of himself and family from a diligence or stage-coach, in Italy, gives the narrative wholly in the present time: 6 "The door is opened. Breathless expectation. The lady of the family gets out. Ah, sweet lady! Beautiful lady!' The sister of the lady of the family gets out. 'Great Heaven, ma'amselle is charming! First little boy gets out. ‘Ah, what a beautiful little boy!' First little girl gets out. Oh, but this is an enchanting child! Second little girl gets out," etc. LESSON X.-Minor Figures of Speech. I. CLIMAX.-Climax consists of a series of members in a sentence, each rising in importance above the one which precedes it, so that the strongest impression shall come last. It is most effective when the last idea of the former member becomes the first of the latter, and so on to the end of the series, as in the following example from the orator Cicero: "What hope is there remaining of liberty, if whatever is their pleasure, it is lawful for them to do; if what is lawful for them to do, they are able to do; if what they are able to do, they dare do; if what they dare do, they really execute; and if what they execute is no way offensive to you?" An Anti-Climax, which is a descent from great to little, has the effect of lowering the character of a subject, to the same extent that the climax elevates it. II. REPETITION.-Repetition is a figure which gracefully and emphatically repeats either the same words, or the same sense in different words. We find this figure in David's lament for his son Absalom; and it is used with much beauty in the following lamentation of Orpheus for his beloved Eu-ryd'i-ce: 66 Thee, his loved wife, along the lonely shores; Thee, his loved wife, his mournful song deplores ; Thee, when the world is overspread with night."-Virgil. With poetic license the fond lover is represented as continuing his lament even in death :: "His last, last voice, his tongue now cold in death, Still named Eurydice, with parting breath; Ah! lost Eurydice! his spirit sighed, And all the rocks- Eurydice replied." III. ALLUSIONS.-An Allusion is an implied comparison, which consists in a reference to something supposed to be known to the hearer or reader, but not explicitly mentioned. Thus, when the Mexican general Santa Anna, on falling into the hands of General Houston, after the battle of San Jacinto, said to him, "You have conquered the Napoleon of the West," the allusion was one that almost any person would understand, and also the comparison implied in it. The following Biblical allusion will be readily understood by Bible readers:—“It is a melancholy pity when a man's philosophy, instead of being the angel that steps down into the Bethesda of his speculations, to trouble its waters to effect a cure, only perplexes the depth of his being, and turns up mire and dirt." Allusions are very common in scholarly writings. IV. METON'YMY.-Metonymy is a figure by which one name is put for another, the cause for the effect, the container for the thing contained, the sign for the thing signified, etc. Thus: "I am reading Milton" (his works):"Gray hairs (old age) should be respected:"-" The kettle (the water in it) is boiling:"-"He has at last assumed the sceptre" (kingly power). PART SECOND. CHAPTER I.-WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.-1564-1616. I.-Biographical. What 1. Homer and Shakspeare, who may be placed side by side as the greatest and most original of poets, are al.ke in these respects,-that scarcely anything is authentically known of their personal history, and that what is knov n furnishes no explanation of their literary career. knowledge we have of Shakspeare's life is derived from the musty records of the parish and the courts. We know that he was baptized on the 26th of April, 1564, that he died on the 23d of April, in the year 1616, and that he was buried on the 25th in the parish church of Stratford-uponAvon. In his nineteenth year he married a very ordinary woman eight years older than himself, and a few years later he went to London, and played on the stage at the Globe Theatre. In 1605 he retired to an estate that he had purchased at Stratford-upon-Avon, where, to use the words of Nicholas Rowe, a play-writer of George the First's time, "his pleasurable wit and good nature engaged him in the acquaintance and entitled him to the friendship of the gentlemen of his neighborhood." 2. Tradition says of Shakspeare that he was one of the thirsty lads of Stratford, and that he ran away to London to escape arrest for poaching. There is scarcely a line in his writings, except here and there in his sonnets, that can be traced to his personal experiences; and what there are of these express his discontents rather than his misfortunes. His plays, for the most part, are suggested by older dramas, if they are not revisions of them, and his knowledge of 99 classical history was probably derived from Plutarch's Lives; but what passed through the alembic of his mind is transformed in the process. It is no more what it was before than wine is a cluster of grapes, or a statue of Canova is a quarryman's block of marble. 3. Shakspeare's place in literature is an independent one. He had no models, and he followed no accepted rules. Neither the Renaissance nor classical training appears to have influenced his productions; but his genius first embodied the Teutonic or German type of art, the essential feature of which is the expression of feeling, and which has created new forms and new standards of criticism. With him comedy is mingled with tragedy, and blank verse with prose. His measure halts, and serious scenes end in rhyming puns; incongruous metaphors override one another in the same sentence; he has little regard for the unities of time or place; his scenes shift with startling rapidity, and long intervals of time often elapse between them; he hesitates at no anachronism; he has plays within plays; the most tragic movement is interrupted by needless episodes, and he allows himself the incongruities, the impossibilities, and the freedom of the old miracle plays, in which, indeed, the genuine English drama had its origin. 4. Shakspeare's works have taught the world that there is an art other than that of Greece or Rome, and that feeling can dictate form, as well as form awaken feeling. His art does not display the machinery of analysis or of reflection, for it portrays life. Its profoundest reflections are the outcries of human souls, and not the criticisms of the sage. His moral lessons are taught as nature teaches them ;—the reader must infer them, for the master will not formulate them. No writings excel Shakspeare's in height, depth, and breadth of imagination; none in the variety of emotions depicted; none in tragic intensity of passion; none in airy gracefulness of fancy: no other author employs a vocabulary so copious and appropriate, a diction so energetic, so suggestive, so concentrated, so effective. Art does not reach its perfect elaboration in Shakspeare, but its boundless resources are with him. He is the mine that contains the ore; others, here and there, may assay a little of it to a more lustrous purity. We quote from the distinguished critic, WILLIAM HAZLITT, the following characterization of the genius of the great dramatist : 5. "The genius of Shakspeare shone equally on the evil. and on the good, on the wise and on the foolish, on the monarch and on the beggar. He turned the globe around for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals, as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives, as well those that they knew, as those which they did not know or acknowledge to themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women; and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for if the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel, and act as he makes them. He had only to think of anything in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it.-Shakspeare's language and versification are like the rest of him. He has a magic power over words: they come winged at his bidding, and seem to know their places. They are struck out at a heat, and have all the truth and vividness which arise from an actual impression of the objects. His language translates thoughts into visible images." 6. Another eminent critic, LORD JEFFREY, thus writes:"The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images, and descriptions, are given with such brevity, and introduced with such skill, as to adorn, without loading, the sense they accompany. Although his sails are purple and perfumed, and his prow of beaten gold, they waft him on his voyage, not |