 vate to much of her management. Early in the morn- 
 ing he heard her demand of one of her maids, " Are the 
 pigs served?" Just before dinner she entered with in- 
 finite state the great chamber where her guests were 
 met, when Sir Walter asked : 
 
 " Madam, are the pigs served ?" 
 The lady answered, with undiminished dignity, 
 "You know best whether you have had your breakfast." 
 
420 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CLIV. Specification of Details is often a figure giving 
 strength to a speaker. We pray you to form your opin- 
 ion on Victor Hugo's latest sample, in his last novel 
 " Ninety-Three." Lawyers and ministers, study the fol- 
 lowing, of June, 1793: 
 
 " It was about eight o'clock in the evening. There was still 
 some light in the street, but the room was dark, and a lamp 
 hanging from the ceiling threw a dim glimmer on the table. 
 The first of these three men was pale, young, grave, with thin 
 lips and a cold look. A nervous twitch in the cheek must 
 have spoiled his attempts to smile. He was powdered, gloved, 
 brushed, and buttoned. There was not a crease in his bright 
 blue coat. He wore nankeen trousers, white stockings, a frilled 
 shirt, and shoes with silver buckles. The two other men were 
 one, a kind of giant ; the other, a kind of dwarf. The tall 
 man, negligently dressed in a vast coat of scarlet cloth, his neck 
 bare, his untied cravat falling lower than the frill, his waistcoat 
 open, with many buttons missing, wore top-boots, and his hair 
 was straight and in disorder, although it revealed traces of 
 dressing and care. There was something of a mane about it. 
 His face was pock-marked; he had an angry wrinkle between 
 the eyebrows, and an expression of kindness at the corner of 
 the lips; thick lips, large teeth, a bargeman's fist, a luminous 
 eye. The dwarf was a yellowish man, who, seated, seemed de- 
 formed ; his head was thrown backward ; his eyes were blood- 
 shot; his face was covered with livid patches; a handkerchief 
 was tied over his greasy and flat hair. No forehead; an enor- 
 mous and terrible mouth. He wore ordinary trousers, slip- 
 pers, and a waistcoat which looked as if it were of white satin ; 
 and over this waistcoat a jacket, in the folds of which a hard 
 and straight line revealed a poniard. The first of these men 
 was named Robespierre, the second Danton, the third Marat. 
 They were alone in the room. There was a glass and a bottle 
 of wine before Danton, a cup of coffee before Marat, and a 
 heap of papers before Robespierre. A map of France was 
 stretched out on the table." 
 
 In the magnificent speech by him, on the Nabob of 
 Arcot's debts, February 28, 1785, which Lord Brougham 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 42 1 
 
 has pronounced " by far the first of all Mr. Burke's ora- 
 tions," he had spoken of Hyder Ali's horse as " a whirl- 
 wind of cavalry;" then, farther on, he individualized, by 
 mentioning the impoverished state of the country, the 
 Carnatic 
 
 " Even before an enemy's horse had imprinted his hoof on 
 the soil of the Carnatic." 
 
 The individual war-horse here specified, what vividness 
 does it not give to the description ! If we would write 
 or speak vividly, we must escape from generalities to 
 specific objects and incidents ; and in nothing can genius 
 or taste or the tact of the heart be more clearly shown, 
 than in choosing such individual things as suit best. 
 Mark particularly the external objects which Jesus uses 
 in his parables. 
 
 You have a little touch of individualization in such an 
 example as this : 
 
 " Your course has been wrong, from the lowest foundation 
 stone to the turret stone ;" 
 
 or in Napoleon's frequent saying: 
 
 " The ball that is to hit me has not yet been cast -" 
 
 or as when William Arthur, in his book " Italy in Tran- 
 sition" all his works are interesting and instructive 
 says: 
 
 " Massa is about as stupid a little town as post-horses were 
 ever changed at." 
 
 This figure is a wondrous contrast to indistinctness. 
 What variety of war-gear language hath ! 
 
 "If you wished," says Curran, "to convey to the mind of an 
 English matron the horrors of that period when our poor peo- 
 ple were surrendered to the brutality of the soldiery by the 
 authority of the state, you would vainly attempt to give her a 
 general picture of rapine and murder and conflagration. But 
 endeavoring to comprehend every thing, you would convey 
 
422 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 nothing.. When the father of poetry wishes to portray the 
 movements of contending armies and an embattled field, he 
 exemplifies, he does not describe. So should your story to her 
 keep clear of generalities. You should take a cottage, and 
 place the affrighted mother with her orphan daughters at the 
 door, the paleness of death in her face, and more than its ag- 
 onies in her heart her aching heart; her anxious ear struggling 
 through the mist of closing day to catch the approaches of deso- 
 lation and dishonor. The ruffian gang arrives; the feast of 
 plunder begins ; the cup of madness kindles in its circulation. 
 You need not dilate you need not expatiate; the matron to 
 whom you tell the story of horror beseeches you not to proceed ; 
 she presses her child to her heart she drowns it in her tears ; 
 her fancy catches more than an angel's tongue could describe." 
 
 Mark here the wonderful skill in the twofold individuali- 
 zation : in the story told, and in the listener to it. 
 
 The renowned passage in Sterne's " Sentimental Jour- 
 ney " must needs be subjoined here : 
 
 " I began to figure to myself the miseries of confinement. I 
 was going to begin with the millions of my fellow-creatures 
 born to no inheritance but slavery; but finding, however affect- 
 ing the picture was, that I could not bring it near me, and that 
 the multitude of sad groups in it did but distract me I took a 
 single captive ; and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I 
 then looked through the twilight of his grated door to take his 
 picture. 
 
 " I beheld his body half wasted away with long expectation 
 and confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of the heart it 
 was which arises from hope deferred. Upon looking nearer, I 
 saw him pale and feverish ; in thirty years the western breezes 
 had not once fanned his blood ; he had seen no sun, no moon, 
 in all that time, nor had the voice of friend or kinsman breathed 
 through his lattice. But here my heart began to bleed, and I 
 was forced to go on with another part of the portrait. 
 
 " He was sitting upon the ground upon a little straw in the 
 farthest corner of his dungeon, which was alternately his chair 
 and bed; a little calendar of small sticks was laid at his head, 
 notched all over with the dismal days and nights he had passed 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 423 
 
 there ; he had one of these little sticks in his hand, and with 
 a rusty nail he was etching another day of misery to add to the 
 heap. As I darkened the little light he had, he lifted up a 
 hopeless eye -toward the door, then cast his eyes down, shook 
 his head, and went on with his work of affliction. I heard his 
 chains upon his legs, as he turned his body to lay his little stick 
 upon the bundle. He gave a deep sigh. I saw the iron enter 
 into his soul. I burst into tears. I could not sustain the pict- 
 ure which my fancy had drawn." 
 
 There are turns of expression here which we can scarce- 
 ly persuade ourselves that we have not been long famil- 
 iar with in Scripture the highest eulogy that can be 
 paid to any form of words. Cleanse the " Sentimental 
 Journey" of its frequent grossness, and it would deserve 
 its immortality. But every now and then the angel 
 changes into the brute. O for a truly judicious ex- 
 purgator of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Congreve, Vanburgh, 
 Sterne, and of the Greek and Latin classics. 
 
 Saurin, in the subjoined, individualizes in every sen- 
 tence : 
 
 " The tomb is the best course of morality. Study avarice in 
 the coffin of a miser. See a few boards inclose him, and a few 
 square inches of earth contain him. Study ambition in the 
 grave of that man of enterprise. Approach the tomb of the 
 proud man. See the mouth that pronounced lofty expressions 
 condemned to eternal silence; the piercing eyes that convulsed 
 the world with fear, covered with a midnight gloom ; the for- 
 midable arm that distributed the destinies of mankind, without 
 motion and life." 
 
 Dr. George W. Bethune, in his very valuable posthu- 
 mous " Lectures on the Heidelberg Catechism," has the 
 following sentence, that owes much of its vividness to 
 the last specification. He is speaking of human de- 
 pravity : 
 
 " Every where we see symptoms of this depravity ; every 
 where men make laws to guard against it; every penal statute. 
 
424 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 every gibbet, every prison, every lock on our doors, testify to 
 man's belief that his fellow-man is prone to hate man and his 
 neighbor." 
 
 Very frequently pathos lies in the details specified, as 
 in the oft-quoted words of Webster's " Duchess of Malfi," 
 just as she goes to her death. Mark very carefully how 
 commonplace the details are ; how characteristic of the 
 nursery, and of a good mother's tender cares : 
 
 "Farewell, Cariola; 
 
 I pray thee look thou givest my little boy 
 Some sirup for his cold ; and let the girl 
 Say her prayers ere she sleep. Now, what you please ! 
 What, death ?" 
 
 If ever you would move men's hearts, you must study 
 this pathos of the minute; your own heart and expe- 
 rience must teach you where to find your details. Look 
 for them in the simplest points of unaffected and very 
 homely life and scenery. In this how wonderfully strong 
 is Scripture: I Sam. ii., 19; 2 Sam. xii., 34; xiv., 7, 14; 
 Matt, xxiv., 17, 1 8 ; xxv., 35-44; Luke xi., 5-8 ; xiv., 18- 
 20,31; xvi., 24; xvii., 34-36; Zech. viii., 5. 
 
 In no portion of our literature can you better study 
 this pathos of the minute than in that inimitable de- 
 partment, our ballad poetry, as you will meet with it in 
 Percy's " Reliques," Sir Walter Scott's " Border Min- 
 strelsy," and elsewhere. It is a valuable and instructive 
 incident that when Lady Anne Bernard was writing her 
 " Auld Robin Grey," and her whole stock of pathetic 
 points was exhausted, she recited what she had com- 
 posed to the junior members of the family, and asked 
 them what she could add ; when one of the youngest, a 
 mere child, cried out, " Mak' somebody steal the coo ;" 
 which she did. 
 
 Boyd, in his valuable notes on P. L., gives this critique 
 on iv., 196: 
 
 " The cormorant is a voracious sea-bird. Dr. George Camp- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 425 
 
 bell remarks that if for ' cormorant ' Milton had said ' bird of 
 prey,' which would have equally suited both the meaning and 
 the measure, the image would have been weaker than by this 
 specification. The more general your terms are, the picture is 
 the weaker; the more special they are, it is the brighter." 
 
 See S., " Cymbeline," act ii., scene ii., lachimo's speech, 
 line 28; act iv., scene ii., Belarius's i8th speech, line 45. 
 " Lear/' act in., scene ii., Lear's wondrous 2d speech ; 
 scene vi., Lear's 8th speech. " Romeo and Juliet," act 
 v., scene iii., the Friar's 1st speech, lines 1,2. " Hamlet," 
 act i., scene i., Francisco's 5th speech. " Henry IV.," 
 part ii., act ii., scene i., Hostess's I3th speech. 
 
 CLV. Plurals. The use of plurals, figuratively, may 
 be put in here, as a separate and exceedingly admirable 
 usage. As when one was speaking of " the glory of the 
 sunrisings and the roseate flushing of sunsets." 
 
 CLVI. Optation, or Wish, is very natural in an aroused 
 state of mind. Chatham, in the close of his speech 
 against the quartering of soldiers on the people of Bos- 
 ton, carries optation up into the sacredness of prayer. 
 It was on May 27, 1774: 
 
 " I will venture to declare that the period is not far distant 
 when my country will want the assistance of her most distant 
 friends. Length of days be in her right hand, and in her left 
 riches and honor; may her ways be ways of pleasantness, and 
 all her paths be peace !" 
 
 In a ludicrous way, again, we have optation in the cry 
 of the fat monk, Panurge, in Rabelais ; who, in a storm 
 at sea, threatened by a briny doom, longs for dry land, 
 which would turn things naturally inconvenient to bless- 
 ings ; and so he exclaims right earnestly, 
 
 "Would I were on shore, and somebody kicking me." 
 
 The orator at times wishes that the point he has pow- 
 erfully proven, were not proven. In the Second against 
 Philip, we find the following : 
 
426 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " I could wish I were not conjecturing aright. But I fear 
 that the event is much nearer than even what I said." 
 
 Then at the close of that speech : 
 
 " O all ye gods, let it not be that the event shall have been 
 foretold only too accurately !" 
 
 CLVII. Anacoenosis is the applying to an opponent, 
 or to the hearer, for his opinion. The Duke of Bedford, 
 the hero of Junius's malignant but immortal letter, 
 had been horsewhipped by a country attorney. When 
 George III. heard that Sir Edward Hawke had given the 
 French a drubbing, his majesty asked Lord Chesterfield 
 the meaning of the word : 
 
 " Sire," said Lord Chesterfield, " the meaning of the word 
 ' drubbing ' but here comes the Duke of Bedford, who is better 
 able to explain it to your Majesty than I am." 
 
 Every student of the powers of language will recall to 
 mind Paul's use of this animated figure in his defense 
 before Agrippa : 
 
 " The king knoweth of these things, before whom I speak 
 freely ; for I am persuaded that none of these things are hid- 
 den from him ; for this thing was not done in a corner. King 
 Agrippa, believest thou the prophets ? I know that thou be- 
 lie vest." 
 
 Mai. i., 6; Isa. v., 3,4; Jer. xxiii., 23 ; Acts iv., 19; I Cor. 
 iv., 21 ; Gal. iv., 21. 
 
 Dr. Griffin thus asks the audience to decide: 
 
 " Say now, pronounce, is not the object worthy of all the 
 means employed for its attainment ? Do you hesitate ? Look, 
 and think again." 
 
 In the same discourse, " On Christ's Kingdom :" 
 
 " Let me never fall into the hands of the man who, while 
 he refuses to aid the missionary efforts of his brethren, coolly 
 says that he submits the fate of the heathen to God. Do you 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 427 
 
 call this submission ? Put it to the test; does it preserve you 
 equally composed by the bed of your dying child?" 
 
 Why, the Holy Scripture should not only be nobly 
 read from the rostrum, but, first, three or four times at 
 home by the minister. Garrick, the great actor, once 
 said to a clergyman : 
 
 " What books were those that you used this morning in read- 
 ing the service?" "Books?" rejoined the clergyman; "the 
 Bible and Prayer-book." "Ah," said Garrick; "I observed 
 that you handled them as if they were a ledger and day-book." 
 
 We quote from Gould's excellent lecture on Clerical Elo- 
 cution, in his " Good English." Let our ministers arouse 
 them, too, to the grand historical fact that, if they wish 
 to make a sensation, there is nothing so good for that as 
 the plain, pure, earnest Gospel no ritual a match for 
 that ; such as New York crowds hasten out to, when 
 they go to hear Dr. Hall. We are starving for lack of the 
 Bible, twice every Sunday, grandly read ; and of great 
 preaching of the old-fashioned sort. Blessed, also, is the 
 preacher, of whose ability we think not, but by whose 
 theme we are absorbed and by the humbling sense of 
 our own wickedness. 
 
 CLVIII. Supposition, the bringing forward a supposed 
 case as an illustration of the actual one, or the treating 
 of the actual case as if it were merely supposed, is a form 
 of expression that has often been used with good effect ; 
 of which we have a noted instance in that justly famous 
 letter of Junius to the king: 
 
 " There is a moment of difficulty and danger, at which flat- 
 tery and falsehood can no longer deceive, and simplicity itself 
 can no longer be misled. Let us suppose it arrived. Let us 
 suppose a gracious, well-intentioned prince made sensible at 
 last of the great duty he owes to his people and of his own dis- 
 graceful situation ; that he looks around him for assistance, 
 and asks for no advice but how to gratify the wishes and se- 
 cure the happiness of his subjects. In these circumstances it 
 
428 Might and Mirth of Liter alure. 
 
 may be matter of curious speculation to consider, if an honest 
 man were permitted to approach a king, in what terms he would 
 address himself to his sovereign." 
 
 The writings of the eminently pious Dr. Payson pre- 
 sent many examples, as thus, in which magnetic philos- 
 ophy is used in Christ's work : 
 
 " Suppose you wished to separate a quantity of brass and 
 steel filings, how would you effect the separation ? Apply a 
 loadstone, and immediately every particle of iron will attach 
 itself to it, while the brass filings remain behind. Thus if we 
 see a company of true and false professors of religion, we may 
 not be able to distinguish between them ; but let Christ come 
 among them, and all His sincere followers will be attracted to- 
 ward Him, while those who have none of His spirit remain at 
 a distance." 
 
 Again, to a mother bereft of a child, he said : 
 
 " Suppose some one was making a beautiful crown for you 
 to wear. Now if the maker of it, in order to make it more 
 splendid, were to take some of your jewels to put into it, should 
 you be sorry because they were taken from you for a little, 
 when you knew they were to make up your crown?" 
 
 Let this figure be much cultivated by the pulpit ora- 
 tor. He who can, for a year, not once put a single sup- 
 position into eighty sermons of his, deserves the title 
 of " Solemn Stupidity." To neglect this figure is inde- 
 fensible. 
 
 CLIX. Isolation must not be confounded with any 
 other figure ; for it means the isolating of an individual 
 addressed, who is separated from all others ; the putting 
 him apart, so that the orator may deal with his single 
 soul ; or so that the man himself may deal with him- 
 self, while he feels that he is alone with his conscience 
 and with his God. TKus, in Paul's words, in Rom. ii., I : 
 
 "Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou 
 art that judgest : for wherein thou judgest another, thou con- 
 demnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 429 
 
 For purposes of conviction, when you endeavor to 
 bury some barbed arrow of alarm or accusation deep in 
 some single bosom, this figure is invaluable. The un- 
 approachable triumvirate of the French pulpit are Bos- 
 suet, Bourdaloue, and Massillon ; on this occasion let 
 Massillon speak ; let him isolate each of us ; for it was 
 to him the Grand Monarch said : " Father, I have heard 
 many great orators in this chapel, and have been highly 
 pleased with them ; but whenever I hear you, I go away 
 displeased with myself, for I see my own character." 
 When Massillon was drawing near the close of the ser- 
 mon from which we are now to quote, the whole congre- 
 gation started to their feet, interrupting him by their 
 exclamations of terror and despair : 
 
 " I confine myself to you who are now here assembled. I 
 include not the rest of men ; but consider you as alone exist- 
 ing on the earth. The idea which fills and terrifies me is this : 
 I figure to myself the present as your last hour, and the end 
 of the world ; the heavens opening above your heads j the 
 Saviour in all His glory about to appear in the midst of His 
 temple ; you only assembled here as trembling criminals to 
 await His coming, and hear the sentence each, either of life 
 eternal or of everlasting death. Which of you would not im- 
 mediately apply to his conscience, to examine if his crimes mer- 
 ited not eternal punishment which of you, seized with dread, 
 would not demand of our Saviour, as did the apostles, crying 
 out, ' Lord, is it I ?' Does this danger affect you not, my dear 
 hearer ? You persuade yourself that in this great number who 
 shall perish, you will be the happy individual ! You who have 
 less reason, perhaps, than any other to believe it." 
 
 Jonathan Edwards is continually isolating hearer by 
 hearer. Thus closes he his awful sermon, " Sinners in 
 the hands of an angry God :" 
 
 "There is reason to think that there are many in this con- 
 gregation now hearing this discourse that will actually be the 
 subjects of this very misery to all eternity. We know not who 
 they are, or in what Seats they sit, or what thoughts they now 
 
430 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 have. If we knew that there was one person, and but one, in 
 the whole congregation, that was to be the subject of this mis- 
 ery, what an awful thing it would be to think of. If we knew 
 who it was, what an awful sight it would be to see such a per- 
 son ! But, alas ! instead of one, how many, is it likely, will re- 
 member this discourse in hell !" 
 
 In the oration on the Crown, our darling model, De- 
 mosthenes, frequently singles out ^Eschines : 
 
 " You being there on the spot and at the moment, and see- 
 ing me deprive the state of such an opportunity and such an 
 alliance as you now, in long detail and in swelling, tragic phrase, 
 tell us of, is it the case, that you expressed your indignation ? 
 Or being a spectator of these doings of mine which now you 
 brand, did you make bare, did you expose them ? And most 
 certainly if I had wrought with Philip to hinder the union of 
 the Greeks, it was your part not to keep silence; but to cry 
 aloud, to testify with all earnestness, and to make my guilt 
 plain to these your fellow-citizens. But no such thing did you 
 ever do. That voice of yours no one heard." 
 
 Our study of this figure brings us to this conclusion, 
 that in the Christian pulpit we are convinced of what is 
 the greatest aim of eloquence: a great thing to convince 
 the judgment ; a great thing to delight the tasteful and 
 the poetic ; but highest of all, to convict the conscience. 
 That is the highest sort of sermon ; and to display God 
 and Christ ; to teach humility ; to make us capable of 
 true repentance. 
 
 CLX. Unification, the bringing forward as one in- 
 stance, is a figure never enumerated before. We have 
 not succeeded in naming it felicitously. An example 
 will make it perfectly plain. Our marvelous Shake- 
 speare helps us, speaking, of Henry the Fifth : 
 
 "And therefore in fierce tempest is he coming, 
 In thunder and in earthquake, like a Jove." 
 
 How much better than if he had said, " like Jove." So, 
 again, a midnight camp, previous to a* battle, is before us : 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 431 
 
 " The armorers, accomplishing the knights, 
 With dint of hammer closing rivet up, 
 Give dreadful, note of preparation." 
 
 How much finer than " dints," " hammers/' " rivets," 
 " notes." Mark this very carefully. 
 
 CLXI. Assumption of Agreement on the part of your 
 hearer or opponent is a frequent usage. Erskine, in his 
 speech for Stockdale, thus expressed himself: 
 
 "Gentlemen of the jury, I observe plainly, and with infinite 
 satisfaction, that you are shocked and offended at my even 
 supposing it possible you should pronounce such a detestable 
 judgment." 
 
 Or take an illustration from the splendid oratorical ca- 
 reer of John Philpot Curran. Lord Avonmore, an old 
 college companion of his, was on the bench ; one who 
 had been a member of a certain joyous college club along 
 with Curran. Curran expressed the hope that the deci- 
 sion of the court would be favorable : 
 
 " This soothing hope I draw from the dearest and tenderest 
 recollections of my life; from the remembrance of those Attic 
 nights which we have spent with those admired, respected, be- 
 loved companions who have gone before us; over whose ashes 
 the most precious tears of Ireland have been shed. [Here 
 Lord A. could not refrain from tears.] Yes, my good lord, I see 
 you do not forget them. I see their sacred forms passing in 
 sad review before your memory." 
 
 We find this figure frequent in Demosthenes : 
 
 "You can not think so. You remember! You are well 
 
 It suits the Christian pulpit, where the speaker ought 
 to be constantly appealing to conscience even more than 
 either to feeling or intellect or fine taste. In the Chris- 
 tians Sabbath Companion are these sentences : 
 
 " What an individual would forthwith do, but for want of op- 
 
432 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 portunity, hazard of detection, or fear of punishment, that is 
 what shows his true character. You admit that statement, 
 surely ? I see that some of you feel .how much it condemns 
 you. I see that some of you are honest enough to take it 
 home." 
 
 CLXII. Pretended Assent, a figure never named be- 
 fore, is different from the above ; being your own pre- 
 tended, not actual assent, not that of your hearer or op- 
 ponent. In S.'s " Macbeth," act i., scene ii., the Soldier's 
 3d speech, a clear instance occurs of this very peculiar 
 figure : 
 
 "Duncan. Dismay'd not this 
 
 Our captains, Macbeth and Banquo ? 
 
 "Soldier. Yes; 
 
 As sparrows, eagles; or the hare, the lion." 
 
 CLXIII. Interpolation, the sudden throwing in of 
 some explanatory or enforcing circumstance ; as it is 
 natural in earnest, onward hurrying states of the mind, 
 so does it suit the warmest moods of eloquence. Shake- 
 speare, by the lips of Antonio, speaking of Shylock, will 
 give us an instance : remember to study Shakespeare for 
 oratory quite as much as for poesy : 
 
 " You may as well forbid the mountain pines 
 To wag their high tops, and to make no noise, 
 When they are fretted with the gusts of heaven ; 
 You may as well do any thing most hard, 
 As seek to soften that (than which what's harder ?) 
 His Jewish heart." 
 
 " Cymbeline," act v., scene v., lachimo's 4th speech, and 
 5 th. 
 
 St. Paul makes frequent use of this form of writing ; 
 as thus: 
 
 " Unto the Jews became I as a Jew, that I might gain the 
 Jews ; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I 
 might gain them that are under the law ; to them that are with- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 433 
 
 out law, as without law (being not without law to God, but un- 
 der the law to Christ), that I might gain them that are without 
 law." 
 
 Let us treat you to one of the noblest sentences 
 in our language occurring in Mackintosh's speech for 
 Peltier containing a beautiful interpolation near the 
 close: 
 
 " Let me suppose, gentlemen, that Aloys Reding, who has 
 displayed in our times the simplicity, magnanimity, and piety 
 of ancient heroes, had, after his glorious struggle, honored this 
 kingdom by choosing it as his refuge; that, after performing 
 prodigies of valor at the head of his handful of heroic peasants 
 on the field of Morgarten, where his ancestor, the Landman 
 Reding, had, five hundred years before, defeated the first op- 
 pressors of Switzerland, he had selected this country to be the 
 residence as the chosen abode of liberty, as the ancient and 
 inviolable asylum of the oppressed, would my learned friend 
 have had the boldness to have said to this hero that he must 
 hide his tears (the tears shed by a hero over the ruins of his 
 country !), lest they might provoke the resentment of Reubell 
 or Rapinat? that he must smother the sorrow and the anger 
 with which his heart was overloaded? that he must breathe his 
 murmurs low, lest they might be overheard by the oppressor ?" 
 
 Do not let escape here the mighty Saxon force of sar- 
 casm in the word " low " " he must breathe his mur- 
 murs low !" 
 
 From the First Philippic of Demosthenes we glean 
 the following the commencement of a paragraph : 
 
 " First, I say that the infantry but how to prevent you from 
 doing that which has often injured you ! Your thinking that 
 the occasion demands far less than it does demand your se- 
 lecting the grandest plans in your decrees, while in execution 
 you make not the paltriest exertion." 
 
 In a humorous way, we find in Fielding's " Covent 
 Garden Tragedy," acted in Drury Lane Theatre in 1732, 
 the following promises by a lady to a gentleman : 
 
 E E " 
 
434 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " A joint of meat a day is all I ask, 
 And that I'll dress myself. A pot of beer 
 When thou din'st from me, shall be all my wine ; 
 Few clothes I'll have, and those, too, second-hand ; 
 Then when a hole within thy stocking's seen 
 (For stockings will have holes), I'll darn it for thee." 
 
 CLXIV. Catachresis itself deserves to be catalogued 
 as a legitimate form of speech : a metaphor that borders 
 on impropriety, or seems to confound the nature of 
 things ; a breaking loose into a bad construction such as 
 grammar forbids ; lawful when it arises from a crowd of 
 thoughts clouding the right construction out of sight, or 
 from warmth of emotion rendering the speaker all un- 
 mindful of Lindley Murray or Gould Brown. We speak 
 of a silver candlestick ; Horace writes of children riding 
 on horseback on a long reed ; Moses tells us of the blood 
 of the grape. The reader has a certain delight in seeing 
 the bands of syntax thrown off now and then, and the 
 reins cast wild, on the neck of the steed wilder than of 
 the Ukraine. Thus in a letter by Henry Ward Beecher 
 on occasion of a dinner to George Law : 
 
 " Those who develop commerce building clippers so fleet 
 as to put the winds out of breath in keeping up with them; 
 steamships that empty towns, and bear their population round 
 the globe to found new cities in a day; immense engines that 
 in the face of storms and waves roll round the ponderous wheel 
 with the constancy of the earth upon its axis ; the benefits of 
 such services are not confined to the sea, or to the commercial 
 cities that wash their feet by the sea-side." 
 
 Mr. Fox's well-known saying is in excellent accord 
 with the good effect and breezy freedom of catachresis : 
 
 " Did the speech read well when reported ? If so, it was a 
 bad one." 
 
 An air of extemporaneousness, the absence of all ap- 
 pearance of art, a noble forgetfulness of minute verbal 
 points, is often delightful in an impetuous address, espe- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 435 
 
 cially when we feel it to be crowded with great thoughts. 
 Such may be called the Philosophy of the Ungrammat- 
 ical. " Cymbeline," act iv., scene ii., Arviragus's i8th 
 speech, line 6; " Hamlet," act i., scene ii., Hamlet's I4th 
 speech ; act i., scene iv., lines 30-36 ; Lev. xxvi., 30 ; Deut. 
 xxxii., 14; Psa. Ixxx., 5 ; Hos. xiv., 2 ; i Cor. i., 25 ; Matt. 
 xi., 31,32. 
 
 CLXV. Anacoluthon may be catalogued as a species 
 of catachresis: such a change in the construction as in- 
 volves bad grammar ; as when in S., " Henry V.," in his 
 speech to his soldiers, cries : 
 
 " Rather, proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host, 
 That he who hath no stomach to this fight, 
 Let him depart ; his passport shall be made 
 We would not die in that man's company." 
 
 " Tempest," act i., scene ii., Prospero's 3d and loth 
 speech. 
 
 CLXVI. Affirmative Negation affirms by negatives, 
 the contrast adding pungency. Let Junius, acrid, and 
 in the highest degree able, present to us an instance : 
 
 " When our gracious sovereign ascended the throne, we were 
 a flourishing and contented people. If the personal virtues of 
 a king could have insured the happiness of his subjects, the 
 scene would not have altered so entirely as it has done. The 
 idea of uniting all parties, of trying all characters, and dis- 
 tributing the offices of state by rotation, was gracious and be- 
 nevolent to an extreme, though it has not yet produced the 
 many salutary effects which were intended by it. To say noth- 
 ing of the wisdom of such a plan, it undoubtedly arose from an 
 unbounded goodness of heart in which folly had no share. It 
 was not a capricious partiality to new faces ; it was not a nat- 
 ural turn for low intrigue; nor was it the treacherous amuse- 
 ment of double and triple negotiations. No, sir, it arose from 
 a continued anxiety in the purest of all possible hearts for the 
 general welfare." 
 
