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Illus. 1. The field for figurative language is very wide. All nature, to speak in the style of figures, opens its stores to us, and admits us to gather, from all sensible objects, whatever can illustrate intellectual or moral ideas. Not only the gay and splendid objects of sense, but the grave, the terrifying, and even the gloomy and dismal, may, on different occasions, be introduced into figures with propriety.

2. But we must beware of ever using such allusions as raise in the mind disagreeable, mean, vulgar, or dirty ideas. Even when metaphors are chosen in order to vilify and degrade any object, an author should study never to be nauseous in his allusions. But, in subjects of dignity, it is an unpardonable fault to introduce mean and vulgar metaphors.

Obs. 1. In the treatise on the Art of Sinking, in Dean Swift's works, there is a full and humorous collection of instances of this kind, wherein authors, instead of exalting, have contrived to degrade their subjects by the figures which they employed.

2. Authors of greater note than those which are there quoted, have at times fallen into this error. Archbishop Tillotson, for instance, is sometimes negligent in his choice of metaphors; as, when speaking of the day of judgment, he describes the world, as "cracking about the sinners' ears.'

3. Shakspeare, whose imagination was rich and bold, in a much greater degree than it was delicate, often fails here.

Example. The following is a gross transgression; in his Henry V., having mentioned a dunghill, he presently raises a metaphor from the steam of it; and on a subject too, that naturally led to much nobler ideas:

And those that leave their valiant bones in France,
Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,
They shall be famed ; for there the sun shall greet them,
And draw their honours reeking up to heaven.

Act IV. Scene 8.

267. In the third place, as metaphors should be drawn from objects of some dignity, so particular care should be taken that the resemblance, which is the foundation of the metaphor, be clear and perspicuous, not far-fetched, nor difficult to discover. The transgression of this rule makes what is called harsh or forced metaphors, which are always displeasing, because they puzzle the reader, and instead of illustrating the thought, render it perplexed and intricate.

Illus. With metaphors of this kind Cowley abounds. He, and some of the writers of his age, seemed to have considered it as the perfection of wit, to hit upon likenesses between objects which no other person could have discovered; and, at the same time, to pursue those metaphors so far, that it requires some ingenuity to follow them out, and comprehend them. This makes a metaphor resemble an enigma; and is the very reverse of Cicero's rule on this head: " Every metaphor should be modest, so that it may carry the appearance of having been led, not of having forced itself into the place of that word whose room it occupies; that it may seem to have come thither of its own accord, and not by constraint."*

* "Verecunda debet esse, translatio; ut deducta esse in alienum locum non irruisse, atque ut voluntario non vi venisse videatur." De Oratore, lib. i. e. 53.

2. To be new, and not vulgar, is a beauty. Trite and common resemblances should indeed be avoided in our metaphors. But when they are fetched from some likeness too remote, and lying too far out of the road of ordinary thought, then, besides their obscurity, they have also the disadvantage of appearing laboured, and, as the French call it, "recherché." Metaphors, like all other ornaments, lose their whole grace, when they do not seem natural and easy.

3. It is but a bad and ungraceful softening, which writers sometimes use for a harsh metaphor, when they palliate it with the expression, as it were. This is but an awkward parenthesis; and metaphors, which need this apology of an as it were, would, generally, have been better omitted. (See Art. 166.) Metaphors, too, borrowed from any of the sciences, especially such of them as belong to particular professions, are almost always faulty by their obscurity. (Art. 84. Illus.)

268. In the fourth place, it must be carefully attended to, in the conduct of metaphors, never to jumble metaphorical and plain language together: never to construct a period so, that part of it must be understood metaphorically, part literally this always produces a most disagreeable confusion.

Example 1. Long to my joys my dearest lord is lost,

His country's buckler, and the Grecian boast ;
Now from my fond embrace by tempests torn,
Our other column of the state is borne,

Nor took a kind adieu, nor sought consent.* Odyssey IV. 962.

Analysis. Here, in one line, her son is figured as a column; and in the next, he returns to be a person, to whom it belongs to take adieu, and to ask consent. This is inconsistent. The poet should either have kept himself to the idea of man, in the literal sense; or if he figured him by a column, he should have ascribed nothing to him but what belonged to it. He was not at liberty to ascribe to that column the actions and properties of a man. Such unnatural mixtures render the image indistinct; leaving it to waver, in our conception, between the figurative and the literal sense.

Example 2. Pope, elsewhere, addressing himself to the king, savs,

To thee the world its present homage pays,
The harvest early, but mature the praise.

Analysis. This, though not so gross, is a fault, however, of the same kind. It is plain, that had not the rhyme misled him to the choice of an improper phrase, he would have said,

The harvest early, but mature the crop :

and so would have continued the figure which he had begun. Whereas by dropping it unfinished, and by employing the literal word, praise,

*In the original, there is no allusion to a column, and the metaphor is regularly supported:

'H πριν μεν ποσιν ἐσθλον απώμεσα θουμολέοντα
Παντοίης αρετῆσι κεκασμένον ἐν Δαναοίσι

Εσθλον, του κλεος ευρυ καθ' Ελλαδα και μεσον Αργος
Νυν δ' αυ παιδ' αγαπητον ανηρείψαντο θύελλαι
Ακλεα εκ μεγαρου, ουδ' ὁρμηθευτος ακουσα.