 Alice Gary contrives,- while not enumerating, to enu- 
 
436 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 merate; and makes us feel how deeply emphatic that 
 one circumstance is, which immeasurably more impresses 
 her than even those items which she rules off 
 
 " Among the beautiful pictures 
 
 That hang on Memory's wall, 
 Is one of a dim, old forest, 
 
 That seemeth best of all ; 
 Not for its gnarled oaks olden, 
 
 Dark with the mistletoe ; 
 Not for the violets golden 
 
 That sprinkle the vale below. 
 
 " Not for the milk-white lilies, 
 
 That lean from the fragrant ledge, 
 Coquetting all day with the sunbeams, 
 
 And stealing their golden edge ; 
 Not for the vines on the upland, 
 
 Where the bright red berries rest, 
 Nor the pinks, nor the pale, sweet cowslip, 
 
 It seemeth to me the best. 
 
 " I once had a little brother, 
 
 With eyes that were dark and deep; 
 
 In the lap of that old, dim forest, 
 He lieth in peace asleep. 
 
 Therefore of all the pictures 
 
 That hang on Memory's wall, 
 
 The one of the dim, old forest, 
 Seemeth the best of all." 
 
 CLXVII. Negative Affirmation is the exact opposite 
 of the last named : a denying by affirmatives. You can 
 not contrast these twain without having a deeper im- 
 pression of the wondrous flexibility of God's miracle 
 language. From Saxe cull we an example of college 
 days: 
 
 " I recollect those harsh affairs, 
 
 The morning bells that gave us panics ; 
 I recollect the formal prayers, 
 
 That seemed like lessons in mechanics. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 437 
 
 I recollect the drowsy way 
 
 In which the students listened to them, 
 As clearly, in my wig, to-day 
 
 As when a boy I slumber'd through them. 
 I recollect the tutors all 
 
 As freshly now, if I may say so, 
 As any chapter I recall 
 
 In Homer, or Ovidius Naso." 
 
 Some of us comprehend how little of such Greek or 
 Latin we now recall. 
 
 CLXVIII. Community is that figure which makes the 
 pleader and his client one, or the speaker and his au- 
 dience. Thus Paul, in Rom. xiii., 13, where the apostle 
 supposes himself and the common believers to whom he 
 was writing to be exposed to the same perils, and draw- 
 ing near to the same crisis of departure and of doom. 
 Thus the Pulpit-Demosthenes wins a way for his rebukes 
 and warnings into our hearts and wills by using the pro- 
 noun " we " and " us " instead of" you ;" and we feel that 
 he who speaks from the sacred desk hath the same hard 
 battle to fight that we have ; is attacked by the same 
 dread temptations; hath the same downward tendencies; 
 that he arrogates to himself no cold, proud superiority. 
 
 CLXIX. Proprietorship, a newly catalogued figure it 
 may be not very well named consists in calling a thing 
 "yours" or "ours," or by some possessive pronoun or 
 other, when the only ownership we have in it lies in the 
 interest the heart takes in it. Your author supplies an 
 instance : 
 
 How weak thy light to guide, mere Intellect ! 
 
 When the great central moral truths are gone, 
 Unable grossest falsehoods to detect; 
 
 Religion, Conscience, Social Rule, o'erthrown ! 
 For useless even the eagle's potent eye 
 When sun and stars are clouded in the sky. 
 Ye worship Intellect ? Your Caesars are 
 Nothing to Lucifer. 
 
438 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 There lies a certain charm in " your," which we can not 
 describe or analyze, yet which is quite perceptible. 
 
 CLXX. Prolepsis, or CLXXI. Procatalepsis, is the pre- 
 supposing of the adversary's arguments, and the refut- 
 ing of them beforehand. The story told of Harry Ers- 
 kine, brother of Thomas, the great Lord Erskine, de- 
 serves attention. Harry Erskine mistook, on one occa- 
 sion, the side for which he was retained; he rose and 
 addressed the jury with great force against his client. 
 That anxious personage writhed with alarm and aston- 
 ishment ; at length, as the erring advocate was about re- 
 suming his seat, the client succeeded in getting a note 
 put into his hands, telling him he had been arguing on 
 the wrong side. Without the slightest embarrassment, 
 he turned to the jury, and said : 
 
 " Gentlemen, such are the arguments which the speaker on 
 the other side will address to you. I shall now show you how 
 worthless they are." 
 
 He then tore to pieces all the reasoning he had brought 
 forward. 
 
 As usual, abundant cases occur in the Bible : Isa. xlix., 
 14; Rom. ix., 19; i Cor. xv., 35-39. De la Rue, in the 
 pathetic rhetoric of his wonderful sermon, " The Dying 
 Sinner," supplies us with the following: 
 
 "At death, say you, reason will exert its strength; it will 
 come forth from the tomb, when man shall be just entering into 
 it ; its light will awaken him when life is almost extinguished. 
 Think, O think of the embarrassments which then beset rea- 
 
 This figure is most powerful when the hearer is 
 brought forward as in the above, stating the objection 
 in his own words. Yet how seldom do we hear this or 
 almost any of the more daring and heroic figures from 
 some pulpits ? Is there no longer any electricity in yon 
 thunder -clouds around Christ's throne, to be flashed 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 439 
 
 thence into the heart and style of his embassadors ? 
 What a thing the pulpit is fit to be ! It is capable, anew 
 and anew, of regaining, more and more widely, its an- 
 cient coruscations ! How, in the name of wonder, is it 
 how, in the name of disgrace, does it happen, that the 
 Scripture is so often miserably read ? No part of Church 
 ritual is more heart-arousing, more epic, more like the 
 roll of thunders among mountains, than the suitable 
 reading of the Word ! 
 
440 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIL 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 
 PART SEVENTEENTH. 
 
 Self-substitution. Retort. Conversion. The Prosaic. 
 Indirection. Oratorical Syllepsis. A ttitude. Epipho- 
 nema, or Oracular Summing-up. Abbreviation. Hen- 
 diadys, or Splitting into Two. Antonomasia. Alliter- 
 ation, or Homceopropheron. Poetic Forms. 
 
 CLXXII. SELF-SUBSTITUTION is the name that may 
 be given to a figure highly valuable : the asking the 
 hearer to place himself in the circumstances you de- 
 scribe ; most suitable to the pulpit. De la Rue, point- 
 ing to a death-bed, cries : 
 
 " Imagine this to be your case !" 
 
 Dr. Griffin supplies a fine example : 
 
 " Place your soul in his soul's stead ! Or, rather, consent 
 for a moment to change condition with the savages on our bor- 
 ders. Were you posting on to the judgment of the great day, 
 in the darkness and pollution of pagan idolatry, and were they 
 living in wealth in this very district of the Church, how hard 
 would it seem for your neighbors to neglect your misery. When 
 you should open your eyes in the eternal world, and discover 
 the ruin in which they had suffered you to remain, how would 
 you reproach them that they did not even sell their possessions, 
 if no other means were sufficient, to send the Gospel to you !" 
 
 CLXXIII. Retort is a mode of expression of great in- 
 terest : the taking an adversary's argument or witticism 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 441 
 
 the contrary way, turning it round, showing that it proves 
 against him. It was a favorite mode with Mr. Pitt. In 
 his speech for the abolition of the slave-trade, April 2, 
 1792, he had to combat the objection that its abolition 
 by Great Britain would do little good if it were retained 
 by other countries, as was likely to be the case : 
 
 " Let us wait therefore, on prudential principles, till they join 
 us, or set us an example." 
 
 He thus replied : 
 
 "But, sir, does not this argument apply a thousand times 
 more strongly in a contrary way ? How much more justly may 
 other nations point to us, and say, 'Why should we abolish the 
 slave-trade, when Great Britain has not abolished it ? Britain, 
 free as she is, just and honorable as she is, and deeply also in- 
 volved as she is in this commerce above all nations, not only 
 has not abolished, but has refused to abolish. She has inves- 
 tigated it well; she has gained the completest insight into its 
 nature and effects ; she has collected volumes of evidence on 
 every branch of the subject. Her Senate has deliberated has 
 deliberated again and again ; but what is the result ? She has 
 gravely and solemnly determined to sanction the slave-trade.' " 
 
 CLXXIV. Conversion is of kin to retort. Under this 
 figure might be placed that bold statement which De- 
 mosthenes puts in the very commencement of his First 
 against Philip : 
 
 " First, then, O men of Athens, these our affairs must not be 
 despaired of; no, not even though they seem altogether de- 
 plorable ; for the most shocking circumstance of all our past 
 conduct is itself the most favorable to our expectations in the 
 future. What, then, is this ? That our affairs are in ruin, mere- 
 ly from our utter neglect of our most urgent duties. But were 
 we thus distressed, in spite of all vigorous efforts, then would 
 our condition be hopeless." 
 
 You perceive from this instance that by conversion is 
 meant the turning an objection into a proof an argu- 
 ment against into an argument for. But let us beware 
 
442 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 lest we pass from our domain of figures and rhetoric into 
 the domain of logic. Matt, xv., 21-28. 
 
 Pass on, therefore, to a species of conversion strictly 
 rhetorical, when some old form of words, by a change, 
 gives us a vivid surprise. Rogers, the poet and banker, 
 was a person of very cadaverous ugliness of face ; of a 
 portrait of him by Maclise, one said: 
 
 " It is a mortal likeness, done to the death." 
 Mark the change or twist perpetrated on the old ex- 
 pression, " Done to the life." Or suppose one in the 
 pulpit, instead of saying, in the well-known language of 
 Paul, " The sting of death is sin," were to convert it into 
 this, "The sting of hell is sin," he would thus, in a live- 
 ly way, express the great truth that the hell-fires the 
 most to dread are crimes, ^Etna-heavy. It is evident 
 that under this figure many fine flashes of feeling and of 
 argument may be ranged. Gonsalvo turned a disaster 
 into an omen of good, when in one of his Italian bat- 
 tles his powder-magazine was blown up by the enemy's 
 first discharge. His soldiers, smitten by panic, were turn- 
 ing to flee ; with the cry, he rallied them 
 
 " My brave men, the victory is ours ! Heaven tells us, by this 
 signal, that we shall have no farther need of our artillery." 
 
 So the expressions "Good-night!" "Good-morning!" 
 are commonplace enough ; but in how elevated a sense 
 are they used in the following instance of conversion, by 
 Mrs. Barbauld : 
 
 " Life ! we have been long together, 
 Through pleasant and through cloudy weather. 
 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear, 
 Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear ; 
 
 Then steal away, give little warning, 
 Choose thine own time ; 
 Say not good-night; but in that happier clime 
 
 Bid me good-morning /" 
 
 CLXXV. The Prosaic turned to a poetical use is de- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 443 
 
 lightful, for it comes with the effect of surprise. William 
 Robert Spencer favors you with a pleasant example : 
 
 " If the stock of our bliss is in stranger hands vested, 
 
 The fund, ill-secured, oft in bankruptcy ends; 
 But the heart issues bills which are never protested, 
 
 When drawn on the firm of wife, children, and friends." 
 
 This gives us a surprise such as when, under the rough 
 rind of the cocoa-nut, we find the fresh milk. 
 
 Gay, in his " Shepherd's Week," brings in, successfully, 
 real rural manners ; ridiculing Ambrose Philips, whose 
 shepherds were merely those of the drawing-room. Gay's 
 " Lobbin Clout," approaches real life much more nearly; 
 as in his first pastoral, " the Squabble :" 
 
 " Leek to the Welsh, to Dutchmen butter's dear, 
 Of Irish swains potato is the cheer ; 
 Oat for their feasts the Scottish shepherds grind, 
 Sweet turnips are the food of Blouzelind. 
 While she loves turnips, butter I'll despise 
 Nor leeks, nor oatmeal, nor potato prize." 
 
 CLXXVI. Indirection, never before catalogued, is a 
 form of turning aside, when the question or difficulty of 
 the opposite party meets no direct reply, yet is replied 
 to or removed more effectually than it could have been 
 by almost any direct statement. Of this fine figure our 
 Saviour, so divinely dexterous in so many a figure, fur- 
 nishes a beautiful instance in Luke xv., 21 : 
 
 "The son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, 
 and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son." 
 
 The father is far beyond waiting to reply : 
 
 "Ah, my dearest, no question such as that can my heart 
 coldly discuss, or think of it at all. Saved from shipwreck, you 
 are a thousand times a son. Haste, every one in this house, 
 now blessed of God ! Bring forth the best robe, ye my serv- 
 ants, and put it on him." 
 
 See John vi., 25, 26. 
 
444 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CLXXVII. Oratorical Syllepsis must next be enumer- 
 ated : a very delicate, beautiful figure when happily used ; 
 consisting in the employing of a word in two different 
 senses at once, the one literal, the other figurative. Lear 
 says of one of his daughters : 
 
 " Turn all her mother's pains and benefits 
 To laughter and contempt, that she may feel 
 How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
 To have a thankless child." 
 
 The serpent's tooth is literally sharp ; a child's ingrati- 
 tude is figuratively sharp; the adjective "sharper" in 
 this passage denotes both kinds of sharpness at once 
 that which wounds the flesh, and that which tears the 
 soul. The First Philippic gives us a fine example : 
 
 " If we send out galleys empty of munition, and empty hopes 
 given us by some paltry orator, think ye that all will be well ?" 
 
 Here the empty galleys were to be sent out against 
 Philip literally, and the empty hopes figuratively. Soon 
 after, our prince of orators returns to this figure : 
 
 " When you send forth against the enemy a general, and an 
 empty decree and hopes from the declaimer's platform, noth- 
 ing happens to you of the things you need." 
 
 CLXXVIII. Attitude is the name that may be given 
 to a usage of speech which, when employed in modera- 
 tion, is lively and effective. What we mean is, the intro- 
 duction of words expressive of attitudes of the body, 
 other than the pointing with the finger or indication ; to 
 which it is allied ; and not the same at all as outward il- 
 lustration. Thus Byron writes : 
 
 " Such is the aspect of this shore ; 
 'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more ! 
 So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, 
 We start, for soul is wanting there !" 
 
 All expressions such as can not be done justice to, ex- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 445 
 
 cept by throwing the body into some attitude, fall un- 
 der this head ; as when, speaking of some famous indi- 
 vidual whom you knew in early life, you say, proudly, 
 " I knew him when he was so high !" whereupon it be- 
 hooves to elevate the outspread palms, knowingly, to the 
 proper altitude. What a thrilling example, when the 
 apostle of the Gentiles cried : 
 
 "These hands have ministered to my necessities." 
 
 Yet the best thing may be outraged ; as did he, this fig- 
 ure, who waved the skirt of his coat toward the audience 
 on reciting Addison's lines : 
 
 " Soon as the evening shades prevail, 
 The moon takes up the wondrous tale (tail)." 
 
 The idea that mere attitude has much force is a child- 
 ish mistake. Almost every hearer sees through the trick. 
 We have seen a preacher act admirably Abraham's feel- 
 ing Isaac's breast for the seat of life, that one stroke 
 might be enough, and uplifting the knife in his hand ; 
 but unfortunately the orator attitudinized so cleverly the 
 first time, that he could not resist the temptation to repeat 
 the scene. He enjoyed the slaying of Isaac, whatever* 
 Abraham did. A speaker has been seen, when speaking 
 of a child in its cradle, to divide off with his hands in the 
 air a space about the size of a cradle. Another, speak- 
 ing of the place of woe, usually stepped back in the pul- 
 pit, and looked down with horror. But when Garrick, 
 on delivering Lord Lyttelton's prologue to Thomson's 
 " Caractacus " the author of the " Seasons " had died 
 shortly before shed genuine tears, and made a pause 
 which evidently his heart dictated, the effect on the au- 
 dience was irresistible : 
 
 " He loved his friends forgive this gushing tear ! 
 Alas ! I feel I am no actor here." 
 
 Mark, too, the action required by John Clare, the won- 
 derful Northamptonshire peasant : 
 
446 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Though low my lot, my wish is won, 
 
 My hopes are few and staid ; 
 All I thought life would do, is done, 
 
 The last request is made. 
 If I have foes, no foes I fear, 
 
 To God I live resigned ; 
 I have a friend I value here, 
 
 And that's a quiet mind." 
 
 The admirers of the first Napoleon, overlooking his 
 coarse selfishness and the blood he lavished, will recog- 
 nize an impressive epic attitude on his part, when, on 
 his return from Elba, and on approaching the regiment 
 stationed at Grenoble, the officers in command gave the 
 order to fire. Advancing within ten steps of the lev- 
 eled muskets, he bared his breast, and said: 
 
 " Soldiers of the Fifth Regiment, if there is one among you 
 who would kill his emperor, let him do it here I am." 
 
 The regiment was instantly at his feet. 
 
 Willingly we turn from this despot, false to truth, to 
 a far nobler man, Algernon Sidney, most foully con- 
 demned to death, in 1683, by the loathsome Jeffreys. 
 When the ferocious judge pronounced sentence, Alger- 
 non nobly said : . 
 
 "Then, O God, I beseech Thee to sanctify these sufferings 
 unto me, to impute not my blood to the country, nor to the 
 city through which I am to be drawn. Let no inquisition be 
 made for it; but if any, and if the shedding of blood that is 
 innocent must be revenged, let the weight of it fall only upon 
 those that maliciously persecute me for righteousness' sake." 
 
 Jeffreys replied : 
 
 " I pray God work in you a temper fit to go into the other 
 world; for I see you are not fit for this." 
 
 Then the Colonel, stretching out his arm, cried : 
 
 " My lord, feel my pulse, and see if I am disordered. I bless 
 God, I never was in better temper than I am now." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 447 
 
 We strongly recommend his " Discourse concerning 
 Governments," as most admirable for its style and for 
 its argument ; a book the world should not let die ; a 
 book that should ever be dear to all lovers of freedom. 
 
 We hesitate to mention here the most dread, sublime, 
 pathetic attitude that men or angels have ever seen ; our 
 admiration should perhaps be stifled by our awe we al- 
 lude to the attitude of our Saviour on the Cross. It is 
 thus referred to by Bishop Joseph Hall, whose works, 
 teeming with thoughts and figures, especially that mas- 
 terpiece, his " Meditations," are most deserving of re- 
 peated perusal: 
 
 " See Him stretching out His arms to receive and embrace 
 you ; hanging down His head to take view of your misery ; 
 opening His precious side to receive you into His bosom ; 
 pouring from his heart water to wash you, and blood to redeem 
 you!" 
 
 With the attitudes of the younger Pitt in the House of 
 Commons while Erskine was making his maiden speech 
 there were, to be sure, no words mingled, but the atti- 
 tudes were a very effective speech. We quote from 
 Croly's " Life of George IV. :" 
 
 "Pitt, evidently intending to reply, sat with pen and. paper 
 in his hand, preparing to catch the arguments of his formidable 
 adversary. He wrote a word or two. Erskine proceeded ; but 
 with every additional sentence Pitt's attention to the paper re- 
 laxed, his look became more careless, and he obviously began 
 to think the orator less and less worthy of his attention. At 
 length, while every eye in the house was fixed upon him, with 
 a contemptuous smile he dashed the pen through the paper, 
 and flung them on the floor. Erskine never recovered from 
 this expression of disdain ; his voice faltered, he struggled 
 through the remainder of his speech, and sank into his seat, 
 dispirited and shorn of his fame." 
 
 Mark Sir Walter's reference, all unthinking of attitude, 
 to his position at the moment. He said on his death- 
 bed to his son-in-law : 
 
448 Might and Mirth of Literature 
 
 " Lockhart, I may have but a minute to speak to you. My 
 dear, be a good man be virtuous, be religious be a good man. 
 Nothing else will give you any comfort 'when you come to lie 
 here." 
 
 That is an attitude which we all must use. May a 
 Christian life make it grand and eloquent. 
 
 CLXXIX. Epiphonema oracular summing up, an in- 
 structive remark at the end is abundantly illustrated in 
 Scripture: see Acts xix., 18, 20; Judges ix., 56. From 
 Milton we quote four lines : 
 
 "This saw his hapless foes; but stood objured, 
 And to rebellious fight rallied their powers, 
 Insensate, hope conceiving from despair; 
 In heavenly spirits could such perverseness dwell ?" 
 
 "Hamlet," act i., scene ii., Hamlet's 6th speech, line 18; 
 " Winter's Tale," act ii., scene i., Leontes's 2d speech, 
 lines 4-10. 
 
 Summation must come in always at the end of the 
 sentence, and be much more than the mere closing of 
 the statement : it must possess a certain oracular weight 
 and tone ; . it must announce some conclusion that has 
 become axiomatic and needs proof no longer; the many 
 details must be gathered into .one, like many lightnings 
 into one thunderbolt. It suits the pulpit well; where 
 the great truths of heaven and of home may often, nay, 
 should often, be taken for granted ; verities which when 
 left to clear for themselves their own way without proof 
 are then many a time the best proven. The Gospel its 
 own witness ! Stand back, frequently, O preacher ; leave 
 the cry of God and the aroused conscience alone with 
 each other. Let them wrestle there alone on this mys- 
 tic, sad, Peniel of the heart. Carlyle and the great Ger- 
 man, Richter, deal much in genuine epiphonemas; as 
 when the latter exclaims : 
 
 " Were there no longer any thing inexplicable, I would no 
 longer care to live either here or hereafter." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 449 
 
 Or we hear Schiller cry of Art, truly skillful : 
 "Art is the right hand of Nature." 
 
 From Burke, the magnificent, wise, and copious, let us 
 republicans take one summation a truth indispensable 
 in a republic ; our country will be scourged into it : 
 
 "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to 
 their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appe- 
 tites. . . . Society can not exist unless a controlling power upon 
 will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there 
 is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in 
 the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds 
 can not be free. Their passions forge their fetters." 
 
 Grant to us now one other indulgence of availing 
 ourselves of our familiarity with the noble and melodious 
 Spanish literature. We translate from Calderon, his 
 " Green and Blue," where Worship accepts not her high- 
 est name, yet one of her pleasantest names : 
 
 " Green ! Tis the fairy garb of spring 
 With million dew-drops glistening; 
 Lo ! every fountain, every stream, 
 Margin'd with this fair livery, gleam ; 
 The bright hill-side, the leafy shade, 
 Are in this pleasant garb arrayed ; 
 And the broad oak's majestic head 
 With emerald is garlanded. 
 The shimmering moonbeams softly fall 
 On ivied green of castle wall ; 
 All summer's flowers of varied tint, 
 And graceful form, are cradled in't, 
 Till fostering sunbeams call them forth 
 To twinkle as the stars of earth. 
 The tender love of Deity 
 In this delightsome tint we see, 
 Potent the weary eye to soothe, 
 And clothe the earth in new-born youth. 
 Such care to deck man's home he took, 
 Till joy flows in at every look, 
 FF 
 
450 Might . and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 While mount and main flash hymns abroad, 
 And nature coruscates with God ; 
 And worship dons a bridal dress, 
 And owns her name is Cheerfulness." 
 
 CLXXX. Abbreviation, never named, yet deserves no- 
 tice; as when you speak of " Gents on Broadway cane in 
 hand;" or "We Yanks brag enough about ourselves;" 
 or a certain line of conduct is stigmatized as wholly 
 "infra dig" that is, beneath our dignity; yet we may 
 be compelled, by the first outburst of rain, to wait, at 
 the next corner, for the earliest 'bus that passes. 
 
 CLXXXI. Hendiadys, Splitting into Two, consists in 
 the separating of what is really but one thing into two 
 things, as when Virgil describes persons at a banquet as 
 drinking " from goblets and from gold" that is, from 
 golden goblets; or as when Horace, book i., ode viii., 
 speaks of Achilles hurried " into slaughter and the Tro- 
 jan bands," instead of " hurried to the slaughter of the 
 Trojan bands." This figure is in English very rare. 
 Milton, familiar with all felicities and dexterities of the 
 classics, gives us examples, as in vi., 355, when he tells 
 us that " the might of Gabriel fought." 
 
 CLXXXII. Antonomasia is our next: the using a 
 proper name for a common name, as when an orator is 
 called a Demosthenes ; a traitor an Arnold ; a calm, dis- 
 interested patriot a Washington. A renowned example 
 of this occurs when Shylock, the case being at first de- 
 cided in his favor in Shakespeare's drama, cries delighted : 
 
 "A Daniel come to judgment; yea, a Daniel." 
 
 You remember, no doubt, the instance in Gray's 
 "Elegy:" 
 
 " Some village Hampden, who, with dauntless breast, 
 
 The little tyrant of his fields withstood ; 
 Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest; 
 
 Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 451 
 
 How great a force to this figure, when, instead of say- 
 ing, " Thou art a Cicero," it is said, out and out, " Thou 
 art Cicero." Mark viii., 33. As Dr. Young was walking 
 in his garden at Dover, in company with two ladies, one 
 of whom he afterwards married, a servant came to tell him 
 that a gentleman wished to speak with him. " Tell him," 
 says the doctor, " I am too happily engaged to change 
 my situation." The ladies insisted that he should go, as 
 his visitor was a man of rank, his patron and his friend. 
 As persuasion, however, had no effect, one took him by 
 the right arm and the other by the left, and marched 
 him to the garden gate; when, finding resistance was 
 vain, he bowed, laid his hand upon his heart, and in that 
 expressive manner for which he was so remarkable, 
 spoke the following lines : 
 
 " Thus Adam look'd when from his garden driven, 
 And thus disputed orders sent from heaven. 
 Like him I go, but yet to go am loth ; 
 Like him I go, for angels drove us both. 
 Hard was his fate, but mine still more unkind, 
 His Eve went with him but mine stays behind." 
 
 CLXXXIII. Alliteration, or Homceopropheron, is the 
 employment in close succession of two or more words 
 that begin with the same letter, as when Elijah Fenton 
 terms Waller 
 
 "Maker and model of melodious verse." 
 
 So much is our language inclined to this, that thus on 
 a prayer-book wrote Richard Crashaw, of " Prayer:" 
 
 " It is the armory of light ; 
 Let constant use but keep it bright, 
 
 You find it yields 
 To holy hands and humble hearts 
 
 More swords and shields 
 Than sin hath snares or hell hath darts." 
 
 Tobias G. Smollett, the novelist, bursts into his noble 
 " Ode to Independence " thus: 
 
452 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 "Thy spirit, Independence, let me share 
 Lord of the lion heart, and eagle eye !" 
 
 Let us adopt from De Quincey his two admirable def- 
 initions of those who dig up the metal, truth, and those 
 who work up that metal for current use : 
 
 " The fact is, that the laborers of the mine are seldom fitted 
 to be also laborers of the mint." 
 Or hear Henry Clay : 
 
 " I was born to no proud patrimonial estate ; from my father 
 I inherited only infancy, ignorance, and indigence." 
 
 Gibbon, in his magnificent work, " The Decline and 
 Fall of the Roman Empire," says: 
 
 " Whenever the spirit of fanaticism, at once so credulous and 
 so crafty, has insinuated itself into a noble mind, it insensibly 
 corrodes the vital principles of virtue and veracity." 
 
 In McLellan, on the " Robin," what a sweet accord of 
 sounds ! 
 
 " With the sweet airs of spring the Robin comes, 
 And in her simple song there seems to gush 
 A strain of sorrow when she visiteth 
 Her last year's withered nest. But when the gloom 
 Of the deep twilight falls, she takes her perch 
 Upon the red-stemmed hazel's slender twig 
 That overhangs the brook, and suits her song 
 To the slow rivulet's inconstant chime." 
 
 In fact, alliteration is rhyme; rhyme at the beginning 
 of a word instead of at the end. The recurrence of the 
 same sound gives a certain satisfaction of honey to the 
 sense, slight, to be sure, yet perceptible enough ; there is 
 a tendency in our nature to form such recurring sounds ; 
 hence alliteration frequently is produced without any 
 set design ; you yourself are surprised when you see you 
 have run into it. But often it is the fruit of intention. 
 Of all our great writers, Spenser uses it the most. He 
 thus paints Prince Arthur's crest : 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 453 
 
 " Upon the top of all, his lofty crest, 
 A bunch of hairs discolor'd diversely, 
 With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest, 
 Did shake and seem'd to dance for jollity; 
 Like to an almond-tree, ymounted high 
 On top of green Selinjs, all alone, 
 With blossoms brave bedecked daintily, 
 Whose tender locks do tremble, every one, 
 At every little breath that under heaven is blown." 
 
 In every literature that has risen from independent 
 native sources and impulses, poetry has come sooner 
 than written prose, for in rude tribes fancy is stronger 
 than judgment : Homer preceded Herodotus. Even be- 
 fore the at least common use of writing, epic and lyric 
 song has existed; the epic being essentially historical, 
 while the lyric is the voice of individual passion and of 
 praise ; and the bard was expected to be able to carry 
 in his mind and recite numerous lengthy poems. Hence 
 a powerful memory was as much admired, in the dawn 
 of literature, as strong inventive genius; every thing 
 that could aid the recollection was highly valued. It 
 thus happened that what Churchill the Satirist terms 
 " apt alliteration's artful aid " is of old historic standing 
 in our literature, being derived from the Saxons, with 
 whom, as with the Scalds of Iceland, and in the old 
 Welsh Cymric poets, alliteration enjoyed constantly the 
 highest metrical value; and Spenser sat at their feet. 
 Very early appeared " The Vision of William concerning 
 Piers Plowman," and what an indescribable luxuriousness 
 does Spenser steal for his " Dreamland " from the alliter- 
 ative indulgences by which " William " is so continually 
 ruled. Joseph P. Drake, in our day, revels thus in his 
 description of Bronx: 
 
 " I sat me down upon a green bank side 
 
 Skirting the smooth edge of a gentle river, 
 Whose waters seem'd unwillingly to glide, 
 
 Like parting friends, who linger while they sever; 
 
454 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Enforced to go, yet seeming still unready, 
 
 Backward they wend their way in many a wistful eddy. 
 
 " Gray o'er my head the yellow-vested willow 
 Ruffled its hoary top in the fresh breezes ; 
 Glancing in light, like spray on a green billow, 
 
 Or the fine frostwork which young winter freezes, 
 When first his power, in infant pastime trying, 
 Congeals sad autumn's tears on the dead branches lying." 
 
 In an eminently beautiful poem, " A Song for Septem- 
 ber," by Thomas W. Parsons, this delicate rhyme at the 
 beginning is charming : 
 
 " September strews the woodland o'er 
 
 With many a brilliant color; 
 The world is brighter than before, 
 
 Why should our hearts be duller? 
 Sorrow and the scarlet leaf, 
 
 Sad thoughts and sunny weather. 
 Ah me ! This glory and this grief 
 
 Agree not well together." 
 
 From George Eliot's poem, " The Spanish Gypsy," 
 well worth reading the authoress a very able novelist 
 take as follows : 
 
 " Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love 
 On the mid-sea that moans with memories, 
 And on the untraveled ocean whose vast tides 
 Pant dumbly passionate with dreams of youth." 
 
 The whole volume abounds every where with the finest 
 felicities. 
 
 From the close of what follows, alliterations may be 
 culled. It is taken from the " Earthly Paradise," a col- 
 lection of twenty-four poetic tales, by William Morris, 
 our modern Chaucer, of whom it has been said, by the 
 Southern Review, that " for clearness of vision, vivid pow- 
 er of representation, and sweet, pure, idiomatic English, 
 there has not been such a poet since the days of Chau- 
 cer." We give you his inimitable picture of a mill; 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 455 
 
 much in Chaucer's style, and equal to any picture that 
 Chaucer hath. His " Lovers of Godrun " is one of the 
 best of the twenty-four of these tales of the Indo-Euro- 
 pean nations: 
 
 " So long he rode, he drew anigh 
 A mill upon the river's brim, 
 That seemed a goodly place to him, 
 For o'er the oily, smooth millhead . 
 
 There hung the apples growing red, 
 And many an ancient apple-tree 
 Within the orchard could he see ; 
 While the smooth mill-walls, white and black, 
 Shook in the great wheel's measur'd clack 
 And grumble of-the gear within ; 
 While o'er the roof that dull'd the din 
 The doves sat crooning half the day, 
 And round the half-cut stack of hay 
 The sparrows fluttered twittering." 
 
 Morris has more than Chaucer's copiousness in giving 
 us lengthened pictures of scenery, for Chaucer's are very 
 short ; far more than Chaucer's melody, for nobody has 
 been able to tell what was the great old writer's law of 
 rhythm it is doubtful if our poetry at that time had 
 any; and the modern is his equal in painting human 
 character; and in narrative. 
 
 With a quotation let us indulge ourselves from a re- 
 cent Californian poet, Joaquin Miller, " Songs of the 
 Sierras," 1871 : 
 
 "The trees shook hands high overhead, 
 And bowed and intertwined across 
 The narrow way; while leaves and moss 
 And luscious fruit, gold-hued and red, 
 Through the cool canopy of green 
 Let not one sunshaft shoot between." 
 
 Let your author inflict on you these lines, that close 
 with front rhyme: 
 
456 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Mid the wan billows of a ghastly sea 
 Billows that coil like snakes of giant size 
 And 'neath the pallors of a corpse-like moon, 
 Wrestles the bark that bears my destiny. 
 When reach I safety's shore and sunbreak's sheen? 
 I not despair ! My Christ the tempest rides, 
 And glints of hope, with silver, crest the tides; 
 And solitude and storm my teachers be, 
 And all the moan and mystery of the sea. 
 
 Or Algernon Charles Swinburne sings to us of 
 " The lisp of leaves, and the ripple of rain." 
 
 CLXXXIV. Poetic Forms should come in here. Of 
 themselves they deserve a lecture. P. L., vii., 99. Many 
 fetters are laid on the poet, which he must wear so light- 
 ly and gracefully that they shall become ornaments; 
 therefore it is but fair that he should enjoy certain lib- 
 erties or licenses granted to him and not to the prose 
 writers. To use " adown the vale," for " down the val- 
 ley," would justly be deemed a piece of feeble affectation 
 in prose ; but is felt to be very suitable in a poet, and 
 may help him to round off his poetic line. It is well, too, 
 to possess turns of diction that say to us, as it were, 
 " Come, now, let us abandon ourselves to poetic suscep- 
 tibilities." These turns will serve a purpose similar to 
 the sound of Sabbath-bells awakening us on a Sunday 
 morning. A large number of these forms have already 
 been registered under the figures above named, such as 
 "adown" just mentioned; the very numerous archa- 
 isms of Spenser not archaisms in his day, but to us 
 beautiful bits of moss besprent with dew. But there are 
 others not falling under any of these heads. There are 
 many of the Scottish Doric words : unwise ye, if you are 
 unacquainted with them ; a rich variety of words, redo- 
 lent of pastoral life; tufted with tufts of the beautiful, 
 as is the hawthorn with bunches of bloom, or the wil- 
 low with its early April catkins: such as "gloaming," 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 457 
 
 " bonnie," " kye," " snell," " the slogan," " gowans," 
 "glen," " coronach," "eerie," "blithe." Study a glos- 
 sary to Burns. Yet Marsh gives a*warning that is wise : 
 
 " The power of substituting a hundred epithets for the prop- 
 er name of the object to which they are applied, when their 
 origin is forgotten, is a hinderance rather thail a help ; and even 
 in poetical diction such words are little better than tinsel. To 
 exemplify: To those who know that falchion is derived from 
 the Latin falx, a sickle or scythe, the word suggests an image 
 which sword does not excite, and therefore the picturesqueness 
 of the poetic phrase in which it occurs. But to those who are 
 ignorant of the etymology, it is simply what may be called a 
 sensation-synonym for sword. It is recommended only by 
 metrical adaptation, or simply by its unfamiliarity ; it adds ab- 
 solutely nothing to the expressiveness of the diction which em- 
 ploys it, and in most cases is, both to writer and reader, simply 
 fustian." 
 
 In short, if your thought or description be not poetic 
 when couched in the plainest and commonest language, 
 you have reason sometimes to suspect that no soul of 
 poesy is in it. 
 
 Yet, spite this caution, many a touch of beauty can 
 poetic forms bestow, as in Cowper, " libbard " for " leop- 
 ard :" 
 
 " The lion, and the libbard, and the bear 
 Graze with the fearless flocks." 
 
 So there are such words as " nathless," " ammiral," 
 " Rhene," " Danaw," " erst," " cressets," " parle," " mage " 
 (singular of magi), " eld." Or as in P. L., xii., 600. Or 
 condescend to read from your author: 
 
 The queen of night seems lost from heaven ; 
 But though her silvery cirque may wane, 
 Returns the hour, spite rain and rack, 
 When, like cleans'd soul from death come back, 
 Her crescent fills again. 
 
 It must, however, be once again repeated that poetic 
 
45 8 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 forms are ofttimes a delusion and a snare, tending to 
 foster a brood of " literary-poets," far inferior to the 
 poets of simple strength and direct inspiration. To a 
 considerable extent,Tennyson is a " literary-poet ;" he is 
 too fine-spun ; his diction is too artistic ; the bow he 
 twangs has been carved and made so elegant that, like 
 the bow in the fable, it has lost some of the invaluable 
 rude strength which a true practical Robin Hood would 
 rejoice in, if there were a great fight for home and father- 
 land. Surely, to say " rich enow " for " rich enough," 
 or to call a merchant ship "a dromond, "'is a style of 
 talk never found on the lips of actual men. Let us de- 
 spise tinsel, even when Tennyson patronizes such a 
 thing. 
 
 We here press on you two great balancing truths 
 both emphatic. If you despise either, your style will 
 never be first class, and your judgment of writers will be 
 often erroneous. First, the thought is always greater 
 than the form. Ideas are more than the arrangement of 
 ideas. Not the clothes are the chief thing, but the man, 
 the truth. Despise whatever is frippery, and all the 
 dandyism of set efforts to get at the ornamental. To 
 seize a young oak, and try to toss its boughs and its 
 leaves into pretty or noble shapes, by shaking it, is pal- 
 try work ; but the princely growth is a grand thing to 
 look at, when the free winds of heaven swing the tree, 
 as if with an inspiration from the sky. Let it mainly be 
 the throbbing vitality of your idea that shall call up the 
 figures that suit it. But, on the other hand, lay to heart 
 what that profound thinker, Taine, has said : " The source 
 of the arts is the sentiment of form." It is of almost su- 
 preme importance that a valuable fact or thought be 
 stated skillfully and artistically, and in the most felicitous 
 and impressive form. In this the French is unequaled. 
 Our writers of English are often very clumsy and unar- 
 tistic both in prose and poetry. Therefore, be so familiar 
 with figures that they will come to you without effort. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 459 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 . PART EIGHTEENTH. 
 
 Sudden Transition. Allusion. Hint, or Suggestion. As- 
 cription of Determination. Periphrasis. Superfine En- 
 glish. Interpretation. Proverbs. The Third Person. 
 Odd Rhyme. Odd Prose. Household Words. Pre- 
 tended Depreciation. Rhetorical Use of the Past. Rhe- 
 torical Use of the Future. Ascription of Rationality. 
 Nicknames. The Doric. Impersonation. The Mate- 
 rialistic. The Singular Number. Double Nouns and 
 Double Words. Celerity. Epithetic. Passing over 
 from the Literal to the Figurative. Threat. Repose. 
 
 CLXXXV. SUDDEN TRANSITION, of kin to antithesis, 
 is a form of writing powerful in oratory, and often used 
 in wit. We send you to a very diverting poem by a 
 Scotch bard, Professor William Tennant, " Anster Fair" 
 its name. He thus depicts his heroine, the far-famed 
 Maggie Lauder, well known in Scottish music. The 
 verse is the celebrated ottava-rima of Italy : 
 
 " Her face was as the summer cloud, whereon 
 The dawning sun delights to rest his rays ; 
 
 Compared with it, old Sharon's vale, o'ergrown 
 With flaunting roses, had resigned its praise ; 
 
 For why ? Her face with heaven's own roses shone, 
 Mocking the morn, and witching men to gaze ; 
 
 And he that gazed with cold, unsmitten soul, 
 
 That blockhead's heart were ice, thrice baked beneath the pole. 
 
460 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Her locks, apparent tufts of wiry gold, 
 
 Lay on her lily temples, fairly dazzling, 
 And on each hair, so harmless to behold, 
 
 A soul's soul hung mercilessly strangling; 
 The piping, silly zephyrs vied t' unfold 
 
 The tresses in their arms so slim and tangling, 
 And thrid in sport these lover-noosing snares, 
 And played at hide-and-seek amid the golden hairs." 
 
 Dr. Johnson gives us a good example as follows : 
 
 " Hermit hoar, in solemn cell, 
 
 Wearing out life's evening gray, 
 Strike thy bosom, sage, and tell 
 What is bliss, and which the way. 
 
 " Thus I spoke, and speaking sighed, 
 Scarce repress'd the starting tear, 
 When the hoary sage replied 
 
 ' Come, my lad, and drink some beer.' " * 
 
 Occurs a clever instance of this figure in Longfellow's 
 " Hyperion," a book worth perusal, though it takes, after 
 all, no sufficiently strong grasp of the great questions it 
 touches upon : 
 
 " I had a friend who is now no more. He was taken away 
 in the bloom of life, by a very rapid widow." 
 
 In the same style, John Hookham Frere, in 1817, in 
 his " Mock-heroic/' by Whistlecraft Brothers, after tell- 
 ing how certain ladies were rescued from a party of gi- 
 ants, thus goes on : 
 
 " The ladies ? They were tolerably well ; 
 
 At least as well as I could have expected. 
 Many a sad detail I shall not tell 
 
 Their toilet had been very much neglected ; 
 But by supreme good luck it so befell, 
 
 That when the castle's capture was effected, 
 When those vile cannibals were overpower'd. 
 Only two fat duennas were devour'd." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 461 
 
 It has too often happened that this figure has been 
 used to mock at lofty feeling ; to insinuate with the 
 sneer of a fiend or of a callous man of the world that 
 there is no reality in disinterested emotion. Byron is 
 especially open to this condemnation. These writers 
 really felt the beauty of the ideas they ridicule ; but they 
 wished to seem more callous and skeptical than they 
 actually were. Unblest hypocrisy, and most perverted 
 to desire to seem worse than we are ! What hardened 
 mental suicide ; what a perverted employment of our no- 
 blest susceptibilities, to exclaim to the world, "You deem 
 a certain feeling noble ; behold how easily I can ape it, 
 and how thoroughly I despise it !" This is a kind of 
 mimicry of God himself. 
 
 Sudden transition may be so used, as in a way full of 
 meaning, to suggest far more than is written down, as in 
 the Doric poem on a baby : 
 
 " Her een, sae like her mither's een 
 
 Twa gentle liquid things; 
 Her face, sae like an angel's face 
 We're glad she has nae wings !" 
 
 The closing line suggests how often a baby flies away 
 from us to heaven, and makes our embrace of one, who 
 is so sweet and so evanescent, more intense from* the 
 fear of soon losing it. 
 
 CLXXXVI. Allusion is one of the most interesting 
 usages of speech ; very wide in the range it can take. 
 Here, various reading of many an author triumphs, and 
 extensive knowledge ; as Milton's great epic proves. A 
 writer can thus avail himself of all his information ; he 
 can ennoble a common subject, or insinuate what he 
 may not wish to declare in plain words ; he can electrify 
 our flagging attention by a delicate reference to some 
 renowned event or great person or beautiful idea, em- 
 balmed in the deepest memory of all educated minds. 
 In sermons, particularly, an allusion to some Bible inci- 
 
462 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 dent has often a winning charm. A sermon by Dr. Sher- 
 lock gives us this : 
 
 " How disrespectfully do we treat the Gospel of Christ, to 
 which we owe that clear light both of reason and nature which 
 we now enjoy, when we endeavor to set up reason and nature 
 in opposition to it. Ought the withered hand which Christ has 
 restored and made whole, to be lifted up against Him ?" 
 
 Men such as Darwin and Mill; such as Herbert Spen- 
 cer and Dr. Tyndall, are the very sort who ought so to 
 be branded. 
 
 In the sermons of Dr. Seed you will find many such 
 eloquent references. Green, also, says very happily, al- 
 luding to David's slaying of Goliath with a stone, how 
 important exercise is, were it but the lifting of a stone 
 and the throwing of it, as a cure for the spleen : 
 
 " Fling but a stone, the giant dies." 
 
 As references to Greek and Roman mythology are fre- 
 quent, inwrought into the very texture of modern -liter- 
 ature, an intimate knowledge of that mythology is a val- 
 uable part of a good education ; yet the allusion must 
 be widely known, else it can not be widely enjoyed ; con- 
 sequently the most telling allusions are those that make 
 reference to God's Word, on account of the wide famil- 
 iarity of Scripture. Yet not to Scripture alone are we 
 restricted. In the address of R. C. Winthrop to the Bos- 
 ton Mercantile Library Association, 1845, we encounter 
 a very original allusion to a well-known custom of the 
 American Indians: 
 
 " Commerce has in all ages been the most formidable antag- 
 onist of war. In the smoke-pipe of every steamer which brings 
 the merchandise of Britain to our ports we see a calumet of 
 peace which her war-chiefs dare not extinguish." 
 
 Observe what a sublime allusion in the subjoined 
 couplet of P.ope's : 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 463 
 
 "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: 
 God said, ' Let Newton be !' and all was light." 
 
 Sir Walter Scott treats us to the following apt yet 
 unexpected allusion to Shakespeare : 
 
 "Give to the world one half of the Sunday, and you will find 
 that religion has no strong hold of the other. Pass the morn- 
 ing at church, and the evening, according to your taste or rank, 
 in the cricket-field or at the opera, and you will soon find that 
 thoughts of the evening's hazards and bets intrude themselves 
 on the sermon, and that recollections of the popular melodies 
 interfere with the Psalms. Religion is thus treated like Lear, 
 to whom his ungrateful daughters first denied one half of his 
 stipulated attendance, and then made it a question whether 
 they should grant him any share of what remained." 
 
 Let us now precisely contrast the common and the 
 Scriptural allusion. In one of the wild stories of the 
 Greek mythology, Medea had an aged animal chopped 
 to pieces, boiled the parts in a caldron, and brought out 
 the animal restored to life and to youth. Accordingly, 
 Prescott, our justly far-famed historian, in his criticism 
 of Chateaubriand's " English Literature," thus speaks of 
 the obligation lying on the historian to consult old chron- 
 icles, and to new-mould their matter into new forms of 
 elegance : 
 
 "In short, a sort of Medea -like process is to be gone 
 through; and many an old bone is to be boiled over in the 
 caldron, before it can come out again clothed in the elements 
 of beauty." 
 
 This allusion thousands would not understand; what 
 could a caldron, or immense kettle, have to do with it ? 
 But in the following, Webster, lauding Alexander Ham- 
 ilton as a great financier, makes an allusion that no one 
 can miss; for it is to the Bible he alludes the common 
 classic of Christendom : 
 
464 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " He smote the rock of the national resources, and the abun- 
 dant stream of revenue gushed forth ; he touched the dead 
 corpse of the public credit, and it sprang to its feet." 
 
 In like manner, in the following familiar dictum aimed 
 against the mimicking of great masters, lies a reference 
 which no one mistakes : 
 
 "He who has really caught the mantle of the prophet, is the 
 last man to imitate his walk." 
 
 The chief book for the orator to get thoroughly familiar 
 with, for the purposes of his art, and to go to for weap- 
 ons, is the Bible. Master the Bible, if you would master 
 the heart. 
 
 In a homelier direction did Chatham travel for an al- 
 lusion, in his amusing reply to George Grenville. The 
 latter, in the British House of Commons, was contend- 
 ing against Chatham, then Mr. Pitt, that a certain tax 
 was unavoidable: 
 
 " The right honorable gentleman complains," said Grenville, 
 " of the hardness of the tax ; why does he not tell us where he 
 can lay another in its place ? Tell me, tell me where you can 
 lay another tax tell me where ?" 
 
 Mr. Pitt, from his seat, broke out in a musical tone, 
 quoting from a very popular song of the day : 
 
 " Gentle Shepherd, tell me where !" 
 
 The House burst into a fit of laughter. It was lucky for 
 Mr. Grenville that he was not nicknamed " Gentle Shep- 
 herd " for the rest of his life. You will be reminded of 
 General Butler's " Shoo-fly." 
 
 Be it permitted to have recourse to the sublime ; from 
 Curran's speech for Rowan let us quote: 
 
 " If, which Heaven forbid, it hath been still unfortunately de- 
 termined that, because he has not bent to power and author- 
 ity, because he would not bow down before the golden calf and 
 worship it, he is to be bound and cast into the furnace, I do 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 465 
 
 trust in God that there is a Redeeming Spirit in the Constitu- 
 tion which will be seen to walk with the sufferer through the 
 flames, and to preserve him unhurt by the conflagration." 
 
 Mark how sublime such Bible allusions can be. 
 
 There occur instances, too, of happy, heart-touching 
 allusions to the speaker's life or profession, as when the 
 old schoolmaster, dying, said, as the dimness of death 
 fell on his eyes and mind : 
 
 " It is growing dark the school may be dismissed." 
 
 Excellent, Nathaniel Cotton's well-known lines on 
 Time : 
 
 "O let it not elude thy grasp; but like 
 The good old patriarch upon record, 
 Hold the fleet angel fast, until he bless thee." 
 
 Enough has been stated to show how well fitted to 
 reach every mind are allusions to the Scriptures. Re- 
 member this. Act upon this. Allusions to Shakespeare, 
 also, are widely understood and felt. We close with an 
 allusion of our own: 
 
 The Theban bard, in lyric strain of old, 
 Pictured an eagle on Jove's thunder-bolt; 
 On our Jehovah's 'tis a Dove that perches. 
 
 CLXXXVII. Hint, or Suggestion, may be registered 
 as quite different from the last ; something very brief 
 of your own ; as when John Sterling says : 
 
 " What the dream but vain rebelling, 
 
 If from earth we sought to flee. 
 
 'Tis our stored and ample dwelling; 
 
 'Tis from it the skies we see." 
 
 Think how much is hinted at in the last line. No great- 
 er merit can a writer or speaker have than to be very 
 suggestive. A suggestion is a dim thought of your own. 
 Is thinking, then, a figure? No. But a thought kept 
 
 GG 
 
466 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 
 purposely dim for effect is a figure, and a very fine one. 
 On the other hand, an allusion is a reference to a thought 
 of some one else. 
 
 CLXXXVIII. Ascription of Determination is another 
 figure not to be left out. In a translation of Paul Faval's 
 powerful French tale, " The White Wolf," made by us 
 for a Philadelphia periodical, we have thus rendered a 
 passage on guardians : 
 
 " For one who knows how to steer his bark, the part of a 
 guardian may be made to go far. Every man is mortal; the 
 ward is liable to that crowd of deplorable accidents which 
 threaten our poor humanity. They die, these children, of fever, 
 of croup; they die of eating too much and of drinking too 
 much ; one can be munched up by a wolf in a way different 
 from what is told in the fables of Perrault; some of them insist 
 on getting drowned. Farther on in life there are duels, falls 
 from horseback, and such love as that which ruined Troy. Be- 
 cause of all these things, the ward of a guardian who is up to 
 his trade rarely reaches his majority, when his heritage is worth 
 much thought; and Mr. de Vaunoy was an able man." 
 
 Mark in this, too, the pleonasm and the irony. 
 
 CLXXXIX. Periphrasis, or Circumlocution, than which 
 few figures are more common or more important, is the 
 naming of a person or thing, not directly, but in a round- 
 about way. In " Hiawatha," Longfellow gives us the 
 Indian name for September 
 
 "The moon of the falling leaves." 
 
 So that this figure may be called, when it grows more 
 condensed, with flash in it Definition. When skillfully 
 managed, it adds energy by fixing attention on some im- 
 portant circumstance ; or it may serve purposes of ridi- 
 cule by making prominent some absurd point in the his- 
 tory of the object described. In his oration on the Peace, 
 Demosthenes, speaking of Neoptolemus,who was a tragic 
 writer, as well as an actor, calls him 
 
 "Neoptolemus the player," 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 467 
 
 in order to depreciate him. Dean Swift, wishing to put 
 a slight on an individual, expressed himself thus : 
 
 " One of these authors (the fellow that was pilloried I forget 
 his name)." 
 
 But often it is carried to excess an inch of meaning be- 
 ing spun out into tedious yards, and yards of wordy talk. 
 Scriblerus tells us of a certain periphrast of Scripture 
 the passage spun out was this sublime one: 
 
 " He looks on the earth and it trembles ; He touches the hills 
 and they smoke." 
 
 The man of words thus mixed water dish-water with 
 the wine : 
 
 " The hills forget they're fix'd, and in their fright 
 Cast off their weight, and fit themselves for flight; 
 The woods, with terror winged, outfly the wind ; 
 And leave the heavy, panting hills behind." 
 
 On this doth Scriblerus thus discourse : 
 
 "You here see the hills not only tumbling, but shaking off 
 the woods from their backs to run the faster; after this you are 
 presented with a foot-race of mountains and woods, where the 
 woods distance the mountains, that, like corpulent, pursy fel- 
 lows, come puffing and panting a vast way behind them." 
 
 Like alliteration, periphrasis is of very old standing in 
 our literature ; in Saxon poetry it was in constant use, 
 and was at times a source of obscurity. In a passage in 
 the death-song of Regnor Lodbrog, this phrase occurs: 
 
 " Soon shall we drink out of the curved trees of the head." 
 
 Bishop Percy, who did such invaluable service to En- 
 glish poetry by bringing the old ballads into notice, trans- 
 lated this expression thus : 
 
 " Soon in the splendid hall of Odin we shall drink beer out 
 of the skulls of our enemies." 
 
 The Bishop followed Olaus Wormius, the celebrated 
 Danish antiquary, who had rendered it 
 
468 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " Out of the concave goblets of skulls." 
 
 Thus has the idea prevailed that our Scandinavian sires 
 pictured their departed heroes, in Valhalla, or heaven, 
 drinking out of their enemies' skulls an impression so 
 universal that Peter Pindar said of booksellers that, like 
 the heroes of Valhalla, they drink their wine out of the 
 skulls (the abilities) of authors. But the Scald was mere- 
 ly alluding, in a periphrasis, to the curved horns that 
 formed the drinking-cups of the North, and which grew, 
 branchlike, from the head of the stag. The numberless 
 roundabouts of Saxon poetry Caedmon having eight- 
 een for Noah's ark have this excuse, that they arose 
 sometimes from a violent stimulus. King Knut told a 
 scop, as the Saxons called a poet, who had recited a short 
 poem in his honor: 
 
 "Are you not ashamed to do what none but you has dared 
 to make a short poem on Me ! Unless by to-morrow's dinner 
 you produce above thirty strophes on the same subject, you'll 
 pay for it with your head !" 
 
 The scop, Loftinga, set to work ; and by dinner-time the 
 thrice ten strophes were piping hot ; whereon Knut 
 gave him fifty marks of purified silver. Effectual way to 
 stimulate a flow of periphrasis. 
 
 Some writers are so unwilling to call things by their 
 plain names that they make their style ridiculous by 
 swelling circumlocutions. Even the classical Gray has, 
 for once, too much of this ; as when, speaking of Eton 
 College, where he was at school, he asks 
 
 " Who foremost now delight to cleave 
 With pliant arm thy glassy wave ? 
 
 The captive linnet which enthrall ? 
 What idle progeny succeed 
 To chase the rolling circle's speed, 
 Or urge the flying ball ?" 
 
 To trundle the hoop was not dignified enough for 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 469 
 
 these lines, so the boys must " chase the rolling circle's 
 speed." Dr. Johnson sins in this way so much that his 
 name is proverbial for it. " Sunset " with him is " the 
 gentle coruscations of declining day." At another time 
 he saturates us with this : 
 
 " A skillet is watched on the fire ; we see it simmer with the 
 due degree of heat, and snatch it off" 
 
 when, think ye? when it is about to boil over? By no 
 means; at least you must not be vulgar enough to say 
 so ; you must snatch it off 
 
 " at the moment of projection." 
 
 Gilfillan, idolater of genius, straining to become him- 
 self a genius, calls Amos " the Robert Burns of the proph- 
 ets;" and Peter " the Oliver Goldsmith of the New Tes- 
 tament;" and Job "the Landseer of ancient poetry;" 
 and in a more felicitous way, with accuracy, he calls Jesus 
 " that transcendent poet who died on Calvary." In won- 
 drous bad taste, McQueen, in his book, " The Orator's 
 Touchstone," terms a tall man 
 
 " One who rose in height greatly above the mediocrity of 
 human altitude." 
 
 In short, never use periphrasis unless there be in it keen 
 insight into character, or an overflowing eloquence, or a 
 glow poetic. Thus Shakespeare calls Valeria 
 
 " The moon of Rome ; so chaste she, and so fair ;" 
 or Pope terms Alexander 
 
 " Macedonia's madman," 
 
 an epithet most contradictory of facts; or as Spenser, 
 thus: 
 
 " Here eke that famous golden apple grew 
 For which the Ida3an ladies disagreed." 
 
 Or as Luther is termed 
 
 *The solitary monk that shook the world." 
 
470 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Hugh Miller was styled. "Old Red," or " the Stone- 
 mason of Cromarty." Guizot, the French statesman and 
 historian, terms Luther's revolution 
 
 "The great insurrection of human thought against au- 
 thority." 
 
 Dr. Donne, whose poetic satires are rough in style and 
 disfigured by countless conceits, and who is usually con- 
 sidered the earliest of the metaphysical school of poets, 
 designates the " Robin," prettily, as 
 
 "The household bird with the red stomacher." 
 
 Emile Souvestre, that chaste, elegant, deeply wise 
 writer, in his delightful and instructive tale, " Leaves 
 from a Family Journal," speaks of a man so punctual 
 that he was called 
 
 "The man of all France who best knew what o'clock it 
 was." 
 
 One of the most edifying and, to be sure, rather un- 
 learned of our Bible commentators, is good Matthew 
 Henry; often when two jarring interpretations are of- 
 fered of a passage, not determining by clear argument on 
 the original Greek or Hebrew which is the right mean- 
 ing, but, like a kind, garrulous grandmother of overflow- 
 ing piety, raising good improvements from both the 
 meanings, and mingling a spice of quaintness every now 
 and then as when he makes remark -on the lack of 
 periphrasis with which the folks at Nazareth spoke of 
 Mary the mother of Jesus: 
 
 " They cried, Is not His mother Mary ?" Says Henry, "They 
 did not call her Queen Mary, nor Lady Mary, nor even Mis- 
 tress Mary; but just plain Mary." 
 
 Dr. Johnson's periphrasis on a fishing-rod might have 
 been worse : 
 
 "A rod with a worm at the one end and a fool at the other;" \ 
 or a writer calls a book 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 471 
 
 "Brain preserved in ink;" 
 
 or Erastus Ellsworth, very felicitously, styles " Beauty "- 
 " Daughter of Time, betrothed unto Death ;" 
 
 or, rising still higher, Bourdaloue defines Christ's cru- 
 cifixion 
 
 " Deifice !" 
 
 Gilfillan, in whom are many good things, informs us 
 that 
 
 " Poetry is thought on fire." 
 
 Lady Mary Wortley Montague defined the infidels of 
 her day as the gentlemen who differ very slightly from 
 true believers : 
 
 "The gentlemen who merely take the 'not' out of the Com- 
 mandments (thou shalt steal) and put it in the Creed (thou 
 shalt not believe in God)." 
 
 Sir Henry Wotton calls an embassador 
 
 "An honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his 
 country." 
 
 Wendell Phillips, so classical and interesting as a lect- 
 urer, terms a politician 
 
 "A gentleman who serves God so far as will give no offense 
 to the devil." 
 
 Prior thus writes : 
 
 " Interred beneath this simple stone 
 Lie sauntering Jack and honest Joan. 
 They walked, they ate ; good folks. What then ? 
 Why then they walked and ate again. 
 Without love, hatred, joy, or tear, 
 They led a kind of as it were." 
 
 Sir Robert Walpole assures us that 
 
 " The gratitude of place-hunters is a lively sense of future 
 favors." 
 
472 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 The writer of a recent religious novel styles Green- 
 wood Cemetery 
 
 " Three hundred and sixty acres of human vanity." 
 Or listen to Lord Chatham : 
 
 " Magna Charta, the Petition of Rights, and the Bill of Rights 
 form the Code which I call the Bible of the English Constitu- 
 tion." 
 
 Then mark carefully the different feelings in the dif- 
 ferent speakers' minds that are expressed by the varying 
 periphrases they use; .as when Charles V., of Spain, to 
 the embassador of Henry VIII. : 
 
 " Your master would not give himself such airs were he not 
 surrounded by that herring pond that's round his island." 
 
 Or study the Scotch blacksmith's definition of" meta- 
 physics :" 
 
 " When the pairty wha listens disna ken what the pairty wha 
 speaks means, and when the pairty wha speaks disna ken what 
 he means himsell that is metaphysics." 
 
 After all, however, metaphysics is the discussion of 
 first principles, the assertion of first principles; and these 
 need to be asserted. 
 
 When Curran was keeping his terms in the Temple in 
 Dublin, he attended sometimes a debating club, where 
 the admission fee for the public was sixpence, and whose 
 members were by no means distinguished for their 
 wealth. Curran, not knowing the names of such orators 
 as he was replying to, had to use expressive circumlocu- 
 tions or periphrases : 
 
 " I by no means concur, sir, in the observations of the gen- 
 tleman whose coat is out at the elbows. He has been ably 
 and satisfactorily refuted by the speaker who followed him; 
 and in my opinion he has derived but faint assistance from the 
 gentleman with the hole in his black trousers." 
 
 Turn to Douglas Jerrold, if you want other varieties 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 473 
 
 of this great figure ; for instance, his " Bubbles of a Day" 
 has been styled " the most electric and witty play in the 
 English language ;" he, the originator of the London 
 Punch, will give you plenty of samples. In the admi- 
 rable style of Shakespeare's " Coriolanus," deserving of 
 the closest study, resembling a sky fierce with winter, and 
 all vibrating with the sharp, spear-like coruscations of 
 the Northern Lights, Coriolanus exclaims : 
 
 " Hear you this Triton of the minnows ? 
 Mark you his absolute shall?" 
 
 Burns terms the Haggis famous dish of the Scotch, 
 and deserving of its fame 
 
 " Great chieftain of the pudding race." 
 
 Of the eloquence of Henry Grattan, who endeavored to 
 form himself on Chatham as an orator, one has said that 
 it was 
 
 "A combination of cloud, whirlwind, and flame :" 
 
 a striking representation of the occasional obscurity of 
 his style, and of its higher qualities of rapid force and 
 brilliancy. The speeches of Fisher Ames are remarka- 
 ble specimens of clearness, elegance, force of illustration, 
 and potent reasoning. You will easily detect the peri- 
 phrasis when he says : 
 
 " The rage for theory and system, which would entangle even 
 practical truth in the web of the brain, is the poison of public 
 discussion. One fact is worth two systems." 
 
 Or again, speaking of the American whale-fishers : 
 
 " To that hardy race of men the sea is but a park for hunt- 
 ing its monsters." 
 
 Taking leave of this mode of speech, we are eager to 
 impart to the mind a very deep impression of the ex- 
 ceeding importance of cultivating this figure. Far more 
 could be made of it than is usually done ; as a field-mar- 
 
474 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 shal would take care to be ready for war by having a 
 large park of field artillery ready near his hand. 
 
 CXC. Superfine English demands notice. Very much 
 of it in our day. Thackeray's Cornhill Magazine dis- 
 cusses this topic with abundant wit. An author is "a 
 literary man ;" a farmer is " an agricultural gentleman ;" 
 a bagman is " a commercial gentleman ;" a barrister is 
 "a gentleman of the long robe;" a thief, "a light-finger- 
 ed gentleman;" and a merchant, "a gentleman engaged 
 in mercantile pursuits." A man used to go to law, but 
 nowadays he " institutes legal proceedings ;" he used to 
 go to the doctor, now " he takes medical advice." " I 
 want some cheese," said one in a grocer's store. " That 
 gentleman will serve you," said the master, pointing to 
 a well-curled youth in an apron. Juries are always ad- 
 dressed as " gentlemen of the jury." A genteel friend of 
 Mrs. Brook having directed a letter to a member of the 
 family, and having spelt the name " Brooke," she was 
 asked : " Surely the Brooks do not spell their name with 
 an e?" " No," she answered," but I thought it was more 
 polite." There is, too, the fine English of the store- 
 keeper, who styles himself " the proprietor of the estab- 
 lishment." He that used " to sell by auction," now 
 "submits to public competition;" instead of "giving 
 notice," he " intimates to the public ;" instead of " rais- 
 ing his clerk's wages," he " augments his salary." Some- 
 body going into a store in London to buy half-mourn- 
 ing, was referred by the owner to the " mitigated afflic- 
 tion department." A tradesman of whom some lamp- 
 oil was bought, sent it home " with Mr. Clark's compli- 
 ments and solicitations." One man sells "unsophisti- 
 cated gin ;" and another lets " gentlemanly apartments 
 in close proximity to the Bank." They call floor-cloth 
 " kamptulicon," and soap " typophagon," and an oint- 
 ment to make the hair grow is termed " tricopherous." 
 
 CXCI. Interpretation is entitled to separate mention ; 
 it may or may not accompany parable or allegory; it 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 475 
 
 may have laid on it the main stress of the impression; 
 and might be revived in the pulpit especially. We foist 
 on our audience an instance of our own: 
 
 When Jesus, Victor, rose from gloom, 
 
 A mighty earthquake op'ed the tomb ; 
 
 And where of late their King was laid, 
 
 Two angels stood at feet and head. 
 
 In eager zeal that earthquake came 
 
 Justice was his appalling name ; 
 
 Not frowning, nor on vengeance bent; 
 
 He came with honoring intent; 
 
 Demanding, the atonement o'er, 
 
 With his own hand to burst the door. 
 
 And who these bright and youthful twain, 
 
 The fairest of the angel train, 
 
 Whose smile illum'd that place of death? 
 
 These, O my soul, were Hope and Faith. 
 
 This way of beginning with a secret, which, farther on, 
 you reveal to your audience, will conduce not a little to 
 keep up the interest of your discourse nay, may turn 
 the church-scene into a noble drama. Are there some 
 ministers who never think of this? 
 
 CXCII. Proverbs must not be passed over in our enu- 
 meration proverbs, the philosophy of the common peo- 
 ple : short, pithy, homely sayings, that embody the con- 
 centrated essence of the common people's wisdom. It 
 has been difficult to give a perfect definition of a proverb, 
 so crowded is it with the life of shrewdness and experi- 
 ence ; yet so easy, so negligent is it ; and saucy, as it 
 were. Its excellences are shortness, sense, and salt. It 
 is the wit of one man, the wisdom of thousands, cur- 
 rent on the lips of those who, untaught by books, have 
 learned much from the severe experiences of actual life. 
 
 Singular to say, the Yorubas, an African tribe, that has 
 fto poetry, no rhyme, are rich in proverbs a sure prog- 
 nostic of an elevated future yet in store for them. Take 
 a few specimens : 
 
476 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 "The sword shows no respect for its maker." 
 
 " I almost killed the bird, said the fowler; but Almost never 
 
 made a stew." 
 
 "It is only the water that is spilled; the calabash is not 
 
 broken." 
 
 " He who waits for chance, will have to wait a year." 
 
 " A one-sided story is always right. Ear, listen to the other 
 
 side." 
 
 " Though a man may miss many things, he never misses his 
 
 mouth." 
 
 " The dawn comes twice to no man." 
 
 "He who marries a beauty, marries trouble." 
 
 " The rat said : I am not so angry with him who killed me, 
 
 as with him who dashed me on the ground afterward." 
 " It is easy to cut up a dead elephant." 
 " He is a fool who can't lift an ant yet tries to lift an ele- 
 phant." 
 
 " Covetousness is the mother of unsatisfied desires." 
 "Wherever a man goes to dwell, his character goes with 
 
 him." 
 
 The great abundance of Spanish proverbs, from twen- 
 ty-five to thirty thousand, is one reason, among many 
 others, for believing that much strength lies still to be 
 developed among the fifteen millions of the Peninsular 
 population : strong, active, high-spirited, the most tem- 
 perate in Europe. Study " Don Quixote ;" the humor- 
 ous effect of Sancho Panza's proverbs will illustrate to 
 you to what good use you may put this form of words 
 when quoted deftly. The Italians have very many. The 
 Scotch, too, are rich in proverbs ; witness Andrew Fair- 
 service, in " Waverley." Subjoined is a short collection, 
 taken at random from various sources : 
 
 " Do not look at the vessel, but at what it contains." He- 
 brew. 
 
 " Many wish the tree felled who hope to gather chips by the 
 fall." Thomas Fuller. 
 
 " Put not thy secret into the mouth of the Bosporus, for it 
 will betray it to the ears of the Black Sea." Turkish. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 477 
 
 " He is the best orator who can turn men's ears into eyes." I 
 Arabian. 
 
 " Generally speaking, the rebukes of the just are of more 3 
 value than their praise." Vinet. 
 
 " A false system has for accomplice whoever spares it by / 
 silence." Vinet. 
 
 " The worse part of bad actions is that they make us worse." 
 Vinet. 
 
 " The world is full of fugitives from themselves." Madame 
 Delambert. 
 
 Admirable impressions may be made from the pulpit 
 or in an oration by these proverb-like summaries of great 
 truths. Excellent epiphonemas are they ; that is, sum- 
 mations at the close of a paragraph. No man is fully . 
 equipped for the pulpit who can not supply his own 
 proverbs for himself; as Vinet did in Switzerland. How 
 many preachers never dream of this great point ! Take 
 one or two more proverbs; we refer you, also, to the 
 usual collections of Scottish ones : 
 
 " Harm watch, harm catch." 
 
 "One never has so much need of one's wits as when one I 
 has to do with a fool." Chinese. 
 
 " The unrighteous penny eats up the righteous pound." 
 
 "The mill of God grinds slow, but grinds to powder." 
 
 " God comes with leaden feet, but he strikes with iron hands." 
 
 " The devil's meal is all bran." 
 
 "The man by his word, the ox by his horn." 
 
 " Stay a while, to make an end the sooner." 
 
 "He needs a lang spoon that sups wi' the de'il." 
 
 "The feet of the avenging deities are shod with wool." 
 
 CXCIII. The Third Person deserves special notice. 
 You have heard one say of himself: 
 
 " This child is very honest, I tell you ! It was not he who 
 stole the chickens." 
 
 To put one's self out of doors, and to take a good steady 
 look at one's self, may produce effects not unimportant. 
 
478 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 You are speaking of yourself; you are invoking pity; 
 you say 
 
 " Once stood an oak, strong and rejoicing in its million leaves. 
 A thunderbolt has smitten it. It is withered to the heart. It 
 stands a ruin before you. Such is the man who now speaks 
 to you." 
 
 Manifestly this figure is capable of frequent use. What 
 a touching instance in Shakespeare, when Wolsey, in 
 " Henry VIIL," arriving in his misfortunes at Leicester 
 Abbey, thus bespeaks the abbot : 
 
 " O father Abbot 
 
 An old man, broken with the storms of state, 
 Is come to lay his weary bones among ye; 
 Give him a little earth for charity." 
 
 Studying this figure now, in the light of this inex- 
 pressibly touching passage, say whether it is or is not 
 susceptible of noble uses. 
 
 CXCIV. Odd Rhyme is a weapon not to be despised 
 in rhetorical necessities. For instance, by school-teach- 
 ers. It is a mode of grasping the memory and retaining 
 it for years that is never once used in the text-books of 
 the United States. We may go too far in reforming 
 away old usages like this. Thus, in our school-readers 
 scarcely one of the old masterpieces for reading is allowed 
 to remain. To show what good use rhyme may be put 
 to, we give one instance about " Shall and Will." Hardly 
 a week passes that we do not surprise ourselves quoting 
 these lines, that are of the highest use in keeping us to 
 our duty in the matter: 
 
 " In the first person simply Shall foretells ; 
 In Will a threat or else a promise dwells; 
 Shall in the second or the third doth threat ; 
 Will simply then foretells the future feat." 
 
 Another instance almost as useful refers to the forma- 
 tion of Latin verbs : 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. * 479 
 
 " From O are formed am and em ; 
 From I are ram,, rim, ro, se, and sem. 
 U, us, and rus are formed from urn ; 
 All other parts from Re do come." 
 
 And who but will own how pathetic are the lines that 
 thus begin 
 
 " Thirty days hath September, 
 April, June, and November ?" 
 
 CXCV. Odd Bits of Prose must not be overlooked. 
 It precisely fell in with our inimitable Franklin's humor 
 to deal in such ; as when he used the expression 
 
 "As Honest Richard says." 
 
 In the same spirit we have a small volume by Spurgeon, 
 the deservedly celebrated London preacher a book 
 soaked in Gospel and in Saxon idiom and humor, where- 
 in is a rich variety of odd bits of prose ; racy, and much 
 marked by backbone. 
 
 CXCVI. There is a class of words, to possess which 
 is a glory and charm of our language ; to have named 
 which is one of Shakespeare's brightest glories ; to have 
 little familiarity with which is disgraceful to any one of 
 us; for such words ought to be familiar on our lips as 
 household words. Household words these are they 
 that we mean. We dwell not on this; little attention 
 has ever been urged to it ; the point is extremely sacred ; 
 our beloved English might here be extensively devel- 
 oped. Its Doric branch might be cultivated, too, with ex- 
 cellent effect. Incalculable riches here, in the Scotch ; 
 as Burns, the unsurpassable, can show you. What a 
 word, for instance, is " Auld Lang Syne." A whole vol- 
 ume in itself! Felicitous the man, who, in the crisis of 
 a speech, succeeds in striking forth such an expression. 
 Never will his hearers forget the moment. As in one 
 of the glens on a mountain-side, or on some of the jut- 
 tings of a river's bank, there are certain unequaled points 
 
480 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 of scenery, so is it with such felicities in a mighty lan- 
 guage ; to which new felicities .may ever afresh be added. 
 The writer of whom it can be asserted that he has in- 
 vented a household word has gained one of the brightest 
 laurels. Thus Milton gave us this expression 
 "The sober certainty of waking bliss." 
 
 Chatham in the subjoined, goes to Shakespeare for a 
 household word; it was during the American War of 
 Revolution : 
 
 " But yesterday, and England might have stood against the 
 world; now, none so poor to do her reverence." 
 
 Dryden gives us this 
 
 " Great wits are sure to madness near allied." 
 Pope gives us 
 
 " The proper study of mankind is man." 
 Cowper invents the expression 
 
 " The cup that cheers but not inebriates." 
 
 The student of English can not do better than to collect 
 together all such expressions, as the reading of his whole 
 life will bring before him. 
 
 CXCVII. Pretended Depreciation, as it comes from 
 the heart, very naturally deserves admission ; as when 
 Pat says of his sweetheart that she is 
 
 "The thief of the world;" 
 
 or when he assures her that she has been the death of 
 many a man. 
 
 CXCVIII. Rhetorical Use of the Past, a figure of which 
 a master of pathos can make dexterous use in the pulpit. 
 Exhibit to one of us your hearer laid on his dying-bed ; 
 or under summons before the bar of doom ; and stand- 
 ing there, with God full and clear in front. The past un- 
 questionably is rich in scenes of moral tragedy or of the 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 481 
 
 humorous, which offer themselves to the orator; and he 
 is flat and tame who never avails his cause of them. Why 
 dost thou never make schoolboy days return? or our 
 time of training at our mother's knee ? or those minutes 
 when the family was gathered at our mother's death- 
 bed ? Thus continually Christian oratory wields figures 
 that are most admirably adapted to it. Listen to the 
 wise statements in Bascom's work on " The Philosophy 
 of Rhetoric:" 
 
 " Revelation enlarges the sphere of conscience, not by arbi- 
 trary commands, but by bringing to light new and fundamental 
 facts, in themselves inclusive of old duties, and imposing fresh 
 ones. Religion of necessity thus involves and includes the 
 highest morality; because its peculiar injunctions are, in their 
 consequences, more weighty than any other; because the mi- 
 nor duties of man to man it enforces from a new and higher 
 stand-point a broader apprehension of the relations from 
 which they spring and the results to which they lead ; and be- 
 cause in its own promises and threatenings, and the power with 
 which it arouses the affections, it adopts and reinvigorates the 
 moral law. There thus arises sacred eloquence the eloquence 
 of a Christian pulpit, immeasurably superior in the motives and 
 emotions with which it urges the mind and heart. The imme- 
 diate consequences of virtue and vice are lost in their more 
 permanent results; the breadth of eternity is given to action; 
 the grace of God stoops to bless man to his utmost capacity; 
 the justice of God walls in and pursues his transgressions. In 
 weight, terror, sublimity, joy, and hope, no motives can for an 
 instant compare with those which in sacred eloquence inspire 
 and overpower the mind. Virtue is caught up and inwrapped 
 with the ineffable glory of God ; the virtuous man is caught up 
 and inwrapped in the glory of an incarnate Christ." 
 
 CXCIX. Rhetorical Use of the Future. A weapon 
 this capable of very abundant, solemn, appropriate use. 
 Let the pulpit orator muse on it much. On it we pur- 
 posely avoid saying more ; laying merely before you an ex- 
 ample, translated by us from the French of Victor Hugo: 
 
 H H 
 
482 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 " THE END OF THE JOURNEY. A VOICE FROM THE TOMB- 
 STONES. 
 
 I. 
 
 * Mortal, wherever hastens on thy path, 
 
 Whoever thou mayst be that passest by, 
 By pain or joy impelPd, by love or wrath, 
 
 Here ends thy journey here thy pride shall lie. 
 
 ii. 
 " Upon this broken marble rest a while, 
 
 Like weary seaman on a wreck-strewn shore; 
 We, too, have felt life's passion, pain, and guile; 
 The burden and the strife oppress no more. 
 
 in. 
 " These stones around impressive speak to thee ; 
 
 Escape there's none, by iron circle bound ; 
 Doth not presaging thought already see 
 
 Thy name engraven o'er some fated mound ? 
 
 IV. 
 
 " Press not these heaps with thoughtless, haughty foot; 
 
 As low as mine thy lofty head thou'lt lay ; 
 Each hour some heart grows faint, some lip grows mute ; 
 Know'st thou the blast that bears thy dust away ? 
 
 v. 
 " Farewell ! But to thy spirit oft be told 
 
 What mystic secrets 'neath these tombstones lie. 
 A few dry bones ? A spadeful of dark mould ? 
 Nothing, perchance ? Thine all Eternity ! 
 
 VI. 
 
 " When next assails temptation's fiery hour, 
 
 To siren pleasures do not thou give way. 
 Resist ! Look up ! Invoke Jehovah's power. 
 Think thou shalt die; revive; and live for aye." 
 
 CC. Ascription of Rationality to the, Lower Animals. 
 The finest example of this in literature, known to us, is 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 483 
 
 in a piece by the German, Chamisso a commentary, un- 
 intentionally, in defense of the speaking of Balaam's ass. 
 To imagine that the animal literally spoke, in a ration- 
 ality of its own, is to give to the Christian cause a 
 weakness that would be indefensible. It was an angel 
 that spoke; no power of speech was ever imparted to 
 any mere animal. It is, however, of value to show and 
 to feel that speech can seem to issue from animal lips, 
 yet without offending good taste. All the better for the 
 Bible cause that Chamisso had no recollection, at the 
 moment, of the Bible incident. For a horse, dog, or ass 
 to seem to speak, or to have speech ascribed to them, 
 does not in the least violate the aesthetic. 
 
 " The steed seemed to answer, the lightning-eyed, 
 * I've brought you his message !' Then reeled and died." 
 
 (See poem on pages 200, 201.) We invite all our readers 
 to take the same reverential position as to the remarkable 
 but very defensible case of Balaam, which we take* and 
 defend. Not doth the sacred narrative require us to hold 
 literal speech by the bodily organs and by the intellect of 
 the animal but speech by an angelic minister, who could 
 speak as easily from an animal's mouth as from any other 
 place. Then weigh our argument from literature and 
 from figures an argument entirely new. The cry of ridi- 
 cule based on the narrative in Numbers xxii., 22-35, is 
 hostile to one of the widest and deepest tendencies in 
 literature and in man's nature ; for in literature, in every 
 nation where a literature exists, the lower animals have, 
 rhetorically, speech and rationality ascribed to them 
 as ^Esop, Burns, and Fontaine show you ; and so to 
 cloak an angel under an animal's guise was to make 
 use of a chief standing literary mode. Nay, to go even 
 deeper, this tendency, to ascribe figuratively speech to 
 the lower creatures, is fostered by the aptitude in man 
 to take these creatures under his kindly care, -and to 
 surround his borne by protection extended to them ; 
 
484 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 as when Alexander took his Bucephalus with him in 
 many a campaign, or when Sir Walter Scott had his 
 dog Maida lying at his feet in his study. How very 
 much of the look of home would a farmstead lose from 
 about it, if animals, so eloquently called " domestic," 
 were not continually round the house? Read Burns's 
 " Salutation to his Old Mare on New-year's-day Morn- 
 ing," as if that clarling old personage were indeed a priv- 
 ileged partner in his dearest history and in his heart. We 
 maintain that our topic of figures shows that this pas- 
 sage in Numbers is in harmony with reason, with kindly 
 feeling, with genial civilization, and with one of the old- 
 est, widest, most abiding tendencies in all literature. 
 
 CCI. Nicknames demand a place among figures. We 
 well know that something is sought for, and may be 
 gained, by calling a certain city Goth'am, and its inhab- 
 itants Gothamites. To be s*ure, pathos itself and indig- 
 nation are not themselves figures ; but those changes in 
 language which are made for the purpose of using as 
 weapons to produce such feelings with, these are figures ; 
 and strong for war is he who hath them in his armory. 
 Edinburgh is lovingly termed not only " Modern Athens," 
 but " Auld Reekie ;" just as his veterans named him " the 
 Little Corporal," when Napoleon led them to destiny 
 in truth, hurled them on the sharp edge and pitiless flint 
 of the rock. On the other side of the struggle, the Prus- 
 sian soldier Blucher gained for himself the epithet " Mar- 
 shal Forwards," and England's Wellington "the Iron 
 Duke ;" while in a very different sphere and very influen- 
 tial over all Scotland, Dr. Thomas Guthrie, so sainted 
 and . so humorous, was hailed and was dear as " Lang 
 Tarn Guthrie." Even appellations that seem far too fa- 
 miliar are intended to express affection, as in the popular 
 names of states and cities of our country : Virginia being 
 "the Old Dominion;" Rhode Island, " Little Rhody;" 
 Ohio, ".the Buckeye State ;" Kentucky, " the Corncrack- 
 er;" Delaware, " the Blue Hen's Chicken;" Wisconsin, 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 485 
 
 " the Badger State ;" while Washington is, or was, " the 
 City of Magnificent Distances ;" and Boston is " the 
 Hub." The description of a country is not a national 
 name : thus North Britain is a description, Scotland 
 is a national name ; the United States of the Neth- 
 erlands is a description, Belgium is a national name. 
 The United States is a mere description : our Fatherland 
 needs a national name ; it ought to be deemed as having 
 now reached its majority ; it is high time to be baptized. 
 
 CCII. The Doric to that let us attend. All through 
 this work have we done so. The Scottish of Allan 
 Ramsay, Robert Burns, and Sir Walter is as mighty 
 a thing to our English, as is to the Attic Greek the 
 dialect of Theocritus, with its broad a's, and its rural 
 tones and odors; while we think of Jeanie Deans, and 
 Eddie Ochiltrie, and Baillie Nicol Jarvie, and Cuddie 
 Headrig, and Burns's Daisy that will never fade, and 
 bonnie Doon that will ever sing and brighten in the 
 summer beam ; nay, we hear that national war-ode the 
 best war-lyric ever sung " Scots wha hae wi' Wallace 
 bled" that came on the soul of the great Plowman like 
 winter* lightnings, that are born from out of midnight 
 and storm-rains. So, too, will you get your soul-saturated 
 by nature, by your paying a visit, not always to the vil- 
 lage, but to the clachan ; or by roaming through the 
 glen or the strath; or by a sail on the loch, where, high 
 over you, the mountain eagle poises its wide wings, and 
 meditates, king-like, amid its flight. 
 
 CCIII. Impersonation, or Character-acting, is a figure 
 that requires and admits of great ability on the part of 
 speaker or writer: the person introduced speaking as 
 shall become him. Why not introduce Abraham ad- 
 dressing the fires of Sodom ; or Moses the passions of 
 Pharaoh ; or Elijah the priests of Baal ; or even Jesus 
 the tempests of the lake, or the sins and crimes and 
 woes of the world ? Or Death or War might declaim, so 
 as to thrill every heart. Or any noted historic charac- 
 
486 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 
 ter. It is astonishing that any one's conscience can per- 
 mit him to fill a pulpit, and yet let that pulpit be life- 
 less. Isa. i., II, 24. Almost a volume might be written 
 on this. 
 
 CCIV. The Materialistic is a figure of great value, no- 
 bly common in the original Hebrew of the Old Testa- 
 ment a moulder of style from which might be obtained 
 invaluable influences by the preachers of the day, and 
 through them by the literature of the age. It is the 
 Hebrew of the Old Testament of which we speak. It 
 is so strenuous and muscular and underived and wild and 
 unexhausted. Nay, even those who are so unblest as to 
 be ignorant of Hebrew are quite capable of studying 
 Professor Alexander of Princeton on the Psalms, and 
 will unite with us in holding the vast importance of 
 the Hebrew as a squrce of style. Shame to the Gospel 
 orator who takes not a glimpse of Hebrew once a day. 
 
 Very frequently the wild scent evaporates in our com- 
 mon English version, as would from the mountain heath- 
 er the odor if it were carried down to the Lowlands. 
 Consult Alexander on the Psalms, and delight thyself in 
 a hundred instances. In Psalm li., 17, we read : 
 
 " The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit ; a broken and a 
 contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise." 
 
 In the Hebrew it reads thus : 
 
 "The sacrifices of God a broken spirit; a heart broken and 
 crushed, O God, thou wilt not despise." 
 
 Notice the absence of the verb " are ;" learn how you 
 may invigorate your style by omitting verbs ; a fact too 
 little known. Then listen to Alexander : 
 
 "There is great significance and beauty in what seems at 
 first to be a solecism in the language of the first clause. ' The 
 sacrifice of God is a broken spirit ' might seem to be a more cor- 
 rect expression ; but it would have failed to suggest the strik- 
 ing and important thought that one such heart or spirit is 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 487 
 
 equivalent to all the various and complicated sacrifices of the 
 ritual." 
 
 Then again : 
 
 " The use of the word contrite in the English versions mars 
 the beauty of the metaphor, because that term is confined to 
 the dialect of theology, whereas the Latin contritum, from which 
 it was borrowed, as well as the original expression, exactly cor- 
 responds to broken, both in its literal and figurative usage." 
 
 A reader quite void of the grand old original may ob- 
 tain inestimable benefits, of a literary sort, from the 
 Princeton Professor; as any man may astound himself 
 by reading the Psalms with Alexander in hand. Be kind 
 enough to yourself to buy him to-morrow. 
 
 COY. The Singular Number is often charm and 
 strength. Of this too is the Hebrew full. In Psalm 
 lv., 6, we have this in our version : 
 
 "And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove ; for then would 
 I fly away, and be at rest." 
 
 But thus reads the original before us : 
 
 "And I said, Who will give me a pinion like the dove? I will 
 fly away, and be at rest." 
 
 In Psa. Ixviii., 15, you see this in the Hebrew: 
 
 "A mount of God, Mount Bashan! A mount of peaks is 
 Mount Bashan! Why will ye watch? Hills! Ridges! The 
 hill God hath desired for His dwelling! Yea, Jehovah will in- 
 habit it forever." 
 
 Says Alexander: > 
 
 "A mount of peaks or ridges, not a detached mountain, but 
 a chain with many lofty summits, forming the northern boundary 
 of Bashan. At the same time, the expressions of this verse 
 would necessarily suggest the idea of great states or kingdoms 
 of which each mountain is the standing symbol." 
 
 The " hills," the " ridges," are the mountains of the 
 heathen world, spoken of here as watching, with hostility 
 
488 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 that Hill of Zion and of Bashan whereon God specially 
 loves to dwell on earth, and sit throned. 
 
 CCVI. Double Nouns and other Double Words are 
 figurative usages that may often be met with, yet which 
 we have never seen specified, or dreamed of, as figures. 
 Luther, in his admirable version of the Bible, presents to 
 us a specimen. The silver pieces coined from the aton- 
 ing blood are called in the English translation " the 
 price of blood/' Luther, in his mighty German, calls 
 them "blood -money" (" blut-gelt ") a double noun. 
 Very many are in German ; that language owes a very 
 great deal of its force to this usage ; our language is as 
 capable of adopting it. It has so done in the unsurpas- 
 sable word "-Father-land." Burns speaks of patriot- 
 warriors, striding, for their country, through death to 
 victory, as being " red-wat-shod " an adjective that was 
 greatly admired by Dr. Chalmers. We have translated 
 " The Child's Ascension," a piece with two specimens in 
 it, by Charles Loyson, the celebrated P&re Hyacinthe : 
 
 " Flashing from heaven's height 
 
 An Angel's wings a cradle half enshade, 
 Where, pausing on his glorious flight, 
 
 He gazed upon a child in slumber laid ; 
 In whose young form, so heavenly calm and bright, 
 
 In sweetest smiles of love and peace arrayed, 
 He deemed he saw himself reflected there, 
 
 Like a star mirrored in a fountain fair. 
 
 "The witchery of infant gentleness 
 
 Held the Immortal raptured o'er the place. 
 How sacred seemed that slumber in his eyes; 
 
 The breathing from those lips of roses * 
 Sounded like whisper'd music of the skies. 
 
 On the pure brow what innocence reposes! 
 A holy halo lies 
 
 On the rich ringlets floating playfully; 
 While glints of lustre rest 
 
 Upon the babe's soft hands of snowy die, 
 Clasped peacefully upon a lily breast. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 489 
 
 " The Angel smiled this form of love to see ; 
 But o'er his brow a shade passed suddenly ; 
 He turned aside, a long, deep sigh to heave : 
 * That little breast is doomed to grieve 
 
 'Neath tempests yet to be ! 
 
 Heart-storms that bend the oak and crush the flower ! 
 Shall hiss the arrow of misfortune's hour ! 
 By many a deadly pang shalt thou be tried, 
 Nor wit nor virtue turn those poison'd darts aside. 
 Those soft shut eyes shall ope with many a tear. 
 The breast on which such placid slumber lies 
 Shall heave in earthquake-shocks of crime or fear.' 
 
 "A holy grief the Angel's spirit moved; 
 
 Was it a tear he shed ? 
 His eye, petitioning, sought the Christ he loved. 
 
 Messiah saw and answered. On the bed, 
 O Seraph, thy kind arms have pressed. 
 His eyelids and his lip he kissed. 
 
 * Be happy !' he exclaimed. The child is dead !" 
 
 CCVII. Celerity constitutes a figure, as to Place, or as 
 to Time. As if we were to say, " This very night you 
 should buy a copy of ' Plutarch's Lives.' " It is plain 
 to be seen that fleetness is a point of consideration that 
 can not but be essentially rhetorical. Turn to Psa. Ixiv., 
 7 ; in the original it thus reads : 
 
 " But God has shot them with an arrow suddenly ! Theirs 
 are the wounds." 
 
 By an abrupt but beautiful transition he describes the 
 tables as completely turned upon the enemy. Just as 
 they are about to shoot an arrow suddenly at the right- 
 eous, God shoots an arrow suddenly at, them. The 
 wounds which they intended to inflict on others have 
 become their own. When they thought to strike others, 
 they were struck themselves. Such words as " Quick !" 
 " Haste thee !" " Delay not !" are, often, the very gun- 
 powder that oratory uses to speed its bullets withal. 
 
490 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Grains of which powder may, separately, be very minute 
 and of very small worth, yet may they still be grains of 
 gunpowder, on which the very fate of a battle may turn 
 an illustration not ill fitted to exhibit to you the po- 
 sition which, in literature, figures of speech, at their low- 
 est even, occupy; and which demand the care of the 
 greatest chiefs of intellect. 
 
 Celerity in the movement of the mind, when it passes 
 from the outward emblem to the inward feeling, is often 
 manifested by leaving the application unuttered ; as in 
 the expressive saying of the Scottish Celts, born orators: 
 
 " I will add a stone to your cairn ;" 
 
 which means, " I will honor and bless your 'memory ;" a 
 cairn being a heap of stones over the dead, a heap which 
 the country people thought it unlucky to pass without 
 throwing an additional stone on the heap. Exceedingly 
 emphatic the leaving the mental interpretation unex- 
 pressed. Let this practice be often yours. 
 
 CCVIII. Epithetic, the use of striking epithets, not 
 nicknames, may impart so characteristic an expression 
 to an author's productions as to call for a special place 
 as a figure. Our professional occupation brings old Ho- 
 mer before us so continually that we are led to think of 
 epithets almost every hour of the day. To us his cata- 
 logue of the ships is exquisite ; while we visit, with rapt 
 step and rapt gaze, Eleon with many a highland forest ; 
 and Mykalessus, roomy for the choral dance ; and Arn6, 
 plenteous with its bunches of the grape ; and Thesbe, 
 abounding in doves. If it be true, what is said, that a 
 certain college in our land purposely omits the Cata- 
 logue of the Achaean and Trojan army, in Book Second, 
 from the opening examination of students who are of- 
 fering themselves to enter, that college convicts itself 
 of a great mistake, for no more poetic production ever 
 came from the mind of bard; so much so, that the epi- 
 thets there often moisten our eyes with very tears of 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 49 1 
 
 ecstasy. Every one who would cultivate his style on 
 every side should foster epithetic power, and should do 
 so specially in the pages of Homer, the unsurpassable. 
 The blind old singer has thus forced the feeling on us, 
 if it be perchance somewhat illogical, that though epi- 
 thets may be absorbed among figures in general, yet 
 are they capable of imparting such a tone, so peculiar, 
 that nothing else can ; and we are constrained to classify 
 the epithetic as a capability in language a capability 
 that is very distinctive. And no one can indoctrinate 
 you so deeply into this great point as Homer is able to 
 do when he chants of Zeus, the Cloud-compeller ; or of 
 the sea, thousand-laughtered. Or you can study this 
 great point in the recent epithet of one, who, of Shake- 
 speare in his thirty-four plays, calls him " the Genius of 
 the British Isles." 
 
 CCIX. Passing over from the Literal to the Figura- 
 tive is a passage at arms that may prove itself exqui- 
 sitely beautiful. In Psa. Ixv., 7, it is written of Jehovah : 
 
 " Stilling the roar of seas, the roar of their waves, the tumult 
 of nations." 
 
 Says Alexander : 
 
 " There is here a beautiful transition from the literal to the 
 figurative use of the same language. It is true, in the strict 
 sense, that God stills the raging of the seas ; but it is also true 
 that He subdues the commotion of human societies and states, 
 of which the sea is a natural and common emblem ; hence he 
 adds in express terms, * the tumult of nations.' " 
 
 It was in a humorous mood that a minister, when he 
 was asked what he had in his carpet-bag on a Saturday, 
 replied 
 
 " Dried tongue." 
 He had two sermons in his valise. 
 
 In the invaluable tract by the Rev. Dr. George S. 
 Mott, Presbyterian pastor of Flemington, we meet this 
 "passing over," in his " Nurse Them at Home:" 
 
492 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 "There is an old saying, 'Hearth-fires keep off wolves.' If 
 children spend their evenings in the streets, they are exposed 
 to wolves. Make home attractive, and then the howling wolves 
 of temptation will be kept at bay." 
 
 CCX. Threat is a form of figure that arises from a 
 minatory state of mind ; than which mental condition 
 there is no other more prolific of figures. .That minatory 
 state itself may arise from love, by no means from dis- 
 like or indifference ; thus lately we heard a pastor, most 
 faithful and affectionate, say to his flock : 
 
 " Let such here as live in known sin, while they are well aware 
 what their duty is, and what their God demands from them, re- 
 member that at the judgment-day I, however unwilling, will be 
 compelled to be a witness against them." 
 
 CCXI. Repose. Be such the figure that closes this 
 chapter. Far from skillful is he in eloquence who is not 
 both skillful and frequent in this. The great outbursts 
 of oratory demand to be relieved by rests of argument, 
 of mere statement, of pity, of meditation, of whispering 
 awe ; like a pause before the thunder breaks before the 
 roar and shriek of winds. Permit us to fancy that a pul- 
 pit orator, after a vehement storm of appeal against 
 vices, paused into a whisper and said : 
 
 " O thou Brow of the Dead, how calm, sad, and meditative 
 thou art !" 
 
 What immense force in such a whisper ! 
 
 As we will not again in this volume make reference to 
 Demosthenes, let us in closing this chapter, our last but 
 two, speak of his death. His hour came to die. The 
 old man had taken refuge in a temple, from tyrants and 
 assassins. A troop of soldiers surrounded the gates, un- 
 der the command of one Archias, a stage-player. " Come 
 forth !" they cried, with brutal mockeries, which he re- 
 garded not. Their leader entering, went up to him, try- 
 ing to allure him out by fair promises. " Only wait a 
 little," said Demosthenes, " till I send my last wishes to 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 493 
 
 those at home." Retiring to the shrine, he spread parch- 
 ment before him, as if he meant to write ; he put the pen 
 in his mouth, and gnawed it for some time, as if medi- 
 tating ; and then, covering his head, sat reclining. Soon 
 the poison concealed in the pen began to work ; he un- 
 covered his head, looked up in the face of Archias, and 
 said : " Now you may act the part of Creon in the play, 
 and cast out this carcass of mine unburied. O gracious 
 Neptune, I quit thy temple alive ; but the Macedonians 
 would not have scrupled to profane it with murder." 
 By this time he could not stand. He desired them to 
 support him as he staggered toward the door. In at- 
 tempting to reach it, he fell beside the altar, and died 
 with a groan. 
 
494 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 PART NINETEENTH. 
 
 Bulk. Classicality. Rally ing-cries. Appeal to Knowl- 
 edge. Salutation. Reverse. Specification of Place. 
 Specification of Time. Cry of Warning. Familiarity. 
 Obverse. Seven Great Points : English Language not 
 Half Developed ; Praise of the Homely ; Sources of 
 Figures ; Shakespeare's Three Giant Faults ; One Hun- 
 dred Figures yet Undiscovered ; Ballads Lauded; Sug- 
 gestiveness. Medley, Number Second and Last. 
 
 CCXII. BULK. A queer name for a queer figure. As 
 it may be forced in, violently, as Onomatopy, we give to 
 it very few lines. It is a way of representing the uncouth 
 bulk of objects by the clumsiness or the size and num- 
 ber of the words. Virgil's line on Polyphemus, the one- 
 eyed giant, is well known : 
 
 "Monstrumhorrendum,mforme,ingens,cui lumen ademptum;" 
 of which, says Bryce : 
 
 " This line is composed with wonderful skill. The spondees, 
 the equal caesuras, the frequent elisions, and the harsh sounds 
 of the words, most admirably express the nature of the mon- 
 strous Polyphemus." 
 
 From Milton, the heroic and indomitable, we cull 
 these : 
 
 " Leviathan, which God of all His works 
 Created hugest that swim the ocean stream." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 495 
 
 Again, of Death : 
 
 " The other shape, 
 
 If shape it might be called, that shape had none 
 'Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb." 
 
 CCXIII. Classicality. The use of a classical expres- 
 sion makes a fine figure. We catalogue this as a Classic- 
 ality, if that be the right word. When you use it, take 
 care that the expression be familiar. We favor you with 
 an instance from Sir Walter Raleigh's " History of the 
 World," with which he sums up his volume ; after so 
 many a scene of battle-wreck and beheadal had passed 
 before him : 
 
 " O eloquent, just, and mightie Death ! whom none could ad- 
 vise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast 
 done-; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast 
 cast out of the world and despised ; thou hast drawne together 
 all the farre-stretched greatnesse, all the pride, crueltie, and 
 ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow 
 words, Hie jacet." 
 
 Think of this brilliant man writing these words, and wait- 
 ing for the headsman's axe every uncertain hour ! 
 
 CCXIV. Rallying-cries make a figurative usage that 
 is rapid and arousing. For a splendid example read 
 again and again Judges vii., 18-20. If you are so lethar- 
 gic as not to turn to the passages, you will lose a great 
 deal. One example, we dare not call it uninspired, you 
 will find in the address of the Bruce to his soldiers at 
 the battle of Bannockburn ; by Burns : 
 
 "Now's the day, and now's the hour; 
 See the front o' battle lour : 
 See approach proud Edward's power 
 Chains and slavery !" 
 
 Such a figure as this would, from the pulpit, suit admi- 
 rably in a moment of true enthusiasm. We hear it often 
 from the Methodists ; sometimes with genuine effect. If 
 
496 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 they have it too frequently, which we assert not, the 
 Presbyterians have it too seldom. Cries war-cries and 
 peace-cries, and cries of triumph and jubilee would come 
 nobly from lips all aglow with God. A good deal more 
 of holy passion, if you please. Lay much to heart, this 
 subject of figures. Give us a rallying-cry now and then. 
 The soldiers of the King are soon to go into battle ; and 
 that, one peculiarly trying. 
 
 CCXV. Appeal to Knowledge is often used. Take 
 Southey's well remembered from his " Battle of Blen- 
 heim :" 
 
 "With fire and sword the country round was wasted far and 
 
 wide, 
 
 And many a hapless mother, there, and new-born baby, died ; 
 But things like that, you know, must be 
 At every famous victory." 
 
 CCXVI. Reverse. This is a use of words and of the 
 ideas which they convey that is adapted to leave a very 
 vivid impression. Of Hazlitt, the opinion prevailed that 
 he was incapable of appreciating a writer until the writer 
 was dead : therefore Professor Wilson affirmed that Haz- 
 litt reversed the proverb, and thought a dead ass better 
 than a living lion. Mark how cleverly Christopher North 
 reverses the words of the proverb. So it was a smart 
 hit of the Yankee, who said that if something did not 
 turn up, he would turn up something. 
 
 CCXVIL Specification of Place is our name for that 
 use of locality which brings it intensely before us. This 
 figure is often joined to CCXVIII., Specification of Time. 
 Creasy thus begins his account of the first fifteen of his 
 " Decisive Battles of the World :" 
 
 " Two thousand three hundred and forty years ago, a council 
 of Athenian officers was summoned on the slope of one of the 
 mountains fhat look over the plain of Marathon, on the eastern 
 coast of Attica." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 497 
 
 When he comes to speak of his tenth battle, or contest 
 the defeat of the Spanish Armada he thus commences, 
 availing himself once more of place ; and we forthwith 
 feel the effect : 
 
 "On the afternoon of the iQth of July, A.D. 1588, a group of 
 English captains was collected at the Bowling Green, on the 
 Hoe, at Plymouth, whose equals have never before or since 
 been brought together, even at that favorite mustering-place of 
 the heroes of the British navy." 
 
 Mark, too, the effect of the specific statement of time in 
 both of these quotations. 
 
 Taine, in his very able " History of English Litera- 
 ture," gives us the departure of the Normans from France 
 to conquer England. How graphic do place and time 
 help to make the scene : 
 
 "On the 2yth of September, 1066, at the mouth of the Somme, 
 there was a great sight to be seen : four hundred large sailing 
 vessels, more than a thousand transports, and sixty thousand 
 men were on the point of embarking. The sun shone splen- 
 didly after long rain ; trumpets sounded ; the cries of this armed 
 multitude rose to heaven ; on the far horizon, on the shore, on 
 the wide-spreading river, on the sea, which opens out thence 
 broad and shining, masts and sails extended like a forest; the 
 enormous fleet set out wafted by the south wind." 
 
 CCXIX. Cry of Warning is a figure intensely rhetor- 
 ical ; as when couched in such words as " Hush !" " Be- 
 ware !" " Listen !" You have laughed at the story told 
 so cleverly by Paul Louis Courier (1772-1825) of his ter- 
 rific adventure in Calabria. He and a young friend had 
 to spend the night in a loft, to which they had to mount 
 seven or eight feet by a ladder, in a charcoal-burner's 
 hut, in a very savage part of the country. Early in the 
 night Courier heard the man and wife consulting togeth- 
 er: "Well, come now, must we kill them both?" The 
 wife replied, " Yes." Just before daybreak, Courier saw 
 their host, barefooted, with an immense knife between 
 
 I I 
 
498 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 his teeth, and his wife behind him, steal into the garret. 
 The woman, in a low voice, shading a lamp with her 
 hand, said to her husband, " Softly ! go softly !" I quote 
 Courier's own words : 
 
 " Approaching the head of the bed, where my poor young 
 friend, with his throat bare, was lying, with one hand the mon- 
 ster grasped the knife, and with the other he seized a ham 
 which hung from the ceiling, cut a slice, and retired as he had 
 
 It was a false alarm but a mighty one while it lasted. 
 The two victims, who were so ruthlessly doomed to die, 
 were two fat chickens for the travelers' breakfast. 
 
 We have preferred this illustration, in order to guard 
 you once more against all sham in the figurative. Let 
 every figure you use be expressive, naturally and honest- 
 ly, of the passion fitted for and properly belonging to the 
 idea that rules and should rule and monopolize you at 
 the moment. Be severely honest and simple. If you 
 are not, you will, sooner or later, be sure to make a fool 
 of yourself what the Scotch, in their inimitable Doric, 
 call a gowk or gomeril. Nay, some scornful providence 
 may come down on you ; as once on a time, just as a 
 young preacher had exploded a most astounding para- 
 graph, a jackass at the church door began a lengthy and 
 very competitive bray; and an irreverent hearer cried 
 out, 
 
 " One at a time, gentlemen, if you please." 
 
 However, for all that, a cry of warning is precisely the 
 thing, if it be honest. 
 
 CCXX. Familiarity is legitimate and excellent at the 
 suitable place. We mean something different from the 
 homely. You meet with it precisely in * the following, 
 from stalwart Luther's " Table-Talk :" 
 
 "When Jesus Christ was born, He doubtless cried and wept 
 like other children, and His mother tended Him as other moth- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 499 
 
 ers tend their children. As He grew up He was submissive to 
 His parents, and waited on them, and carried His supposed fa- 
 ther's dinner to him ; and when He came back, Mary no doubt 
 often said, * My dear little Jesus, I'm so glad to see you again.' " 
 
 To us this is inimitable. But be on your guard, especial- 
 ly in prayer. There is a familiarity that is childlike, and 
 is delightful ; but there is another sort of it that is child- 
 ish and irreverent. Particularly, never say laughable 
 things in the pulpit. Dr. Thomas Guthrie, the most 
 genial and victorious wit of his day on the platform, 
 never once, in all his life, excited a smile from the pulpit. 
 It is utterly vain for any one, therefore, to excuse his pul- 
 pit jocularities and buffooneries on the ground that he is 
 a natural-born humorist. Not half so much so as Thom- 
 as Guthrie was. But that great man respected God's 
 pulpit far too much to smirk and laugh there. Almighty 
 God does not mean to keep a jester in His court. 
 
 CCXXI. The Obverse is a figure prominently brought 
 forward by Minto, in his able volume on " English Prose 
 Literature," page 119: 
 
 " Macaulay deals very largely in what is technically known 
 as obverse statement; and gives it a peculiar abrupt point, by 
 denying the negative before affirming the positive. Before af- 
 firming that a certain form of government prevailed in one 
 tract of country, he affirms that it did not prevail in another. 
 
 "As another example, take the following passage from a dis- 
 quisition on the style of Johnson: 
 
 " ' Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreea- 
 ble, when the manner, though vicious, is natural. Few readers, 
 for example, would be willing to part with the mannerism of 
 Milton or of Burke. But a mannerism which does not sit easy 
 on the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle, and 
 which can be sustained only by constant effort, is always of- 
 fensive, and such is the mannerism of Johnson.' 
 
 " There is a good deal of antithetic pungency in thus taking 
 the obverse first. We expect from the general tone of his re- 
 marks that he means to condemn the mannerism of Johnson, 
 
500 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 and we start with surprise when he abruptly declares that 
 ' mannerism is pardonable.' What ? flashes across our minds. 
 Johnson's mannerism ? We eagerly read on, and are pleasing- 
 ly reassured when we see the qualification 'when the manner, 
 though vicious, is natural.' Nor is this the only startle we re- 
 ceive in the course of the short paragraph ; there is another 
 shock in reserve to keep our attention awake. We have been 
 called away from some minute particulars about Johnson to this 
 general principle, and the illustration of it from remote quarters. 
 At the end of the paragraph we are brought abruptly back to 
 Johnson * and such is the mannerism of Johnson.' Many 
 writers would have executed neither of these brilliant turns. 
 Many would have begun by saying that the mannerism of 
 Johnson is unpardonable, and would then have proceeded to 
 state why it is so ; and then, perhaps, by way of counter illus- 
 tration, would have explained when mannerism is pardonable. 
 Macaulay's order of statement would thus have been inverted; 
 and the contrast, brought in by an equable transition, would 
 have produced a much less flashing effect." 
 
 One other example, much more familiar to you, will be 
 sufficient as proof that this mode of arrangement is well 
 fitted to tell, impressively, at the bar, in a public political 
 meeting, or in the pulpit. The writer we quote from 
 begins with the very opposite of what he wishes to 
 prove : 
 
 " O woman ! in our hours of ease, 
 Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, 
 And variable as the shade 
 By the light quivering aspen made 
 When pain and anguish wring the brow, 
 A ministering angel thou !" 
 
 A few thoughts, really great, connected with our theme 
 as a whole, must, as we lovingly prepare to say adieu to 
 our subject, receive notice. Lovingly; for it is far be- 
 yond the force of words to express how intense, delicate, 
 fresh the enjoyments have been that we have received 
 in our study of this strictly defined yet very wide theme 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 501 
 
 a theme that has revealed to us many a capability, 
 many a beauty, in this great English language of ours. 
 
 i. Our English language is but half developed ; it is a 
 millionaire, who on his vast estate has a hundred mines 
 of gold that are only half wrought. There are innumer- 
 able words that must be termed " old-new." For in- 
 stance, by the employment of the prefixes en and be, the 
 most felicitous words, old yet new, offer themselves to 
 you : such as " bedawn," " enhome," " bechrist," " en- 
 star," " bemorn," " enclay." The use of such words will 
 favor your hearers with a strong surprise ; and yet they 
 are so formed out of the oldest materials that they will 
 carry with them their own explanation. Try it. You 
 will be delighted. But say many, " These words are not 
 in the dictionary." What writer on botany would think 
 it necessary to catalogue in a book all the buds and blos- 
 soms of the next May-day ? Very far from necessary is 
 it to have all the words of a language in a dictionary ; 
 thousands of words contain in themselves their own defi- 
 nition; such as this which we heard a fortnight since 
 from the pulpit " disconsolation." Our young lawyers, 
 in a good-natured way, forthwith attacked this word 
 because it is not in Webster. We mentioned it to the 
 preacher. He was astonished. He had no idea of his 
 having used it ; a proof that it had sprung into life so 
 naturally. It was a new eddy in a stream, forced into 
 existence by the necessities of the current. We turn 
 over the leaves of a new volume before us ; we find such 
 words as these: "sun-orb," " rainbow lustres," "God- 
 bright," "serfage," " shadow -haunted," " rebel - heart- 
 ed," " Tabor-light," " night-dispeller." Such amalgama- 
 tions lie before us by the hundred. We could easily 
 quote from a single page of Whittier's flashing lines 
 twenty or thirty such words, coined for the first time. 
 Or if you go back in the centuries with us, to study the 
 English language ere it left the shores that stretch from 
 the Scheldt to Jutland, you will find the same tendency 
 
502 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 to form new nouns in this way of turning a noun into an 
 adjective, and then using that adjective as a prefix to 
 some other old noun ; as in the epic of Beowulf, the 
 great lay on the battle of Brunanburh, when Athelstane 
 conquered ; the funeral song of Adhelm ; or the hymns 
 of Caedmon, where such words as these occur: "wine- 
 hall," "mead-hall," " war-clang," " breast -net," "life- 
 gore," " war- carnage," " battle -hawk," " earth -house," 
 " death-stab," " cavern-house," " flood-dread," " death- 
 mist," " army-cry," " glory-king." In Milton, words of 
 this kind meet us in tens each a sparkle of phosphor- 
 escence on an ocean of brilliancy and depth. 
 
 We. have quoted enough to show you that our En- 
 glish, from its inward character, and in its very earliest 
 age, and in our day as much as ever, admits of and hints, 
 nay, on the part of any great writer, demands a contin- 
 ual birth of new words. Let no man, who is of strong 
 and original mind, allow himself to be the slave of a 
 Webster; let him betake him boldly and lovingly to the 
 English itself and its Saxon roots. From this source 
 any original thinker has the right, governed by common- 
 sense and good taste, to construct new compounds by 
 the score, he taking care that, while they are new, they 
 yet are old. 
 
 But, besides, you have the command of another fount 
 of language, the Greek ; one that must be admirable, in- 
 asmuch as thence come names for discoveries utterly un- 
 known to the Greek when it was a living tongue. In 
 our time we have had remarkable instances; as in the 
 telegraph, the instrument that sends messages from a dis- 
 tance ; and telegram, the message sent. The latter word, 
 so recent, how beautiful it is. Your author desires, 
 shrinking from his own impertinence, to risk his fame, 
 for the future age in which he believes so strongly, on a 
 word which he now invents. It is the word Cosmarch : 
 from Cosmos, the world; and Archon, a ruler. In our 
 United States here, we have above thirty states, each of 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 503 
 
 which abjures the right of war. An age awaits the world 
 when all the European states, and all the tribes of the 
 earth, will similarly abjure this Satanic claim to shed 
 blood, and all international quarrels shall be settled by 
 decision of a common Amphictyonic Council ; the elec- 
 tion of which will wait for the coming of the millennium 
 no more than the Congress at Washington waited. The 
 world's President will need a suitable title ; let this title 
 be our contribution to the cause of brotherhood, of prac- 
 tical Christianity, of common-sense ; let him be hailed 
 as the Cosmarch. The word is regularly formed, pre- 
 cisely expressive, compact, musical ; a word which invites 
 and defies criticism ; another proof of how exhaustless 
 our language is. But will it ever be needed ? It will ; 
 for our Hero, King Jesus, reigns ; and hath resolved. 
 The adoption of this word will be our test of success as 
 a writer. 
 
 Then, if any one of our readers is eager to become, not 
 notorious, but celebrated, there is a niche in the temple 
 of fame open for him to occupy. The Swiss Cantons, 
 The Low Countries these are not names ; Switzerland, 
 Holland, Belgium these are names. In the same way 
 "The United States" is not a name merely a peri- 
 phrasis. In the Centennial Building let a niche be re- 
 served for the happy man who supplies the proper name 
 for our country, be it Columbia, or what else soever may 
 be the most befitting. 
 
 2. While by all means we exhort all existing and all 
 coming orators to be as sublime as their wings, or their 
 supply of hydrogen, enable them to be, we exhort them 
 to foster the homely ; as often throughout these pages 
 we have implored our readers to do. 
 
 The Presbyterian pastor at Flemington, the Rev. Dr. 
 George S. Mott, confines himself to the homely almost 
 exclusively ; he finds that such modes of talking never 
 run out; they are always, understood by every one in his 
 large audience. They often produce a surprise, a strik- 
 
504 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 ing effect ; they make his people regard him as an inex- 
 haustible treasure of the most excellent common-sense 
 and shrewdness. As when he said the other day : 
 
 "We do not ask enough of God; He loves to give. We 
 usually go to Him with a saucer; we should go with a pail." 
 
 Preachers generally have no sufficient notion how this 
 way of talking impresses, and how long and easily it is 
 remembered. In fact, the difficulty is to forget it. In 
 a volume of " Yale Lectures on Preaching " is given this 
 instance : 
 
 " I recollect on one occasion to have heard Dr. Humphrey, 
 President of Amherst College, who certainly was not a rhetori- 
 cian, speaking in respect to the treatment of the Indians. He 
 used one of the most provincial of provincialisms, yet it came 
 with an explosive tone that fastened it in my memory; and not 
 only that, but it gave an impulse to my whole life, I might say, 
 and affected me in my whole course and labor as a reformer. 
 It was the effect of but a single word. He had been describ- 
 ing the shameful manner in which our government had broken 
 treaties with the Indians in Florida and Georgia. He went on 
 saying what was just and what was right, and came to the dis- 
 cussion of some critical point of policy which had been pro- 
 posed, when he suddenly ceased his argument, and exclaimed, 
 * The voice of the people will be lifted up, and they shall say 
 to the government You shrfrft!'' Now 'sha'n't' is not very 
 good English, but it is provincial, colloquial, and very familiar 
 to every boy. It carried a home feeling with it, and we all 
 knew what it meant. He let it out like a bullet, and the whole 
 chapel was hushed for the moment, and then the rustle followed, 
 which showed that the shot had struck. It has remained in my 
 memory ever since." 
 
 Let us now add a few more of Dr. Mott's instances. 
 We implore not preachers only, but all public speakers, 
 to cultivate the homely all through their career. It can 
 not be estimated too highly ; and there is no one but can 
 increase his command of it very far beyond his expecta- 
 tions. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 505 
 
 " Each church is a household of faith. In the household 
 each member can do something. Why, the children can pick 
 up chips and rock the cradle." 
 
 " The food devoid of nourishment to the strong and healthy 
 Christian may be very nutritious to many a faint-hearted be- 
 liever. A working man would go away hungry from a meal of 
 arrowroot; but that is quite hearty enough for a valetudina- 
 rian." 
 
 " A speck upon a minister's character is more prominent 
 than the same would be in a man of the world. Mud on a 
 white lawn dress looks worse than on a dark calico." 
 
 " Man and his work are not like a rider and his horse. The 
 latter are joined for the day in service, but separated as soon 
 as the rider dismounts. But our work, our common business, 
 leaves its impress on us, as the miller carries about with him 
 the dust of his mill." 
 
 3. These illustrations, all of them taken from one ser- 
 mon, send you to an important quarter for materials 
 even to the common businesses of life. From that quar- 
 ter alone inexhaustible supplies may be obtained. You 
 may, possibly, have never dreamed that such is the case. 
 Try, and you will be convinced, to your astonishment. If 
 you study the conversation or the discourses of Jesus, 
 you will find that He went thither: to the housewife at 
 her home-toils, to the fisher in his boat on the lake, to 
 the farmer with his seed-bag round his neck. This, then, 
 forces on your minds the question, a leading one in such 
 a subject as ours, What are the sources whence figures 
 can be obtained ? It may seem that this volume, up to 
 this late page, has overlooked this ; but no every exam- 
 ple that we have quoted exhibits to you a source. You 
 can not do better than to read this book over once more, 
 for the special purpose of discovering and pondering on 
 these sources. It was with the special intention of show- 
 ing what these sources are that the quotations were 
 made. And we very particularly pray you to write down, 
 as you go over the book a second time, a list of what 
 
506 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 the sources were, But we enumerate, as chief founts of 
 the figurative domestic life ; the common trades and 
 businesses ; material nature ; the griefs ; the joys ; ani- 
 mal existence ; the various sciences, so far as they are on 
 the level of the general mind; Bible incidents; historical 
 occurrences. 
 
 4. Of Shakespeare, since we have uttered so much 
 laud, permit us to be guilty of three words of dispraise : 
 Too many indecent words ; too many senseless and wea- 
 risome verbal conceits ; utter indifference to the urgent 
 and sublime claims of the common people. Neither he 
 nor any one of his characters has ever once expressed a 
 word of interest in the masses. Alas! 'how sublime a 
 mind dead to how sublime an aspiration. 
 
 5. We have been far from succeeding in one of our 
 chief objects in this volume if we have not wrought the 
 conviction deep in many minds, not that we have ex- 
 hausted the subject, but that we have left it, in many 
 points, unexhausted ; so that at least a hundred figures 
 lie yet unnamed. We can not convey a fitting idea of 
 the disadvantages we have labored under as to procuring 
 access to writers, living as we have often done far from 
 good libraries. We hope that those who honor us with 
 criticisms will endeavor to make discoveries, especially 
 if they have the command of many books. If we have 
 done something without libraries, how much more may 
 they, with books all accessible. But, besides, let every 
 reader bear in recollection that the book of his own mind 
 should be continually active, and continually productive 
 of figures ; and as in a country where mountains meet 
 with clouds and with sunrays, the appearances of mount- 
 ain scenery are ever new, so with a mind that is ever 
 meeting with sorrows and with joys, the thought-scenery 
 and the word-scenery should be ever various and pro- 
 ductive. Let us hear, then, of many new figures; let 
 them be identified and catalogued, and please do tell our 
 publisher of them, for our tenth edition. 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 507 
 
 6. We trust we have created in many minds an eager 
 thirst for that beauty which is couched in literary ex- 
 pression ; and, if so, such reader will thank us if we tell 
 them where to find, in some one or two productions, a 
 very choice banquet of taste and criticism. Macaulay's 
 " Essay on Milton " read it once and again is such 
 a banquet ; as also Carlyle's " Essay on Burns." And 
 pray do familiarize yourselves with the genuine, unadul- 
 terated ballad poetry. The authors all unknown, just as 
 the master-minds are all unknown, who, in the Middle 
 Ages, raised to heaven the matchless wonders of sacred 
 Gothic architecture. In these ballads there is so much 
 directness, strength, freshness ; such might of incident 
 and exhaustless variety thereof; so many a war-clang 
 from the thickest of the battle-field ; so many a heroic 
 shout of fealty all disinterested ; so many a rough blow 
 struck by intense power of will and manliness ; so many 
 a moan of unfathomable heart-break ; and, besides, so 
 many an incomparable glint of May-dews on the green- 
 wood; of spray on the sea; as when oft a ballad thus 
 opens : 
 
 " In somer when the shawes be sheyne, 
 
 And leves be large and long, 
 Hit is fulle mery in feyre foreste, 
 To here the foulys song." 
 
 If this volume succeed in sending you a-roaming in 
 this wide and wild ballad domain of forestry and of sea- 
 waves, you will never cease being thankful for the hum- 
 ble but enthusiastic service we have tried to render you. 
 
 7. Permit us, in a word, to mention Suggestiveness. 
 Seek and eagerly pray that your style may have sug- 
 gestiveness. This quality of style we are constrained 
 to urge upon you, from our long and so minute study 
 of Shakespeare, the inimitable. Hear Taine on this: 
 
 " Every word pronounced by one of his characters enables 
 us to see, besides the idea which it contains and the emotion 
 which prompted it, the aggregate of the qualities and the entire 
 
508 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 character which produced it the mood, physical attitude, bear- 
 ing, look of the man, all instantaneously, with a clearness and 
 force approached by no one. The words which strike our ears 
 are not the thousandth part of those we hear within ; they are 
 like sparks thrown off at intervals ; the eyes catch rare flashes 
 of flame ; the mind alone perceives the vast conflagration of 
 which they are the signs and the effect. This property pos- 
 sessed by every phrase to exhibit a world of sentiments and 
 forms comes from the fact that the phrase is actually caused 
 by a world of emotions and images. Shakespeare had the pro- 
 digious faculty of seeing in a twinkling of the eye a complete 
 character. A word here and there would need for its expla- 
 nation three pages of commentary; each of the half-understood 
 thoughts, which the commentator may have discovered, has left 
 its trace in the turn of the phrase, in the nature of the metaphor, 
 in the order of the words. These innumerable traces have been 
 impressed in a second, within the compass of a line. In the 
 next line there are as many." 
 
 You do not seek to be a Shakespeare ; but you do ask, 
 " How can I have suggestiveness ?" This direction at 
 least we can urge : Write on great interests ; on great 
 subjects ; on vast doctrines. If you are a preacher, for 
 instance, do not dream that your pretty fancies will fur- 
 nish depths of thought to you and to the people in the 
 prolific way in which God's old dogmas will do. We 
 hear the cry, " Little dogma in the pulpit !" Assured- 
 ly, do not carry them on your weary shoulders as heavy 
 logs; but permeate them with your heart ; show their 
 bearing on affairs, and on the progress and salvation and 
 life of the age ; let us see how they develop our Awful 
 and Beautiful Friend, the Deity ; and it is absolutely cer- 
 tain that they will enthrob your style with suggestive- 
 ness. 
 
 And now, our last medley. We gave one before at 
 the close of Chapter XII., as a good device in teaching 
 this subject in the school. Let the reader identify the 
 figures in the following quotations, thrown together in 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 509 
 
 intentional confusion, such as flickers before us in the 
 forest when leaves of a score of tints mingle and dance 
 in the wind. 
 
 Lord Jeffrey, celebrated editor of the Edinburgh Re- 
 view from 1803 to 1829, gives us this critique on the 
 poet Proctor: 
 
 " His soul seems filled to overflow with images of love and 
 beauty, and gentle sorrow, and tender pity, and mild and holy 
 resignation. The character of his poetry is to soothe and melt 
 and delight; to make us kind and thoughtful and imagina- 
 tive." 
 
 F. W. Faber, a Roman Catholic, thus writes of the En- 
 glish Bible ; his style is inimitable : 
 
 "The uncommon beauty and marvelous English of the 
 Protestant Bible ! It lives on the ear like a music that can 
 never be forgotten, like the sound of 'church-bells which the 
 convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often 
 seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part 
 of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. 
 The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions 
 of childhood are stereotyped in its phrases. The power of all 
 the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It 
 is the representative of his best moments ; and all that there 
 has been about him of soft and gentle and pure and penitent 
 and good speaks to him forever out of his English Bible. It 
 is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and con- 
 troversy never soiled. It has been to him all along as the 
 silent but, oh, how intelligible voice of his guardian angel ; and 
 in the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant, 
 with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual biog- 
 raphy is not in his Saxon Bible." 
 
 What a choice bit of writing ! What enjoyment it gives 
 us! 
 
 As we are very eager to propel you to an enthusiasm 
 for ballads, hear what Sir Walter said of Bishop Percy's 
 " Reliques of Ancient English Poetry:" 
 
510 Might, and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 "The first time I could scrape a few shillings together 
 which were not common occurrences with me I bought unto 
 myself a copy of these beloved volumes ; nor do I believe I ever 
 read a book half so frequently, or with half the enthusiasm." 
 
 Sir Walter's " Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border " is as 
 good. 
 
 We put before you, as it were by compulsion, a con- 
 tribution by Dryden on Oliver Cromwell ; the more you 
 ponder it, the more you will admire it, for its truth to 
 nature and to Cromwell : 
 
 " His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone, 
 For he was great ere fortune made him so; 
 And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, 
 Made him but greater seem, not greater grow." 
 
 By compulsion, too, we can not avoid introducing to 
 you Dr. Craik, than whom there is no recent critic who 
 deserves to stand higher. Thus he writes of Dr. Beattie 
 and James Thomson : 
 
 "'The Minstrel,' by Beattie, is a harmonious and eloquent 
 composition, glowing with poetical sentiment ; but its inferiority 
 in the highest poetical qualities may be felt by comparing it 
 with Thomson's ' Castle of Indolence,' which is perhaps the 
 other work in the language which it most nearly resembles, but 
 which yet it resembles much in the same way as gilding does 
 solid gold, or as colored water might be made to resemble 
 
 From Taine, who treats of English literature on deep 
 principles, and who is so suggestive, let us take this 
 glimpse of how cheerfully men have, thousands of times, 
 died for Christ, that greatest maker of heroes. It is 
 Hugh Latimer, bishop, reformer, man of quenchless hu- 
 mor, who is spoken of by the Frenchman : 
 
 " He spoke the truth to the king, unmasked robbers, incurred 
 all kind of hate, resigned his see rather than sign any thing 
 against his conscience; and at eighty years of age,.under Bloody 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 511 
 
 Mary, refusing to retract, after two years of prison and waiting 
 and what waiting ! he was led to the stake. His companion, 
 old Bishop Ridley, slept the night before as calmly as ever he 
 did in his life; and when ready to be chained to the post, said 
 aloud, ' O heavenly Father, I give Thee most hearty thanks for 
 that Thou hast called me to be a professor of Thee, even unto 
 death.' Latimer, in his turn, when they brought the lighted fag- 
 ots, cried, ' Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the 
 man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in 
 England, as I trust shall never be put out.' He then bathed 
 his hands in the flames, and, resigning his soul to God, ex- 
 pired." 
 
 Befittingly we close with a sweet strain from the Span- 
 ish, on Peace ; which we translate for you : 
 
 " Peace ! Inward Heaven of the breast, 
 
 Nor gold nor costliest gems can buy; 
 Nor fields with heaped abundance blest, 
 Nor war that dims the widow's eye, 
 Dooming proud hosts to bleed and die. 
 
 " Peace ! She the child of conscience pure ! 
 
 She lifts o'er earthly hope and fear ; 
 Homed in the ether'd heights secure; 
 Not hunting praise with fever'd ear, 
 Nor holding rank nor wealth too dear. 
 
 " But finding in herself her wealth, 
 
 In life's unenvied, homely mean ; 
 Where Duty's toils breathe moral health, 
 
 And Faith's glad eye, through shade and sheen, 
 The glories of Christ's brow hath seen." 
 
5 1 2 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 FIGURES OF RHETORIC. 
 
 PART TWENTIETH. 
 Parody. Idiom. Parable. Allegory. 
 
 CCXXII. PARODY should be catalogued among fig- 
 ures rhetorical, for it is had recourse to for literary and 
 artistic purposes ; it is in literature what caricature is in 
 portrait-painting the transforming of a grave composi- 
 tion into a ludicrous shape, yet so as to retain a strong 
 resemblance to the original. We feel strongly, however, 
 the risk at this point of classing a mode of writing as a 
 figure of speech. An essay is not a figure of speech ; it 
 may be plausibly held that a parable, an allegory, a par- 
 ody is not. Yet we think ourselves justified in putting 
 parody on our catalogue, inasmuch as the whole piece is 
 flung into a new shape under the transforming influence 
 of a mirthful feeling in the mind. 
 
 "The Rejected Addresses," by the brothers Smith, 
 is a whole book of specimens. But rather take one on 
 Moore's " Last Rose of Summer:" 
 
 " 'Tis the last rose of summer 
 
 Left blooming alone ; 
 All its lovely companions 
 
 Are faded and gone. 
 No flower of its kindred, 
 
 No rosebud is nigh, 
 To reflect back its blushes 
 
 And give sigh for sigh." 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 5 1 3 
 
 " Tis the last golden dollar 
 
 Left shining alone ; 
 All its brilliant companions 
 
 Are squander'd and gone. 
 No coin of its mintage 
 
 Reflects back its hue; 
 They went for mint juleps, 
 
 And this will go too." 
 
 This form of writing was known early among the Greeks ; 
 even Homer was subjected to this kind of familiarity ; 
 while on the stage they acted caricatures of the best 
 tragedies ; and Aristophanes parodied the spirit-led Soc- 
 rates whose Daemon, surely, his divine Influence, was 
 procured for him by the Friend who died for man. 
 
 CCXXIII. Idioms may be treated of, as of great impor- 
 tance : a mode of expression peculiar to a particular lan- 
 guage. We refer at present to English idioms; which 
 are a very valuable and very racy ingredient in style, de- 
 manding and repaying much attention. They lend an 
 inexpressible charm to Addison's Spectator ; Sir Rich- 
 ard Steele's papers in that periodical are also admirable 
 for idiomatic ease and grace. Every language has turns 
 of expression which to translate word for word into any 
 other language would by no means give a correct trans- 
 lation; nay, would only give us nonsense. " He is a 
 good man " may be translated word for word into Latin 
 and keep its meaning; " He is well to do in the world " 
 defies literal translation. Read the writings of old Thom- 
 as Fuller for an abundant supply, and learn what is meant 
 by saying of an idiom that it is racy and piquant and 
 peppery; and study in our best comedies what Dugald 
 Stewart calls " the shadowy and fleeting forms of comic 
 dialogue." 
 
 Sometimes idioms are in a high degree expressive of 
 national character. " How do you carry yourself?" ges- 
 ticulates the Frenchman ; " How do you do ?" inquires 
 the Englishman ; the former salutation'seeming to let out 
 
 KK 
 
514 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 the Frenchman's regard to outward demeanor and bear- 
 ing ; the latter, the Englishman's love and esteem of 
 practical effort and activity. So a foreign traveler in the 
 United States, alluding derisively to the American facil- 
 ity in moving from one profession to another, or from 
 New England to California, assures us that if you ask a 
 Yankee how he is, his answer will likely be, " Moving, 
 
 sir 
 
 Dean Swift abounds in idiom, the cleverest possible. 
 Writing to Lord Bolingbroke, on the value of a plain un- 
 derstanding, he speaks thus : 
 
 " Did you never observe one of your clerks cutting his paper 
 with a blunt ivory knife ? Did you ever know the knife to fail 
 going the right way ? Whereas, if he had used a razor or pen- 
 knife, he had odds against him of spoiling a whole sheet." 
 
 When you say, " He is on board of a man-of-war ;" " The 
 speaker broke down ;" " I don't like any one to take me 
 off," you are using idioms. 
 
 A good idiom has nothing of vulgarity or of slang 
 about it. But the old writer, Roger L'Estrange, so crams 
 his political pamphlets and his translations with low id- 
 ioms as to taint almost every line with the low-bred, to 
 a degree that is almost inconceivable ; as thus : 
 
 " She was easily put off the hooks, and monstrous hard to 
 be pleased again. She was as bad, 'tis true, as bad could be ; 
 and yet Xanthus had a kind of hankering for her still. The 
 man was willing to make the best of a hard game. * Come, 
 come, master,' says ^Esop, 'pluck up a good heart; for I have 
 a project in my noddle that shall bring back my mistress.' 
 What does my ./Esop, but away immediately to the market. 
 This way of proceeding set the whole town agog; and for that 
 bout all was well again between master and mistress." 
 
 Very valuable .the ability or instinct to discriminate 
 cant terms and the jargon of the day from the pure id- 
 ioms of polished society; the turns born and bred in the 
 language. The Style of Dr. Paley may be recommend- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 5 1 5 
 
 ed as a good model of idiomatic English. Thus, when 
 speaking of the fry of fish that frequents the margin of 
 rivers and lakes, whose happiness proclaims how benign 
 the Deity is to them 
 
 "They are so happy that they do not know what to do with 
 themselves." 
 
 The style of Defoe, author of " Robinson Crusoe," is 
 justly considered by Coleridge as being as idiomatic as 
 any in our literature. Lord Byron owed in part his sud- 
 den and unparalleled popularity for ten or twelve years 
 to his being one of the most idiomatic of our poets. But 
 do not mistake, as L' Estrange did, low for pure expres- 
 sions ; a mistake similar to theirs who in their manners 
 mistake impudence for ease. Never so degrade your- 
 self as to talk of blowing a fellow up ; or of a person's 
 being one of the big-bugs ; or of Peter's getting on like 
 blazes ; or of your not having ary one ; or of your being 
 very 'cute ; or of being in a bad fix. All this multitudi- 
 nous class of utterances prove at once that a man's mind 
 is low-bred. And you will labor in vain to write with re- 
 finement if you do not accustom yourself to speak with 
 refinement. Sam Slick is perpetually using vile Amer- 
 icanisms, which it is well enough to be amused by, but 
 which we should never demean ourselves to use : 
 
 "Did you ever hear tell of Abernethy, the British doctor?" 
 said the clockmaker. "Frequently," said I; "he was an em- 
 inent man, and had a most extensive practice." "Well, I reck* 
 on he was a vulgar critter that," he replied ; " he treated the 
 Hon. Alden Gobble, secretary to our Legation at London, dread- 
 ful bad once ; and I guess if it had been me he had used that 
 way, I'd have fixed his flint for him, so that he'd think twice 
 afore he'd fire such another shot as that at me again. I'd make 
 him make tracks, I guess ; he'd a found his way out of the hole 
 in the fence a plaguy sight quicker than he came in, I reckon." 
 
 But how much fancy, what solid good-sense, what fa- 
 miliarity with manners and actual life in society, what 
 
516 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 easy mastery of polite and classical idioms in style, does 
 not the Spectator display on every unequaled page ! Let 
 us urge you let it be considered as for the hundredth 
 time to buy each one of you for himself a copy of the 
 Spectator : one of the world's choicest books one of the 
 choicest fifty. Of the prose of Addison we can not suf- 
 ficiently express our admiration an admiration that in- 
 creases with our years. Far inferior is Washington Ir- 
 ving's style, though excellent, to Addison's. 
 
 Be warned against slang by Swift, who stigmatized it 
 as 
 
 " The most ruinous of all the corruptions of a language ;" 
 
 and against the lack of classical idioms by Burke, on 
 Tacitus: 
 
 " No author thinks more deeply or paints more strongly ; but 
 he seldom or never expresses himself naturally. It is plain that, 
 comparing him with Plautus and Terence, or with the beautiful 
 fragments of Publius Syrus, he did not write the language of 
 good conversation. Cicero is much nearer to it." 
 
 Only Cicero's oratory is tainted now and then through 
 that enormous self-conceit .-of his ; his literary produc- 
 tions are far finer. 
 
 It seems, in a considerable measure, owing to the great 
 tendency of our language to idiomatic expressions, that 
 our English is so much infested with anomalies. Under 
 this head a late number of a new magazine has an enter- 
 taining article on the inconsistencies and ambiguities of 
 the English language, from which we take the following 
 extracts : 
 
 " Show me a fire," said a traveler to the landlord, " for I am 
 very wet; and bring me a mug of ale, for I am very dry." 
 
 " You walk very slow," said a man to a consumptive. " Yes," 
 he replied; "but I'm going very fast." 
 
 Breaking both wings of an army is almost certain to 
 make it fly ; a general may win the day in a battle fought 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 5 1 7 
 
 at night ; a lawyer may convey a house, and yet be un- 
 able to lift a hundred pounds; a room may be full of , 
 married men, and not have a single man in it ; a traveler 
 who is detained an hour or two may recover most of the 
 time by making a minute of it ; a man killed in a duel 
 has at least one second to live after he is dead; a fire 
 goes out, and does not leave the room ; a lady may wear 
 a suit out the first day she gets it, and put it away at 
 night in as good a condition as ever; a schoolmaster 
 with no scholar may yet have a pupil in his eye; the 
 bluntest man in business is generally the sharpest one ; 
 Ananias, it is said, told a lie, and yet he was borne out 
 by the by-standers; caterpillars turn over a new leaf 
 without much moral improvement ; oxen can only eat 
 corn with the mouth, yet you may give it to them in the 
 ear ; food bolted down is not the most likely to remain 
 on the stomach ; soft water is often caught when it rains 
 hard ; high words between men are frequently low words ; 
 steamboat officers are very pleasant company, and yet 
 we are always glad to have them give us a wide berth ; 
 a nervous man is trembling, faint, weak, while a nervous 
 style and a man of nerve is strong, firm, and vigorous. 
 
 Punch tells us of a man who was arrested for attempting 
 to damage the River Thames. " What was the man do- 
 ing?" "He was trying to pull up the stream." Joseph's 
 brethren have been excused for putting him into the 
 pit, because it is supposed they thought it a good open- 
 ing for a young man. There was the person who carried 
 out a project, and was obliged to bring it back again ; 
 who kept his word, and so had a quarrel with Noah Web- [| 
 ster, who wanted it for his dictionary. There was the 
 one who courted an investigation, and was wedded to his 
 own opinions. A furrier, having facilities for renovating 
 old furs, advertised " capes, victorines, etc., made up for 
 ladies out of their own skins." The circular of a lady 
 teacher spoke of her character, and the " reputation for 
 teaching she bears." The advertisement of a concert 
 
518 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 director announced that " a variety of songs might be 
 expected, too tedious to be mentioned." It may further 
 be noticed that though " caterers " is right, " haterers " 
 is wrong; that though a man from Lapland is a Lap- 
 lander, yet a man from Michigan is not a Michigander, 
 nor a lady from that state a Michigoose; though a nailer 
 is one who makes nails, a tailor is not one who makes 
 tails, unless they be coat-tails ; and though a wavelet is 
 a little wave, yet a bullet is not a little bull, nor a ham- 
 let a little ham. 
 
 In carrying on, which ought to be for life, your study 
 of idioms, contrast Burns with Tennyson Tennyson, 
 whom we greatly admire. Evidently is he searching out 
 deft words. He is a gentleman of the drawing-room ; 
 admirably dressed ; but always thinking of his dress to 
 think of which becomes an unmanly habit. Robert 
 Burns, in his best pieces, thinks no more of his dress 
 than doth the skylark. 
 
 CCXXIV. Parable highly deserves mention and study 
 as a figure of speech ; if allegory is always admitted to be 
 a figure, not less should parable a briefer kind of al- 
 legory; wherein a fictitious or a real incident or little 
 history is narrated for the purpose of covertly insinuating 
 some moral ; some rebuke, warning, or exhortation. It 
 does not seem to differ from allegory essentially, but 
 only in briefness. The oldest on record is that of Jotham, 
 Judges ix., 7-2 1 . Surely, after reading this beautiful illus- 
 tration, and that still more beautiful one in 2 Sam. xii., we 
 have a good right to complain of our pulpit orators for so 
 very seldom in our day employing this polished, dexter- 
 ous, and weighty linguistic weapon. Let them depend on 
 it, it is admirably adapted for the enforcement of Chris- 
 tian truth ; as the infallible and brilliant example of our 
 Saviour demonstrates, who, speaking as never man spake, 
 was constantly using parables in His sermons. We give a 
 few instances of what might be employed in the pulpit. 
 
 Certain Hindoo hearers were objecting to the verse, 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 519 
 
 " He that sinneth in one point is guilty of all." The 
 
 missionary with whom they were arguing replied thus : 
 
 * 
 
 "A boat on a rapid stream, not far from a deadly cataract, was 
 secured to the side by a cable. This cable was cut through in just 
 one place. The boat drifted down, and was torn to pieces in the 
 cataract, quite as disastrously as if the cable had been cut 
 through in fifty places." 
 
 Another time, after he had set the vigilance-arousing 
 doctrine of the temptations of Satan, the gigantic would- 
 be God, of whom it is perhaps that the cataclysms of geol- 
 ogy speak, they maintained that therefore Satan should 
 be punished, and men let go free ; whereupon he replied : 
 
 " Some men with rifles were standing on the bank of the 
 Ganges as a vessel with women and children on board was 
 passing down the river. A malignant stranger came up to the 
 men, and persuaded them to fire on the vessel. They con- 
 sented; eagerly seized their rifles, and killed several of the 
 children and the women. The government put the stranger to 
 death, and the men too." 
 
 We again assert that in no way can truth be stated 
 more neatly, more impressively, more adhesively so as 
 to go in and stick. Rowland Hill, combating the doc- 
 trine of priestcraft, that the common people should not 
 be trusted with the Bible, because there are in it things 
 hard to be understood, said : 
 
 "A boy came running to his father, crying, ' I am very hun- 
 gry; do please give me some meat.' 'No, my dear son; for 
 there are hard bones in it, and you can not eat the bones." 
 
 Such a parabolic way of presenting things will remain 
 fast in the memory for a lifetime. Why do some of our 
 pulpit orators neglect to study eloquence in the light of 
 mental science, and at the feet of Jesus ? Be He your 
 model of a public speaker. If you disdain Shakespeare, 
 and believe not in Demosthenes, you can not disdain the 
 Nazarene. 
 
520 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Here we may insert a quotation from Thomas Hooker, 
 whose Saxon style gives a singular force to his illustra- 
 tion: 
 
 "God dealeth with his servants as a father doth with his son, 
 after he hath sent him on a great journey to do some business; 
 and the weather falleth foul, and the way proveth dangerous, 
 and many a storm and great difficulties are to be gone through. 
 O how the heart of that father pitieth his son. How doth he 
 resolve to requite him, if he ever live to come home again. 
 What preparation doth he make to entertain and welcome him; 
 and how doth he study to do good unto him. My brethren, so 
 it is here; I beseech you think of it you that are the saints and 
 people of God." 
 
 Mark how this plain writer heaps figure on figure ; and 
 what proof he gives that the homeliest and most honest 
 writers employ the most copious and various figures. 
 The Bible itself is essentially the noblest poesy, the no- 
 blest oratory. Permit your author one little liberty 
 more ; he, if little in reason, is abundant in rhyme ! 
 
 How poesy attests the Christian's God ! 
 
 Fair, tender, graphic, vast, the Bible truths! 
 The chivalrous faith that in the martyrs glow'd ; 
 
 That nerves 'mid lightnings and in dying soothes. 
 O how pictorial many a Bible scene ! 
 Glimpses of heaven ; of Eden's dewy green ; 
 Of Ruth in Boaz' fields sent forth to glean ; 
 Or deluge swells; or Egypt's struck with night; 
 
 Foul Sodom's death-wreaths angry heaven drape ; 
 
 The Christ, our Sun-God, dons His Tabor shape; 
 Or the sky blazes with the throne of white. 
 
 Our readers will admit that through this whole volume 
 we have been rebuking the neglect of such as have not 
 made the Man of Bethlehem their model as an orator. 
 We have especially deplored, and have gone the length 
 of indignantly denouncing, the fact, that in the pulpit of 
 the day a figure almost never used is the parable, that 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 521 
 
 unsurpassed figure so often employed by the Divine 
 Man. Restore the modern pulpit, destined to be greater 
 than ever as it would need to be, in the great impend- 
 ing controversy with Rome ; a controversy into which 
 Tennyson has at this moment thrown himSelf, in his great 
 tragedy, " Queen Mary." How heartily he denounces the 
 religion of bloodshed and of Romish tyranny and priest- 
 craft. Our preachers need, at such an hour, to make 
 Jesus their pulpit model, and to use the parable. 
 
 CCXXV. At last to our concluding figure have we come ; 
 claiming, on the one hand, that the treatment of our sub- 
 ject is by far the fullest discussion it ever has received ; 
 yet admitting, on the other hand, that many a usage has 
 by us been left, very likely, as yet unnamed more in 
 number than the above two hundred and twenty-five 
 that have been catalogued. Allegory is a continued 
 metaphor, kept up through a whole piece. The principal 
 subject is not mentioned by name in the allegory itself, 
 but is described by another subject resembling it. The 
 allegory is thus made up of continued allusion ; so that, 
 while professedly a description of one subject, it has an 
 obvious resemblance to another, to which every part of it 
 may be applied. To say a Christian is a pilgrim is to use 
 a metaphor; John Bunyan he died in the year in which 
 Pope was born in his immortal work, the " Pilgrim's 
 Progress," develops this idea, and writes a volume upon 
 it ; certainly the most successful and instructive allegory 
 in the world. We place before you as a sample " The 
 Manner's Hymn," by Mrs. Southey, second wife of the 
 distinguished scholar and poet, in which the risks of a 
 voyage are spoken of and dwelt on ; the allusion might 
 nave been thrown into a metaphor " the Christian's life 
 is a voyage :" 
 
 "Launch thy bark, Mariner! 
 
 Christian, God speed thee ! 
 Let loose the rudder-bands ; 
 Good angels lead thee ! 
 
522 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 Set thy sails warily, 
 
 Tempests will come ; 
 Steer thy course steadily; 
 
 Christian, steer home ! 
 Look to the weather bow, 
 
 Breakers are round thee; 
 Let fall the plummet now, 
 
 Shallows may ground thee! 
 Reef in the fore-sail there ! 
 
 Hold the helm fast! 
 So let the vessel wear, 
 
 There swept the blast ! 
 1 What of the night ? Watchman ! 
 
 What of the night?' 
 'Cloudy; all quiet; 
 
 No land yet; all's right!' 
 Be wakeful, be vigilant; 
 
 Danger may be 
 At an hour when all seemeth 
 
 Securest to thee. 
 How ! Gains the leak so fast ? 
 
 Clear out the hold ! 
 Hoist up thy merchandise, 
 
 Heave out thy gold. 
 There ! let the ingots go ; 
 
 Now the ship rights. 
 " Hurrah! the harbor's near; 
 
 Lo ! the red lights ! 
 Slacken not sail yet 
 
 At inlet or island; 
 Straight for the beacon steer, 
 
 Straight for the highland. 
 Crowd all thy canvas on, 
 
 Cut through the foam ! 
 Christian, cast anchor now ; 
 
 Heaven is thy home !" 
 
 It is in agreement with that love of clearness which 
 distinguishes Scripture that its allegories, if it had any, 
 would have been preceded or followed by an indication 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 523 
 
 of what the illustrated object is, and would have been all 
 scrupulously couched in the past tense. There is thus 
 no excuse to hold that predictions, which are in the fut- 
 ure, are allegories ; for all allegories are couched in the 
 past tense. In Scripture are no allegories. When the 
 God of Israel has thought fit to foretell the return of his 
 beloved Jewish people from their present long and weary 
 exile to their own grand historic land a land the birth- 
 place of religion, the cabinet wherein truths, the most 
 noble and precious of all, were stored for centuries, while 
 foul idolatries, and bloody, engloom all other realms 
 many writers have maintained that Israelites stand alle- 
 gorically for us Gentiles, and that the rebuilding of Jeru- 
 salem and the Temple stands for the conversion of the 
 heathen; but prediction proclaims itself to be prediction 
 by its being written in the future tense. In Scripture 
 there are parables, too brief to be reckoned allegories ; 
 or predictions marked as predictions, because composed 
 in the unmistakable future tense. 
 
 To enjoy the allegory, study Bunyan's Pilgrim nay, 
 journey with him to the Celestial City ; to enter which 
 the worst of us is permitted, through the pathway of 
 sincere penitence. A book written by a man wholly self- 
 taught a swearing tinker once, who could never spell 
 even tolerably no work of modern times has been trans- 
 lated into more languages, has been more popular among 
 all classes of men ; you will find it in the boudoir of the 
 duchess, and folded in the plaid of the shepherd as he 
 tends his sheep on the hill-side. It is written in excel- 
 lent taste, being, like the " Iliad" and the " Odyssey," a re- 
 markable proof that genius of the first order unconscious- 
 ly selects for itself the very path that would be dictated 
 by the severest good taste. Well has Macaulay said : 
 
 "Though there were many clever men in England during 
 the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two 
 creative minds. One of these produced the 'Paradise Lost;' 
 the other, the ' Pilgrim's Progress.' " 
 
524 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 This work is besides as remarkable for its style as for 
 it's genius. You will find in it whole pages that have 
 not in them a word of more than two syllables. Its lan- 
 guage is the purest, most racy Saxon. If you would see 
 how vigorously the simplest Saxon English can express 
 every shade of feeling, and at the same time the humor- 
 ous, the sarcastic, the magnificent ; the indignation, vehe- 
 mence, or tenderness of reproof; the subtleties of theo- 
 logical argument ; the pathetic, the oratorical, the sub- 
 lime then read and read again this allegory, never ex- 
 celled, with its admirable personifications and deep hu- 
 man interest. It is so much and so justly valued as a 
 hand-book of religion being perhaps the most interest- 
 ing exhibition of evangelical Calvinism ever given so 
 that less attention has been directed to the circumstance 
 of its being so richly steeped in the choicest humor; as 
 witness the following description of what is known as 
 " Popping the Question :" 
 
 " Now by that these pilgrims had been at this place a week, 
 Mercy had a visitor that pretended some good-will unto her, 
 and his name was Mr. Brisk; a man of some breeding, and 
 that pretended to religion, but a man that stuck very close to 
 the world. So he came once or twice or more to Mercy, and 
 offered love unto her. Now Mercy was of a fair countenance, 
 and therefore the more alluring. Her mind was also to be 
 always busying of herself in doing, for when she had nothing 
 to do for herself she would be making hose and garments for 
 others, and would bestow them upon those that had need. 
 And Mr. -Brisk, not knowing where or how she disposed of 
 what she made, seemed to be greatly taken, for that he found 
 her never idle. ' I will warrant a good housewife,' quoth he 
 to himself. 
 
 " Mercy then revealed the business to the maidens that were 
 of the house, and inquired of them concerning him, for they 
 did know him better than she. So they told her that he was a 
 very busy young man, and one who pretended to religion, but 
 was, as they feared, a stranger to the power of that which is 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 525 
 
 good. ' Nay, then,' said Mercy, ' I will look no more on him, 
 for* I purpose never to have a clog to my soul.' Prudence then 
 replied that there needed no matter of great discouragement to 
 be given to him : her continuing so as she had begun, to do for 
 the poor, would quickly cool his courage. 
 
 " So the next time he comes he finds her at her old work, 
 making things for the poor. Then said he, 'What! always 
 at it ?' ' Yes/ said Mercy, * either for myself or for others.' 
 'And what canst thou earn a day ?' said he. ' I do these things,' 
 said she, ' that I may be rich in good works, laying up in store 
 for myself a good foundation against the time to come, that I 
 may lay hold on eternal life.' ' Why, prithee, what doest thou 
 with them? 7 'Clothe the naked,' said she. With that his 
 countenance fell. So he forbore to come after her again. And 
 when he was asked the reason why, he said that Mercy was a 
 pretty lass, but troubled with ill-conditions." 
 
 By this time you are, no doubt, better informed about 
 this figure than was the old lady in Sheridan's comedy 
 of the " Rivals," who said of her niece that 
 
 " She was as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the 
 Nile." 
 
 Hawthorne, one of our very best American prose writ- 
 ers, though sometimes guilty of the anti-natural and re- 
 volting, has written a capital imitation of Bunyan in his 
 " Celestial Railroad." He represents himself as travel- 
 ing in this new and easy way to Heaven, with Mr. Smooth 
 it Away, Mr. Love for the World, Mr. Hide Sin in the 
 Heart, Mr. Scaly Conscience, and others from the town 
 of Shun Repentance. Apollyon has the management 
 of the engine, and, as might be expected, keeps up the 
 heat well ; and, instead of reaching Heaven, the journey 
 ends with a tremendous explosion. Among other first- 
 rate allegories, we direct you to the "History of John 
 Bull," by Dr. Arbuthnot ; Shakespeare's " Queen Mab ;" 
 also his "Seven Ages;" Paulding's "History of John 
 Bull and Brother Jonathan;" Dryden's " Hind and Pan- 
 
526 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 ther," full of power and varied versification ; Mrs. Bar- 
 bauld's "Choice of Hercules;" Dr. Johnson's " HilKof 
 Science," and also his "Journey of a Day, a picture of 
 human life ;" Hawksworth's " Eastern Narrative " no 
 life pleasing to God which is not useful to man. Addi- 
 son's "Vision of Mirza" is a composition than which 
 never was any more exquisite ever written. Cheever's 
 " Lectures on Bunyan " are inexpressibly admirable. 
 
 To give one or two of the shorter specimens of this 
 noble figure, the United States have produced nothing 
 more finished than Longfellow's " Ship of State ;" fit to 
 be a national piece. Mark how simple and Saxon is the 
 language ; nine monosyllabic lines out of twenty-two. 
 Blessings be on him who wrote this address ! 
 
 " Thou, too, sail on, O ship of state ! 
 Sail on, O Union, strong and great ! 
 Humanity, with all its fears, 
 With all its hopes of future years, 
 Is hanging breathless on thy fate ! 
 We know what master laid thy keel, 
 What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel ; 
 Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, 
 What anvils rang, what hammers beat; 
 In what a forge and what a heat 
 Were shaped the anchors of thy hope ! 
 Fear not each sudden sound and shock 
 'Tis of the wave and not the rock; 
 'Tis but the flapping of the sail, 
 And not a rent made by the gale ! 
 In spite of rock and tempest-roar, 
 In spite of false lights on the shore, 
 Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea ! 
 Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee ; 
 Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, 
 Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, 
 Are all with thee, are all with thee."- 
 
 We hope you will relish deeply what speaks of the do- 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 527 
 
 mestic, from the rural lips of Allan Ramsay, the Theoc- 
 ritus of our literature our first quotation from him 
 may it have the effect of sending you to his " Gentle 
 Shepherd," the finest pastoral the world possesses ; given 
 to our zephyrs before Burns dawned on the North. Ram- 
 say was originally a poor barber in Edinburgh, but he 
 produced this pastoral drama, and being as prudent as 
 he was poetical, he became a successful bookseller, and 
 amassed a respectable independence. Two country lasses, 
 as fresh as their May-born daisies, have met on a lovely 
 summer morning, by the side of a small clear brook, or 
 burn, to wash and bleach their " claithes." Their names 
 are Peggy and Jenny. Jenny pretends to prefer a single 
 to a married life : 
 
 "A dish o' married love right soon grows cauld, 
 And dozens down to nane, as fouk grow auld." 
 
 Peggy is much honester ; and replies : 
 
 " But we'll grow auld thegither, and ne'er find 
 The loss of youth, when love grows on the mind. 
 Bairns and their bairns make sure a firmer tie 
 Than aught in love the like o' us can spy. 
 See yon twa elms that grow up side by side? 
 Suppose them some years syne bridegroom and bride. 
 Nearer and nearer ilka year they're prest, 
 Till wide their spreading branches are increased. 
 This shields the ither frae the eastern blast, 
 That in return defends it frae the west. 
 Such as stand single (state sae liked by you) 
 Beneath ilk storm frae every airt maun bow." 
 
 Very deep lies the taste for the allegoric in man's best 
 nature; this figure is well fitted to make an interesting 
 object still more interesting, being a graceful veil, deli- 
 cately embroidered, flung over a noble form ; but so as 
 to allow its grand or fair proportions to shine through. 
 Thus much of the Greek mythology is an allegoric veil 
 over important truths. Venus, for instance, or Beauty, 
 
528 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 is fabled to have been born of the sea-foam ; and whence 
 sooner could the emotion of the beautiful have been 
 awakened in the human mind than when man was gaz- 
 ing on the bright, soft curve of the bounding billow, and 
 on the sparkling foam of its swelling crest ? Again, Ve- 
 nus is married to Vulcan, the god of blacksmiths, de- 
 formed and begrimmed with soot a marriage apparent- 
 ly so ill-assorted as to be the standing jest of all school- 
 boys ; for their teachers have not told them the mighty 
 truth that lies under this namely, how deeply indebted 
 the beautiful arts and adornments of life are, and how in- 
 dissolubly married to homely toil, sweltering at its fur- 
 nace; and so it is this same Vulcan, the Tu-Balcain of 
 Genesis thoughtless and ungrateful they who despise 
 him that peoples the halls of the gods, and embosses 
 the shields of monarchs, with elegance, thought, and 
 beauty. The haughty, amid their luxuries, while the 
 gems of art gleam on their walls, may look down on 
 brawny labor ; but the espousals have been ordained by 
 Jehovah himself the wedlock of the beautiful with the 
 toilsome, of Venus with Vulcan. How profound a truth, 
 too, in that allegory although Lucian, greatest master 
 of humor in the Greek literature, saw in it nothing but 
 absurdity of Minerva leaping full grown and in com- 
 plete armor from the brain of Jove; for Minerva was 
 wisdom, and wisdom is God's eldest and victor-born : 
 folly and sin are weak and defenseless things in the day 
 of trial ; but true thought and wisdom, child of God, goes 
 forth in triple mail, to conquer her way to the higher 
 happiness. 
 
 If we from fable pass to truth, we find the Old Testa- 
 ment types of kin with allegory : the Paschal Lamb is 
 carried every where round the world, proclaiming Jesus. 
 And so the Gothic cathedral, wondrous offspring of 
 Christianity, is a grand allegory in stone, which most 
 deeply impresses those who are most familiar with it. 
 Stand beneath these arches, and never again will you 
 
Figures of Rhetoric. 529 
 
 term those ages that produced them " the Dark Ages." 
 That cathedral pile is cruciform, to remind men of Cal- 
 vary ; its altar, directed toward the rising sun, summons 
 us to point our deepest feelings to the Deity; its lofti- 
 ness throughout symbolizes the soaring of holy thought ; 
 its massive stone represents matter, all inert in itself, but 
 wondrously impressible by mind and mental forces; its 
 three main towers tell of the Trinity ; its choir, temple 
 within temple-, pictures a pious soul incased in a conse- 
 crated body; its roses, scattered so profusely, represent 
 to the very eye the bloom of immortality ; its high pin- 
 nacles call us to aspire toward the heavens. 
 
 Our subject is finished. Whatever decision may be 
 come to, as to the way in which we have done our work, 
 the idea itself with which we started was worthy of a 
 lifetime ; very singular that no student of books or of 
 language ever suggested it before to test a whole liter- 
 ature by the light of figurative speech. And what a 
 miracle is the gift of articulation ; what a heritage ours, 
 the tongue of Shakespeare and of the Bible a speech 
 which, so far from having begun to wane, is far from 
 being as yet half developed. May the careful perusal 
 of this volume aid not a little in the reconstruction of 
 rhetoric ; disabuse the subject of the mean and narrow 
 opinions that prevail as to figures ; give higher weapons 
 to oratory and to poesy ; and secure more hallowed and 
 more undoubted triumphs to our modern Christian elo- 
 quence in all its many departments. And when the 
 quotations we have brought together are perused, may 
 every reader cherish the feeling that the American and 
 English literature are not two but one; and that these 
 nations are inseparable, whether we call it the British- 
 American race or the Columbian-British. More and 
 more may the two parts assimilate into one inseparable 
 commonwealth of liberty and of thinking and of devo- 
 tion a race destined to send this language over the 
 world. Therefore, as we venture to lay our book before 
 
 LL 
 
530 Might and Mirth of Literature. 
 
 that Christ from whom cometh the noblest inspiration, 
 we exclaim in our own words : 
 
 Religion lies about our feet in flowers, 
 And over-diadems our head in stars; 
 While Deity breathes round us in spring winds, 
 And in the hush of woods, saith, " Peace ! Be still 1" 
 While all the thunders call us to repentance ; 
 And Christ, high soul of music, love, and sunrise 
 Christ He of literature, theme, source, and model 
 Shows something of His smile in all that's fair, 
 And glimpses of His heart in all that's gentle ! 
 
LIST OF FIGURES OF SPEECH 
 
 DESCRIBED IN THIS VOLUME. 
 
 ' I. Aphseresis, Front-Cut. 55 
 - II. Syncope, Mid-Cut 64 
 
 III. Synaeresis 64 
 
 IV. Crasis 64 
 
 V. Synezesis, Synecphone- 
 
 sis 65 
 
 VI. Apocope, End-Cut 69 
 
 VII. Prosthesis, Prefixing. . . 76 
 VIII. Epenthesis, Insertion.. 80 
 IX. Paragoge, Annexation. Si 
 X. Diaeresis, Separation . . 85 
 XI. Tmesis, Diacope, Cut- 
 ting 86 
 
 XII. Metathesis, Twisting... 87 
 
 XIII. Intentional Misspelling. 89 
 
 XIV. Syllabification 90 
 
 XV. Dialect 91 
 
 XVI. The Alphabetic 91 
 
 XVII. Combination 92 
 
 XVIII. Accentuation. . . t^jjj_^__2i 
 
 XIX. Ellipsis 97, 
 
 XX. Asyndeton, Lack of 
 
 Ands 117 
 
 XXI. Polysyndeton, Many 
 
 Ands 121 
 
 XXII. Zeugma, Joining 127 
 
 XXIII. Syllepsis, Synesis, Syn- 
 
 thesis 128 
 
 XXIV. Paradiastole, Neithers 
 
 and Nors 128 
 
 XXV. Pleonasm, Superfluity. 129 
 
 XXVI. Me-ism 133 
 
 XXVII. Hypallage, The Cart 
 
 before the Horse... 133 
 
 NO. PAGE 
 
 XXVIII. Enallage, Exchange. 138 
 
 XXIX. Antiptosis 140 
 
 XXX. Antemeria 140 
 
 XXXI. Heterosis 140 
 
 XXXII. Metastasis 144 
 
 XXXIII. Hyperbaton, Trans- 
 
 position, Inver- 
 sion 147 
 
 XXXIV. Anastrophe 151 
 
 XXXV. Simile 156* 
 
 XXXVI. Metaphor.... 184 
 
 XXXVII. Metonymy 202 
 
 XXXVIII. Synecdoche 218 
 
 XXXIX. Metalepsis 219 
 
 XL. Trope 221 
 
 XLI. Hypocatastasis, Im- 
 plication 23 1 
 
 XLII. Epanorthosis, Cor- 
 rection 239 
 
 XLIII. Anamnesis, Recall- 
 ing 242 
 
 XLIV. Aposiopesis, Sud- 
 den Silence 242 
 
 XLV. Sudden Self- Inter- 
 ruption 243 
 
 XLVI. Emblem 244 
 
 XLVII. The Weird 247 
 
 XLVIII. The Quaint 248 
 
 XLIX. Antithesis, Epanti- 
 
 osis 248 
 
 L. Antimetabole 250 
 
 LI. Parison, Annomi- 
 
 nation 250 
 
 LI I. Omoioteleuton 250 
 
List of Figures of Speech. 
 
 53 2 
 
 NO. PAGE 
 
 LIII. Isocolon 251 
 
 LIV. Commutation 251 
 
 LV. Intentional Dis- 
 crepancy 263 
 
 LVI. Nonsense 264 
 
 LVII. Oxymoron, Wise 
 
 Folly 265 
 
 LVIII. Euphemism, Smooth " 
 
 Handle 269 
 
 LIX. Misnomer 271 
 
 LX. Hyperbole, Exag- 
 geration 271 
 
 LXT. Peculiarity of Usage 278 
 LXII. Litotes, Meiosis,' 
 
 Lessening 280 
 
 LXIII. The Bull 282 
 
 LXIV. Repetition 288 
 
 LXV. Ploce 288 
 
 LXVI. Gemination 289 
 
 LXVII. Anaphora, Epana- 
 
 phora 289 
 
 LXVIIL Epistrophe, Anti- 
 strophe, Epepho- 
 ra, Conversion. .. 289 
 
 LXIX. Symploce 290 
 
 LXX. Anadiplosis 290 
 
 LXXI. Epadiplosis, Epa- 
 
 nadiplosis 290 
 
 LXXII. Complection 290 
 
 LXXIII, .Epanalepsis 290 
 
 LXXIV. Epanodos, Regres- 
 sion 291 
 
 LXXV. Polyptolon 291 
 
 LXXV.I. Epizeuxis, Tra- 
 
 duction 291 
 
 LXX VII. Paregmenon 291 
 
 LXXVIII. Summation 291 
 
 LXXIX. Choral Chant. ..... 293 
 
 LXXX. .Echo 297 
 
 LXXXI. Redoubled Negation 297 
 LXXXII. Redo-ubled Affir- 
 mation 298 
 
 LXXXIII. Synonym 301 
 
 LXXXIV. Ascription of Value 303 
 LXXXV. Doubt, Dubitation. . 303 
 LXXXVI. Pretended Discov- 
 ery 306 
 
 NO. 
 
 LXXXVII. 
 
 LXXXVIII. 
 
 LXXXIX. 
 
 XC. 
 
 XCI. 
 
 XCII. 
 XCIII. 
 XCIV. 
 
 xcv. 
 
 XCVI. 
 XCVII. 
 
 XCVIII. 
 XCIX. 
 
 c. 
 
 CL 
 
 en. 
 
 cm. 
 
 CIV. 
 
 cv. 
 
 CVI. 
 CVII. 
 
 CVIII. 
 CIX. 
 
 ex. 
 
 CXI. 
 
 CXII. 
 CXIII. 
 CXIV. 
 
 cxv. 
 
 CXVI. 
 CXVII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Aporia, Pretended i 
 Impossibility... 306 
 
 Ignorance 306 
 
 Indistinctness 307 
 
 Affirmation 309 
 
 Affirmation and 
 Negation ...... 310 
 
 Apostrophe 310 "~ 
 
 Denunciation 315 
 
 Solemn Appeal. . 315 
 
 Oath, Adjuration, 
 Anathema 317 
 
 Command 318 
 
 Exclamation of 
 Sorrow 319 
 
 Spiritualization. . . .320 
 
 Irony, The Dry 
 Mock 321 
 
 Antiphrasis,The 
 Broad Flout 323 
 
 Ironical Permis- 
 sion or Ironical 
 Command 324 
 
 Anti-Irony, Pre- 
 tended Blame . . 324 
 
 Mock-Heroic 325 
 
 Personification, 
 
 Prosopopeia. . . . 325 
 
 Ascription of In- 
 tention 334 
 
 Anti-Personifi- 
 cation 335 
 
 Enhancement by 
 Difference 339 
 
 Egoism 341 
 
 Self-Depreciation. 342 
 
 Paranomasia, The 
 Pun 343 
 
 Antanaclasis, 
 Same Word in r 
 Different Sense. 343 
 
 Soliloquy 345 
 
 Direct Address ... 345 / 
 
 Dialogue 347 \J 
 
 Prediction 353 
 
 Anticipation 355 
 
 Paralepsis 355 
 
List of Figures of Speech. 
 
 533 
 
 NO. 
 
 t/CXVIII. 
 CXIX. 
 
 cxx. 
 
 CXXI. 
 
 CXXII. 
 CXXIII. 
 
 ,/CXXIV. 
 
 cxxv. 
 
 CXX VI. 
 
 l^CXXVII. 
 
 CXXVIII. 
 
 CXXIX. 
 
 cxxx. 
 
 CXXXI. 
 CXXXII. 
 
 CXXXIII. 
 CXXXIV. 
 
 cxxxv. 
 
 CXXXVII. 
 
 CXXXVIII. 
 CXXXIX. 
 
 CXL. 
 
 CXLI. 
 
 CXLII. 
 
 CXLIII. 
 
 CXLIV. 
 
 CXLV. 
 
 CXLVI. 
 
 CXLVIL 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Apophasis, Pre- 
 tended Omission 355 
 
 Disparity 356 
 
 Outward Illustra- 
 tion 357 
 
 Accompaniment, 
 Incidentalism of 
 the Moment ... 359 
 Meeting of Oppo- 
 
 sites 360 
 
 Onomatopy, Sound 
 Resembling 
 
 Sense 361 
 
 Erotesis, Interro- 
 gation 365 
 
 Responsion, Ques- 
 tion and Answer 372 
 Ecphonesis.Excla- 
 
 mation 374 
 
 Epiphonema 374 
 
 Nomination^ 376 
 
 Technicality 378 
 
 Indication 378 
 
 Vision 380 
 
 Hypotyposis, Visi- 
 ble Presentation 383 
 Present Occurrence 384 
 
 Hearing 384 
 
 Motion 387 
 
 Climax, Ladder, 
 Incrementum, 
 
 Epiploce 390 
 
 Anti-Climax, Cat- 
 abasis, Ladder 
 to get Down by. 394 
 From Less to 
 
 Greater 394 
 
 From Greater to 
 
 Less 395 
 
 Parallelism 398 
 
 Numeration 399 
 
 Sudden Address. . 404 
 
 Surprisal 406 
 
 Reservation 407 
 
 Pause 408 
 
 Double Meaning . 409 
 Memesis, Mimicry 409 
 
 NO. 
 
 CXLVIII. 
 
 CXLIX. 
 
 CL. 
 
 CLI. 
 
 CLII. 
 CLIII. 
 
 CLIV. 
 
 CLV. 
 
 CLVI. 
 
 CLVII. 
 
 CLVIII. 
 
 CLIX. 
 
 CLX. 
 
 CLXI. 
 
 CLXII. 
 CLXIII. 
 CLXIV. 
 
 CLXV. 
 
 CLXVI. 
 CLXVIL 
 
 CLXVIII. 
 
 CLXIX. 
 
 CLXX. 
 
 CLXXI. 
 
 CLXXII. 
 
 CLXXIII. 
 
 CLXXIV. 
 
 CLXXV. 
 
 CLXXVI. 
 
 CLXXVII. 
 
 CLXXVIII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Archaism 411 
 
 Concession 411 
 
 Paramologia 411 
 
 Synchoresis, Per- 
 mission 411 
 
 Prohibition 415 
 
 Indirect Statement, 
 Coverture, The 
 Gentle Hint. ... 417 
 Specification of De- 
 tails... 420 
 
 Plurals 425 
 
 Optation, Wish ... 425 
 Anacoenosis, Ap- 
 plying to Oppo- 
 nent or Hearer. . 426 
 
 Supposition 427 
 
 Isolation 428 
 
 Unification 430 
 
 Assumption of 
 
 Agreement 431 
 
 Pretended Assent. 432 
 
 Interpolation 432 
 
 Catachresis. 434 
 
 Anacoluthon,Twist 
 
 in Grammar 435 
 
 Affirmative Nega- 
 tion 435 
 
 Negative Affirma- 
 tion 436 
 
 Community 437 
 
 Proprietorship.... 437 
 
 Prolepsis. 438 
 
 Procatalepsis, Pre- 
 supposing of Ad- 
 versary's Argu- 
 ment 438 
 
 Self-Substitution. . 440 
 
 Retort 440 
 
 Conversion 441 
 
 The Prosaic 442 
 
 Indirection 443 
 
 Oratorical Syllep- 
 sis : a Word used 
 both Literally 
 and Figuratively AJ\J\ 
 Attitude ^4 
 
534 
 
 List of Figures of Speech. 
 
 NO. 
 
 CLXXIX. 
 
 CLXXX. 
 CLXXXI. 
 
 CLXXXII. 
 CLXXXIII. 
 
 CLXXXIV. 
 CLXXXV. 
 
 ^CLXXXVI. 
 CLXXXVII. 
 
 CLXXXVIII. 
 
 CLXXXIX. 
 
 CXC. 
 
 CXCI. 
 
 CXCII. 
 
 CXCIII. 
 
 CXC IV. 
 
 cxcv. 
 
 CXCVI. 
 ' CXCVII. 
 CXCVIII. 
 
 CXCIX. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Oracular Sum- 
 ming up 448 
 
 Abbreviation . . . 450 
 
 Hendiadys, Split- 
 ting into Two. 450 
 
 Antonomasia, 
 Proper Name. 450 
 
 Alliteration, Ho- 
 moeopropheron 451 
 
 Poetic Forms. . . 456 
 
 Sudden Transi- 
 tion 459 
 
 Allusion 461 
 
 Hint or Sugges- 
 tion 465 
 
 Ascription of De- 
 termination. . . 466 
 
 Periphrasis, Cir- 
 cumlocution . . 466 
 
 Superfine En- 
 glish 474 
 
 Interpretation. . . 474 
 
 Proverbs 475 
 
 The Third Per- 
 son 477 
 
 Odd Rhyme 478 
 
 Odd Bits of 
 Prose . '. 479 
 
 Household 
 Words 479 
 
 Pretended De- 
 preciation 480 
 
 Rhetorical Use 
 of the Past . . . 480 
 
 Rhetorical Use 
 of the Future. 481 
 
 NO. PAGE 
 
 CC. Ascription of Ration- 
 ality to Lower An- 
 imals 482 
 
 CCI. Nicknames 484 
 
 CCII. The Doric 485 
 
 CCIII. Impersonation, 
 Character-act- 
 ing 485 
 
 CCIV. The Materialistic. . . 486 
 CCY. The Singular Num- 
 ber 487 
 
 CCVI. Double Nouns and 
 other Double 
 
 Words 488 
 
 CCVII. Celerity 489 
 
 CCVIII. Epithetic 490 
 
 CCIX. Passing over from 
 the Literal to the 
 
 Figurative 491 
 
 CCX. Threat 492 
 
 CCXI. Repose 492 
 
 CCXII. Bulk 494 
 
 CCXIII. Classicality 495 
 
 CCXIV. Rallying-Cries 495 
 
 CCXV. Appeal to Knowl- 
 edge 496 
 
 CCXVI. Reverse 496 
 
 CCXVII. SpecificationofPlace 496 
 
 CCX VIII. Specification of Time 496 
 
 CCXIX. Cry of Warning.... 497 
 
 CCXX. Familiarity 498 
 
 CCXXI. The Obverse 499 
 
 CCXXII. Parody 512 
 
 CCXXIII. Idioms 513 
 
 CCXXIV. Parable 518 
 
 CCXXV. Allegory 521 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abbadie, 346, 387. 
 Abernethy, Dr., 515. 
 Abraham, xlv. 
 Adams, John Quincy, 255. 
 
 , Thomas, 141. 
 
 Addison, xxxix., 1., 92, 112, 129, 176, 194, 223, 
 
 265, 516. 
 
 ^Eschines, 1 89, 430. 
 ^Esop, 483, 514. 
 Ailsa Craig, 132. 
 Akenside, 102. 
 Albert, Prince, 385. 
 Alcsus, 369. 
 
 Alexander, 379, 381, 486, 491. 
 Alfred, 104, 136. 
 Alhama, 294. 
 
 Alison, Sir Archibald, 196. 
 Allegories, none in the Bible, 522. 
 Allingham, 334. 
 Allston, 226. 
 
 Ambiguities of English, 516. 
 Ames, 213, 226, 235, 412, 473. 
 Amos, 469. 
 Anglo-Saxon, 104. 
 Anselm, 352. 
 Anthon, Prof., 167. 
 Arbroath, 410. 
 Ariosto, 152. 
 Aristophanes, 513. 
 Aristotle, his Prayer, 336. 
 Arnold, Edwin, 282. 
 
 , Matthew, 73. 
 
 Arthur, William, 421. 
 
 Atheism despicable, 65, 165, 166, 174, 177, 183, 
 
 1 86, 190,202,206,337. 
 Atkinson, xlviii. 
 Augustine, 252. 
 Author of this volume gives us twenty-one 
 
 bits of poesy, lii., liii., 58, 72, 98, 147, 199, 200, 
 
 220, 245, 334, 376, 387, 437, 455, 457, 465, 475, 
 
 492, 520, 530. 
 Avonmore, Lord, 43 1. 
 Ayton, Sir Robert, 61. 
 Aytoun, Prof., 94, 214, 270, 325. 
 
 Bacon, Lord, 162, 177, 235, 251. 
 
 Baillie, Joanna, 95, 214. 
 
 Ballads, 189, 293, 402, 507. 
 
 Bancroft, 190. 
 
 Barbauld, Mrs., 223, 266. 
 
 Barbour, 311. 
 
 Barham, 81. 
 
 Barnes, Albert, 369. 
 
 , William, 91. 
 
 Bascom, Prof., 154, 481. 
 
 Bayle, 109. 
 
 Bayly, 65. 
 
 Bayne, 171,253. 
 
 Bearcroft, 71. 
 
 Beattie, Dr., 83, 510. 
 
 Beaumont, 67, 213. 
 
 Beddoes, 243. 
 
 Bedell, 388. 
 
 Bedford, Duke of, 426. 
 
 Beecher, H. W., xlvii., 179, 259, 292, 434. 
 
 , Lyman, 209. 
 
 Bernard, Lady Anne, 399, 424. 
 
 , St., 2 56, 3 70. 
 
 Bethune, Dr., 423. 
 
 Bible, xli., li., 166, 169, 187, 188, 198, 205, 206, 
 208, 210, 211, 217, 218, 220, 232, 236, 240, 241, 
 243, 248, 267, 268, 270, 271, 272, 288, 290, 291, 
 293, 301, 304, 307, 3io, 315. 32i, 324, 325, 327, 
 334, 336, 338, 345, 346, 347? 357, 359, 367. 3?6, 
 380, 388, 390, 395, 396, 398, 399, 400, 406, 407, 
 409, 411, 412, 415, 424, 426, 428, 435, 438, 442, 
 443,448,487,489. 
 
 , Panegyric on, by a good Roman Cath- 
 olic, 509. 
 
 Bigelow Papers, 80. 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine, xxxviii. 
 
 Blair, Dr., 3 1 1, 383. 
 
 Blennerhasset, 407. 
 
 Boker, G. H., 203. 
 
 Bolingbroke, Lord, 174. 
 
 Bonar, Horatius, 247. 
 
 Bossuet, 268, 359, 429. 
 
 Boston, City of, 425. 
 
 Boswell, James, 149. 
 
536 
 
 Index. 
 
 Boswell, Sir Alexander, 338. 
 
 Bothwell, Lady Ann, 153, 154. 
 
 Bourdaloue, 268, 394, 407. 
 
 Bowes, xiix. 
 
 Bowles, 95. 
 
 Boyd, Dr., 219 ; on Milton, 107, 424. 
 
 Breitman, Hans, xlviii. 
 
 Brewster, Sir David, 235. 
 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 333. 
 
 Brougham, Lord, 315, 341, 349, 420; 
 
 Brown, Dr. Thomas, xli., 261, 234, 246, 318: 
 
 , Gould, 141, 434. 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 155, 193. 
 
 Browning, Mrs., 131, 143, 171. 
 
 Bruce, Michael, 313. 
 
 Brunanburh, Battle and Song, 136. 
 
 Bryant, William Cullen, excellent advice by, 
 
 75, 108. * 
 
 Brydges, Sir Egerton, 107. 
 Buchanan, George, 250. 
 Bulwer the Elder, 148, 372. 
 
 the Younger, 332. 
 
 Bunyan, John, 177, 227, 523. 
 
 Burke, 50, 74, 234, 235, 237, 268, 412, 420, 449, 
 
 516. 
 
 Bumet, 367. 
 Burns, 1., 55, 65, 76, 94, 114, 132, 139, 142, 159, 
 
 179, 260, 264, 270, 273, 306, 339. 360, 457, 473, 
 
 495. 5i8. 
 Burr, 407. 
 
 Bushnell, 120, 168, 213, 400. 
 Butler, General, 464. 
 
 , Hudibras, 66, 69, 274. 
 Byrom, 61. 
 Byron, Hi., 95, 148, 152, 153, 164, 186, 192, 238, 
 
 253, 333, 36i, 368, 375, 385, 5i5- 
 
 Csedmon, 468. 
 
 Caesar, 102, 108, 134, 144, 145, 251. 
 
 Caird, Dr., 165. 
 
 Cairn, a, 490. 
 
 Calderon, 449. 
 
 Callanan, 182. 
 
 Camoens, 239. 
 
 Campbell, Dr., 165, 249, 425. 
 
 , Lord, xliii., 317. 
 
 , Thomas, lii., 59, 186, 192, 223, 233, 307, 
 
 32% 359, 362. 
 
 Canning, 207, 329, 358, 418. 
 Cant terms denounced, 515. 
 Carlyle, 130, 200, 448 ; on Burns, 507. 
 Gary, no. 
 
 , Alice, 435- 
 
 Catiline, 101, 265, 322. 
 Catullus, 332. 
 Cervantes, 258, 476. 
 Chalmers, 242, 249, 488. 
 Chamberlayne, 66. 
 Chamisso, 200, 483. 
 
 Character-paintir.r, 78. 
 Charles II., 109. 
 
 V.,472. 
 
 XII. of Sweden, 99. 
 
 Chatham, Lord, 171, 288, 353, 358, 412, 417, 
 
 425,464,472,480. 
 Chaucer, xxxii., 56, 62, 69, 72, 76, 78, 110, 145, 
 
 281,423. 
 
 Cheever, Rev. Dr., 526. 
 Cherry, Andrew, 103. 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 158, 426. 
 Chevy Chace, 56, 129. 
 Chillingworth, 402. 
 
 Christ, xlvi., li., liii., 121, 122, 229, 530. 
 Chrysostom, 305, 415. 
 Churchill, 453. 
 Cicero, 124, 129, 133, 167, 251, 265, 290, 291, 
 
 302,306,316,516. 
 Clare, John, 445. . 
 Clark, George H., 248. 
 , Willis G., 226. 
 
 Clarke, MacDonalcl, 99. 
 
 Classics, Reason for Studying, xlix. 
 
 Claverhouse, Bloody, 270. 
 
 Clay, Henry, 452. 
 
 Clifford, 225. 
 
 Cochrane, 347. 
 
 Coe, 228. 
 
 Colenso, Bishop, 401. 
 
 Coleridge, Hartley, 67. 
 
 , S. T., 161, 248, 269, 282, 363, 515. 
 
 Collins, Ann, 58. 
 
 , William, 330, 365. 
 
 Comus, 85. 
 
 Conde', 268. 
 
 Congreve, William", 90, 303, 381, 386, 403, 423. 
 
 Contemporaries of Shakespeare, 67. 
 
 Cook, Eliza, 369. 
 
 Coppee. Prof., 302. 
 
 Corbett, 364. 
 
 Coriolanus, 395, 473. 
 
 Cornwall, Barry, 59. 
 
 Cosmarch, 502. 
 
 Cotton, 465. 
 
 Courier, Paul Louis, 497. 
 
 Cowley, 177, 238, 271. 
 
 Cowper, William, 152, 215, 273, 335, 341, 457, 
 
 480. 
 
 Crabbe, 94, 253." 
 Craik, Dr., 183, 510. . 
 Crashaw, 71, 225, 451. 
 Creasy, 496. 
 Croker, 213. 
 Croly, 322. 
 
 Cromwell, 183, 288, 510. 
 Croon, 1., 62. 
 Gumming, 414. 
 Cunningham, Allan, 195, 214. 
 , John, 331.. 
 
Index. 
 
 537 
 
 Curran, 68, 127, 289, 394, 421, 431. 
 Cyprian, 398. 
 
 Dana, 108, 254. 
 
 Daniel, Samuel, 237. 
 
 Danish Literature, 294. 
 
 Dante, 108, 150, 365. 
 
 Danton, 420. 
 
 Dark Age of English Literature, 77. 
 
 Darwin the Elder, 314, 365 ; and his Ape, 
 
 174^462. 
 Dasent, 274. 
 Davenant, 276. 
 Davis, Thomas, 334. 
 Davy, Sir Humphrey, 391. 
 Day, Prof., 290. 
 
 Deepest Source of Figures, 183. 
 Defoe, 251, 515. 
 Dekker, 65, 67. 
 Delambert, Madame, 477. 
 Demosthenes, 115, 123-1.46, 157, 186, 235, 289, 
 
 297. 304, 3i5, 322, 336. 341, 347, 348, 356, 365, 
 
 406, 425, 430, 433, 441, 444, 466, 493. 
 Denham, 177. 
 De Quincey, 155, 200. 
 Dibdin, 175. 
 Dickens, 92. 
 Diogenes, 70. 
 Doane, Bishop, 101. 
 Doddridge, 128. 
 Donne, 470. 
 Doric, 71. 
 Dorset Dialect, 91. 
 Douglas, Gawin, 327. 
 
 , Tragedy of, 42. 
 
 Downing, Major Jack, 346. 
 
 Drake, 326, 453. 
 
 Drayton, 59. 
 
 Drumclog, Battle of, 270. 
 
 Dryden, xxx., 62, in, 174, 183, 190, 238, 249, 
 
 254, 276, 365, 480, 510. 
 Dumas the Younger, 298. 
 Dunbar, 236, 326. 
 Dunciad, 62. 
 Dutch Landscape, 118. 
 D wight, 141. 
 Dyer, 362. 
 
 Earle, Bishop, 256. 
 Ecclesiastical Polity, 87. 
 Edgewortli, Miss, 64, 283. 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 429. 
 
 , Prof. B. B., 100, 309. 
 Elahistoteros, 267. 
 Eliot, George, 454. 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 67. 
 Elliott, Ebenezer, 184. 
 Ellsworth, Erastus, 471. 
 Emerson, 281. 
 
 Emmons, Dr., 160. 
 English Language, 57, 135. 
 
 only half developed, 501. 
 
 Epithets, two kinds of, 334. 
 Erskine, Harry, 343, 344, 438. 
 
 , Lord, 240, 316, 323, 431. 
 
 Euphues, 60, 181, 195. 
 Euripides, 189. 
 Evans, Christmas, 103, 385. . 
 Everett, 382, 419. 
 Exodus, chap, xv., 117., 
 
 Faber, F. W., 509. 
 Faerie Queene, 79. 
 Falconer, 409. 
 Falstaff, 70, 133. 
 Fanshaw, Sir Richard, 214. 
 Faval, 466. 
 Fenton, Elijah, 451. 
 Ferguson, Robert, 222. 
 -, Samuel, 320. 
 
 Fern, Fanny, 149. 
 
 Field, 319. 
 
 Fielding, 89, 433. 
 
 Figures of three kinds, 55, 156; of four kinds, 
 
 230. 
 
 not yet discovered, 506. 
 
 Fle"chier, 342. 
 
 Fletcher, Giles, 72, 142, 148, 209, 272, 309, 
 
 380. 
 
 , John, 67. 
 
 , Phineas, 109. 
 
 Fontaine, 483. 
 
 Fontenelle, 97. 
 
 Foote, 97. 
 
 Ford, 67. 
 
 Fosdick, 182. 
 
 Foster, John, 238. 
 
 Fox, Charles J., 373, 434. 
 
 ;,W.J.,39i. 
 
 Francis I. of France, 107. 
 
 Franklin, Dr., 344, 479. 
 
 Freeman, 203. 
 
 Freneau, 295. 
 
 Frere, 325, 460. 
 
 Froude, 203. 
 
 Fuller, Thomas, 141, 230, 330, 344, 476, 513. 
 
 Galileo, 225. 
 Garrick, 427, 445. 
 Gay, 58, 443- 
 Geare, 406. 
 Gentle Shepherd, 71. 
 George 1 1 1., 58, 426. 
 Gibbon, 162. 
 Gibbons, 219. 
 Gilfillan, 469, 471. 
 Gladstone, 365.. 
 Glover, in. 
 
538 
 
 Index. 
 
 God, 1 1 8, 228. 
 
 Godwin, 195. 
 
 Goethe, no, in, 368. 
 
 Goldsmith, 164, 202, 361. 
 
 Gonsalvo, 442. 
 
 Goodrich, 412. 
 
 Gothic Cathedral, 528. 
 
 Gould, 427. 
 
 Gower, 56, 69, 199. 
 
 Grahame, 374. 
 
 Grant, Sir Robert, 209. 
 
 Grattan, 335, 354, 473- 
 
 Gray, 151, 172, 178, 190, 260, 364, 450, 468. 
 
 Greece, 391. 
 
 Greek, 49, 502. 
 
 Mythology explained, 527. 
 Green, 462. 
 
 Greene, 67. 
 
 Gregory I., 252. 
 
 Grenville, 464. 
 
 Griffin, Dr., 289, 354, 426, 440. 
 
 Griswold, 252. 
 
 Guarini, 214. 
 
 Guizot, 97, 470. 
 
 Guthrie, Rev. Dr. Thomas, 197, 382, 498. 
 
 Habakkuk, 100. 
 Habington, 170. 
 Hall, Bishop, 447. 
 
 , Rev. Robert, 251, 274. 
 
 , the Missionary, 408. 
 
 Halleck, 260. 
 
 Hamilton, Alexander, 463. 
 
 Hancock, John, 344. 
 
 Hare, 186, 255, 404. 
 
 Harms, 241. 
 
 Harrington, Sir John, 57, 275. 
 
 Harry, Blind, 56. 
 
 Hart, Dr., 257. 
 
 Harte, Bret, 56. 
 
 Harvey, Rev. James, 204. 
 
 Hastings, Warren, 3 1 3. 
 
 Hawke, Sir Edward, 426. 
 
 Hazlitt, 496. 
 
 Hemans, Mrs., 207. 
 
 Henry IV., of France, 119, 419. 
 
 VIII., of England, xliv., 472. 
 
 , Matthew, xlix., 470. 
 
 , Patrick, 418. 
 
 Henryson, 403. 
 
 Herbert, George, 248, 350, 380. 
 
 , Hon. William, 224. 
 Herder, 241. 
 Herrick, 334. 
 Heywood, Hi. 
 Higginson, Colonel, 268. 
 Hill, Aaron, 204. 
 
 , Rowland, 265, 349, 519. 
 
 Hillard, George S., 261. 
 
 Hillhouse, 73. 
 Hitchcock, Rev. Dr., 269. 
 Hoffman, 326. 
 Hogarth, 117. 
 Hogg, 3 13. 
 
 Holmes, Dr., 88, 212 ; on Rhetoric, xxxix. 
 Holyoake, 304. 
 Home, a Christian, 120. 
 , John, xli. 
 
 Homely Illustrations much recommended, 
 
 179, 503- 
 Homer, 62, 134, 150, 152, 167, 181, 215, 246, 
 
 249. 
 Hood, Robin, 59. 
 
 , Thomas, 130, 264, 266, 278. 
 
 Hooker, Richard, 86, 149, 155. 
 
 , Thomas, 298, 388. 
 
 Hope, 273. 
 
 Horace, 133. 226, 434, 450. 
 
 Hosmer, W. H. C, 103. 
 
 Howell, Mary, 130, 261. 
 
 Hoyt, 295. 
 
 Hudson, 193. 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 420, 481. 
 
 Hume, David, 116. 
 
 Humphrey, Dr., 504. 
 
 Hunt, Arabella, 381. 
 
 , Leigh, lii., 107, 330. 
 
 Hyacinthe, Pere (Charles Loyson), 488. 
 
 Ingelow, Jean, 339. 
 Invention, Aids to, liii. 
 Irelands, the two, 296. 
 Irishwoman, 89. 
 
 Irving, Washington, 41, 63, 186, 191, 232, 
 237- 
 
 Jackson, 259. 
 James, Angell, 415. 
 
 I., of England, 67, 250. 
 
 Jamieson, Mrs., 119. 
 
 Jeffrey, Lord, 127. 
 
 Jerrold, xlviii., 56, 97, 190, 216, 238, 277, 282, 
 
 472. 
 Johnson, Dr., 99, 108, 115, 116, 155, 221, 235, 
 
 237, 248, 249, 311, 386, 460, 469, 470. 
 Jones, 369. 
 
 Jonson, Ben, 60, 67, 104, 195, 265. 
 Judges ix., 7-21, 518. 
 Jugurtha, 101. 
 Junius, 172, 205, 248, 412, 427, 435. 
 
 Keats, John, 72, 145, 203, 310, 355. 
 Kent, Judge, 127. 
 King, Rev. Mr., 270. 
 Kingsley, 219, 291. 
 Knight, Charles, xlviii. 
 Knowles, Herbert, 368. 
 , Sheridan, 312. 
 
Index. 
 
 539 
 
 Knut, or Canute, 468. 
 Korner, 353. 
 Kosegarten, 299. 
 Kossuth, 213. 
 
 Lamartine, 118. 
 
 Lamb, 92, 210, 274, 344. 
 
 Landon, Miss, 223. 
 
 Langlande, 79, 84, 143, 453. 
 
 Language, xxxix., 128. 
 
 Lamed, 379. 
 
 Latimer, Hugh, 510. 
 
 Latin, xlix. 
 
 Lauder, Maggie, 459. 
 
 Lee, 122. 
 
 Leland, xlviii., 352. 
 
 Leon, 344. 
 
 L' Estrange, Roger, 514. 
 
 Lewis, M. G., 310. 
 
 Lever, Charles, 319. 
 
 Leyden, John, 223. 
 
 Liberty, 117. 
 
 distinguished from Freedom, 302. 
 Lillo, 372. 
 
 Lisle, Rouget de, 386. 
 Livingston, Dr. John, 408. 
 Livy, 217. 
 Locke, John, 173. 
 Lockhart, 448. 
 Lodbrog, Regnor, 467. 
 Lodge, Thomas, 161. 
 Loftinga, 468. 
 
 Longfellow, 140, 460, 466, 526. 
 Longinus, 180. 
 Louis XIV., 429. 
 Lowe, 233. 
 
 Lowell, James R., 80, 199, 323. 
 Lowth, Bishop, 324. 
 Luther, 213, 303, 469, 488, 498. 
 Lydgate, 370. 
 Lyell, 206. 
 Lyly, John, 60. 
 Lyndsay, Sir David, 410. 
 Lyttelton, Lord, 210, 412, 445. 
 Lyttons. (See Bulwers.) 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, xlvi., 87, 95, 165, 250, 257, 409, 
 
 499 ; on Milton, very noble, 507. 
 Macchiavelli, 371. 
 Macdonald, George, 266. 
 Mackay, 369. 
 Mackenzie, 175. 
 Mackintosh, 244, 433. 
 Mandeville, Sir John, xliv. 
 Mangan, 147. 
 Mansfield, Lord, 393, 417. 
 Marat, 420. 
 
 Marchmont, Lord, 417. 
 Mardley, 138. 
 
 Marlowe, 67, 275. 
 Marseillaise Hymn, 386. 
 Marsh, 76, 457. 
 Marston, 67, 327. 
 Martineau, Miss, xlviii., 269. 
 Marvel, Andrew, 72. 
 Mason, Dr. John, 342. 
 -, William, 328. 
 
 Massillon, 268, 429. 
 Massinger, 67. 
 Masson, Dr., 289. 
 Matthews the Elder, 399. 
 May, Edith, 77. 
 McCarthy, Dennis, 132, 263. 
 McFingal, 266. 
 McLellan, 452. 
 McQueen, 469. 
 Medley, 261, 508. 
 Mennis, 82. 
 Metaphysics, 472. 
 Mickle, 239, 296. 
 Mill, John Stuart, 462. 
 Miller, Hugh, 235, 470. 
 
 , Joaquin, 455. 
 
 , Joe, 403. 
 
 , William, 306, 324. 
 
 Mills, the Missionary, 408. 
 Milman, in. 
 Milner, 193. 
 
 Milton, xlviii., 1., lii., 62, 82, 8, 90, 93, 94, 107, 
 109, 112, 113, 142, 148, 149, 153, 169, 188, 189, 
 
 211, 212, 213, 2l6, 217, 222, 224, 225, 227, 245, 
 
 265, 280, 283, 290, 298, 308, 363, 377, 389, 402, 
 
 448,450,456,461. 
 
 Minto, 499. 
 
 Mitford, Miss, no, 172. 
 
 Moir, Macbeth, lii., 166. 
 
 Moliere, 202. 
 
 Monboddo, Lord, 174. 
 
 Montague, Lady Mary Wortley, 471. 
 
 Montaigne, xxxviii., 193. 
 
 Montgomery, Alexander, 382. 
 
 , James, 176. 
 
 , Robert, 170, 195. 
 
 Moore, Thomas, 87, 98, 164, 512. 
 More, Hannah, 252. 
 
 , Sir Thomas, xliiL 
 
 Morris, George P., 59. 
 , William, 454. 
 
 Moses, 434. 
 
 Mosheim, 193. 
 
 Motley, n 8. 
 
 Motherwell, 222. 
 
 Mott, Rev. Dr., liii., 491, 503. 
 
 Mudie, 172. 
 
 Mulock, 237. 
 
 Murray, Lindley, 434. 
 
 Music in English Language, xlix. 
 
 Mythology, Greek, 527. 
 
540 
 
 Index. 
 
 Napoleon, 196, 311, 421, 446. 
 
 Nash, 67. 
 
 Neale, Henry, 72. 
 
 New Figures still to be found, 506. 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 105. 
 
 New Words, 501. 
 
 North, Christopher, xxxviii., 496. 
 
 Nun, by Chaucer, 78. 
 
 One-syllabled Words, li. 
 Osgood, Mrs., 119, 179. 
 O'Reilly, Miles, 69. 
 Ossian, 311. 
 Overbury, 167. 
 Owen, Dr., 251. 
 
 Paine, Tom, 237. 
 
 Paley, Dr., 359, 514. 
 
 Palgrave, 135. 
 
 Palmer, 191. 
 
 Panza, Sancho, 476. 
 
 Parnell, 207. 
 
 Parsons, T.W., 454. 
 
 Partington, Mrs., 88, 234. 
 
 Patmore, 268. 
 
 Paul, St., 215, 267, 280, 289, 306, 355, 356, 357, 
 426,432,442,445. 
 
 Paulding, 167. 
 
 Payson, 428. 
 
 Peace, Poem on, from Spanish, 511. 
 
 Peacham, Henry, 115. 
 
 Pearson, Bishop, 255. 
 
 Peele, 67, 327. 
 
 Percival, 142. 
 
 Percy, Bishop, 130, 424, 467, 509. 
 
 Periodic Sentence, 155. 
 
 Perrault, 466. 
 
 Peter, 469. 
 
 Phillips, Wendell, 471. 
 
 Phunny Phellow, 90. 
 
 Pickering, no, 218. 
 
 Pierpont, 60, 240; 
 
 Piers the Plowman, 79, 143, 453. 
 
 Pindar, Peter. (See Wolcott.) 
 
 Pitt, William, 441, 447. 
 
 Plato, 152. 
 
 Plunket, 321. 
 
 Plutarch, 388, 489. 
 
 Pocahontas, 77. 
 
 Poe, Edgar, 101, 174. 
 
 Poesy discriminated from Poetry, by your Au- 
 thor, 182. 
 
 Poetry, English, Four Eras, 79. 
 
 Pollok, 212. 
 
 Poole, 275. 
 
 Pope, 62, 94,97, 158, 173, 174,249, 273, 362,375, 
 408,411,462,469,480. 
 
 Porson, 162. 
 
 Prayer, Grandeur of, 336. 
 
 Prescott, 127, 203, 463. 
 Priestcraft, 118, 337, 519. 
 Prior, Matthew, 106. 
 Proctor, the Father, 59, 211, 308. 
 
 , the Daughter, 297. 
 
 Prose, 87. 
 
 Psychology, 97. 
 
 Pulpit, Remarks on, 155, 196,292, 306,317, 333, 
 
 342, 347) 348, 354> 430. 
 Punch, 91, 98. 
 Puttenham, 242, 323. 
 
 Quarles, Francis, 57, 226, 248. 
 Quintilian, 160,231,383. 
 
 Rabelais, 274, 425. 
 
 Radcliffe, Mrs., 180. 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 87, 327, 419, 495. 
 
 Ramsay, Allan, 55, 60. 
 
 Ramsey, Dean, 241. 
 
 Randolph, John, 240. 
 
 , Thomas, 261. 
 
 Read, Thomas, 114. 
 Reid, T. Buchanan, 166. 
 Religion every where, 530. 
 Remorse, 134. 
 
 Revolution, the Glorious, 62. 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 239, 259. 
 Richards, Miss, 408. 
 Richter, 180, 448. 
 Robertson, Dr., 116. 
 Robespierre, 420. 
 Robinson, Rev. Robert, 331. 
 Rochester, Lord, 109, 394. 
 Rogers, Henry, 405. 
 
 , Samuel, 232, 307, 442. 
 
 Rosetti, 93, 147. 
 
 Rue, De la, 260, 290, 351, 384, 387. 438, 440. 
 
 Ruskin, 1., 87, 142, 207. 
 
 Russell, Dr., 126. 
 
 Ryle, 367. 
 
 Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, 61, 330. 
 
 Sallust, 101, 127. 
 
 Sappho, 375. 
 
 Saurin, 343, 387, 423. 
 
 Saxe, 131, 436. 
 
 Scalds, 453. 
 
 Schiller, 258. 
 
 Schoolmistress, 82. . 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 71, 92, 151, 163, 178, 186, 
 188, 192, 205, 213, 214, 215, 223, 237, 270, 
 334. 355, 368, 373, 410; 424, 447, 463, 476, 
 59- 
 
 Scottish Dialect, 71, 155, 498. 
 
 Scriblerus, 467. 
 
 Sedan, 268. 
 
 Seed, Dr., 462. 
 
 Seneca, 118, 250. 
 
Index. 
 
 541 
 
 Shakespeare, 1L, lii., 62, 63, 67, 68, 69, 91, 93, 
 94, 109, no, 113, 114, 1 16, 133, 138, 139, 140, 
 142, 145, 146, 153, 167, 170, 178, 186, 188, 197, 
 206,209, 213, 218,220, 223, 227, 237, 241, 243, 
 244, 258, 263, 269, 271, 278, 279, 289, 297, 298, 
 302, 303, 305, 307, 315, 317. 318, 332, 339, 360, 
 364. 365, 384, 394, 395. 405, 408, 419, 423, 425, 
 430, 432, 435, 444, 448, 450, 469, 478, 479, 480. 
 
 Shakespeare's Three Chief Faults, 506. 
 
 Shall and Will, 478. 
 
 Shea, John A., 112. 
 
 Shelley, 1., 179. 
 
 Shenstone, 82, 208. 
 
 Sheridan, R. B., 273, 293. 
 
 Sherlock, Bishop, 328, 462. 
 
 Shirley, 67, 207. 
 
 Sidney, Algernon, 446. 
 
 , Rev., 265. 
 
 , Sir Philip, liii. 
 
 Sigourney, Mrs., 77. 
 
 Skelton, 163. 
 
 Skinner, Rev. John, 90. 
 
 Smith, Alexander, 141, 191. 
 
 , Horace, 64, 83. 
 
 , James, 64, 148. 
 
 , Seba, 346. 
 
 .Sydney, 116,132,139,163,211,234,323. 
 
 Smollett, 451. 
 
 Snelling, 323. 
 
 Snodgrass, 101. 
 
 Socrates, 337, 513. 
 
 Solferino, 126. 
 
 Somers, Lord, 417. 
 
 Sophocles, 189. 
 
 South, Dr., 1., 413. 
 
 Southern, 61. 
 
 Southey, Mrs., 521. 
 
 , Robert, 224, 225, 231, 361, 496. 
 
 Sources of Figures, 505. 
 
 Southwell, 262. 
 
 Souvestre, 470. 
 
 Spanish, Translation from,by your Author, 387. 
 
 Spectator, xxxix., 92, 176, 194, 513, 516. 
 
 Spence, 408. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 268, 462. 
 ,W.R.,443. 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, 62, 142, 203, 308, 363, 411, 
 452, 453' 469- 
 
 Sprague.^ 86, 239. 
 
 Spurgeon, 163, 330, 479. 
 
 Stael, Madame de, 235. 
 
 Stedman, 347. 
 
 Steele, Sir Richard, 284, 513. 
 
 Stephens, 340. 
 
 Sterling, John, 404, 465. 
 
 Sterne, 133, 175, 277, 373, 422. 
 
 Stevens, 378. 
 
 Stewart, Dugald, 251, 513. 
 
 Still, Bishop, 147. 
 
 Stoddard, Miss, 313.,- " 
 
 Storm, 378. 
 
 Story, Judge, 393. 
 
 Strafford, Earl of, 303. 
 
 Street, 103. 
 
 Strickland, Miss, 419. 
 
 Study, How to, this Subject, 74, 164. 
 
 Style, How to Improve, 164, 166, 279. 
 
 Suckling, Sir John, 82. 
 
 Suggestiveness, How to Gain, 507. 
 
 Sully, 419. 
 
 Summerfield, 241. 
 
 Superville, xlvii. 
 
 Surtees, 215. 
 
 Suso, 403. 
 
 Swain, Charles, 345. 
 
 Swift, Dean, 155, 467, 514, 516. 
 
 Swinburne, 456. 
 
 Sylvestre, 73. 
 
 Tacitus, 516. 
 
 Taine, 458, 497 ; on Shakespeare, 507, 510. 
 
 Talfourd, 175. 
 
 Tannahill, 55. 
 
 Tasso, 150. 
 
 Tassone, 256. 
 
 Tatler, 92. 
 
 Taylor, Bayard, 331. 
 
 , Father, 184. 
 
 , Henry, 138. 
 
 , Isaac, 193. 
 
 , Jane, 268. , 
 
 , Jeremy, 1., 162, 197, 204. 
 
 Tecumseh, 331. 
 
 Tennant, Prof., 325, 459. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, the Poet Laureate, xlviii., 
 
 li., lii., 113, 151, 179, 203, 208, 245, 265, 364, 
 
 458, 518. 
 
 , Frederick, 232. 
 
 Tertullian, 399. 
 
 Thackeray, 408, 474. 
 
 Theocritus, 71, 485. 
 
 Theology, 71, 112. 
 
 Theremin, 157. 
 
 Thierry, 203. 
 
 Thorn, 304. 
 
 Thomson, 79, iir, 129, 172, 183, 205, 273, 411, 
 
 445. Sio. 
 Thor, 401. 
 
 Tilton, Theodore, 246. 
 Timanthes, 308. 
 Tintoretto, 308. 
 Toplady, 208. 
 Tourneur, Cyril, 270. 
 Translations of Bible, new, 100, 117, 143, 345, 
 
 379- 
 Transubstantiation, or Dough into God, 159, 
 
 185, 198. 
 Trench, Archbishop, 73, 86, 187. 
 
542 
 
 Index. 
 
 Trollope, Anthony, 180. 
 Trumbull, John, 266. 
 Tuckerman, 193. 
 Turenne, Marshal, 343. 
 Twickenham, 62. 
 Tyndale, Prof., 462. 
 
 Union of England and- United States, 529. 
 United States without a National Name, 503. 
 
 Valhalla put Right, 468. 
 
 Vanburgh, 423. 
 
 Vansittart, 71. 
 
 Vaughan, 141, 380. 
 
 Venice, xli. 
 
 Victoria, Queen, 385. 
 
 Vinet, 134, 389, 414, 447. 
 
 Virgil, 133, 134, 150, 210, 213, 219, 229, 242, 
 
 ' 249. 276, 307, 390. 399. 402, 450. 
 Volpe, 245. 
 Voltaire, 158. 
 
 Waldenses Slaughtered by Romish Priests, 
 
 384- 
 
 Walker, Dr., 344. 
 Waller, 189, 451. 
 Walpole, Horace, 224, 286. 
 
 , Sir Robert, 471. 
 
 Ward, Artemus, 80. 
 Waring, 65. 
 Warner, C. D., 179. 
 Washington, George, 63. 
 Watson, Dr., 269. 
 
 , Richard, 388. 
 Watts, Dr. Isaac, 63, 216, 413. 
 Webster, Daniel, 131, 163, 221, 330, 412, 419, 
 463- 
 
 Webster, the Dramatist, 67, 424. 
 Wesley, the Father, 66. 
 John, 66, 390. 
 
 Wharton, 62. 
 Whately, Dr., 155, 251. 
 Which, Use of, 116. 
 White, Blanco, 371. 
 
 , Henry Kirke, 89. 
 
 White, Two Kinds of, 236. 
 Whitefield, 366. 
 Whittier, 322, 501. 
 Widows, 88, 144, 319. 
 Wild, 52. 
 William III., 265. 
 Williams, Isaac, 139. 
 Wilmer, 323. 
 Wilson, Alexander, 374. 
 
 , John, " Christopher North," xxxviii., 
 
 496. 
 
 Winthrop, R. C., 462. 
 Wirt, 407. 
 
 Wolcott, Dr., 58, 72, 149, 468. 
 Wolfe, General, 106. 
 
 , Rev. C, 379. 
 
 Wordsworth, Hi., 79, 94, 153, 161, 189, 199, 227, 
 
 283, 334, 335- 
 Wormius, Olaus, 467. 
 Worsley, 150. 
 Worth, 323- 
 Wotton, Sir Henry, 266, 471. 
 
 Yorubas, the, 475. 
 Young, Charlotte, 181. 
 , Dr., 235, 250, 268, 451- 
 
 Zechariah, xliv. 
 Zutphen, 119. 
 
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