A. 734.

when we were expecting something that related to the harvest, the figure is broken, and the two members of the sentence have no proper correspondence with each other:

The harvest early, but mature the praise.

Example 3. The works of Ossian abound with beautiful and correct metaphors such as that on a hero: "In peace, thou art the gale of spring; in war, the mountain storm." Or this, on a woman; "She was covered with the light of beauty; but her heart was the house of pride."

Exception. They afford, however, one instance of the fault we are now censuring; Trothal went forth with the stream of his people, but they met a rock: for Fingal stood unmoved; broken they rolled back from his side: nor did they roll in safety; the spear of the king pursued their flight."

Analysis. At the beginning, the metaphor is very beautiful. The stream, the unmoved rock, the waves rolling back broken, are expressions employed in the proper and consistent language of figure; but in the end, when we are told, " they did not roll in safety, because the spear of the king pursued their flight," the literal meaning is improperly mixed with the metaphor; they are, at one and the same time, presented to us as waves that roll, and men that may be pursued, and wounded with a spear.

269. In the fifth place, never make two different metaphors meet on one object. This is what is called mixed metaphor, and is indeed one of the grossest abuses of this figure; such as Shakspeare's expression, "to take arms against a sea of troubles." This makes a most unnatural medley, and confounds the imagination entirely.

Illus. Quinctilian has sufficiently guarded us against it. "We must be particularly attentive to end with the same kind of metaphor with which we have begun. Some, when they begin the figure with a tempest, conclude it with a conflagration; which forms a shameful inconsistency."*

Example 1.

The charm dissolves apace,
And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses

Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason. Tempest.

Analysis. What an inconsistent group of objects is brought together in this passage, which professes to describe persons recovering their judgment after the enchantment, that held them, was dissolved! So many ill-sorted things are here joined, that the mind can see nothing. clearly; the morning stealing upon the darkness, and at the same time, melting it; the senses of men chasing fumes, ignorant fumes, and fumes that mantle.

Example 2. So again in Romeo and Juliet:

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"Id imprimis est custodiendum, ut quo genere cœperis translationis, hoc finias. Multi autem cum initium a tempestate sumserunt, incendio aut ruina finiunt ; quæ est inconsequentia rerum fœdissima."

Of mortals, that fall back to gaze on him,
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds,
And sails upon the bosom of the air.

Analysis. Here, the angel is represented as, at one moment, bestriding the clouds, and sailing upon the air; and upon the bosom of the air too; which forins such a confused picture, that it is impossible for any imagination to comprehend it.

Example 3. More correct writers than Shakspeare sometimes fall into this error of mixing metaphors.

I bridle in my struggling muse with pain,
That longs to launch into a bolder strain.*

Analysis. The muse, figured as a horse, may be bridled; but when we speak of launching, we make it a ship; and by no force of imagination, can it be supposed both a horse and a ship at one moment; bridled, to hinder it from launching. Were we to try this metaphor by Addison's own rule, namely, to suppose the figure painted, it would appear more grotesque than any of Hogarth's subjects. That the muse, from her connexion with the winged horse Pegasus, might sometimes require the bridle, is not perhaps very unnatural. But were she painted in an attitude in which the bridle prevented her from launching or jumping into the sea; or were a picture to exhibit a ship launched, not into the sea, but upon a sheet of paper, or into a song, the spectator would feel something of the disposition inspired by the monster of Horace,

Spectatum admissi risum teneatis amici.

But the muse is a goddess. Now to bridle a goddess is no very delicate idea. But why must she be bridled? because she longs to launch; an act which was never hindered by a bridle. And whither will she launch into a nobler strain. She is in the first line a goddess, or a horse, in the second, a boat or a javelin, (for both may be launched) and the care of the poet is to keep his horse, or his boat, or his spear, from singing.

270. Addison's rule is a good one for examining the propriety of metaphors, when we doubt whether or not they be of the mixed kind: namely, that we should try to form a picture upon them, and consider how the parts would agree, and what sort of figure the whole would present, when delineated with a pencil. By this means we should become sensible, whether inconsistent circumstances were mixed, and a monstrous image thereby produced, as in all those faulty instances which have been given; or whether the object was throughout presented in one natural and consistent point of view.

271. As metaphors ought never to be mixed; so in the sixth place, we should avoid crowding them together on the same object. Supposing each of the metaphors to be preserved distinct, yet, if they be heaped on one another, they

* Addison.

produce a confusion somewhat of the same kind with the mixed metaphor.

Example 1. " There is a time, when factions, by the vehemence of their fermentation, stun, and disable one another."

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Analysis. The noble author represents factions, first, as discordant fluids, the mixture of which produces violent fermentation; but he quickly relinquishes this view of them, and imputes to them operations and effects, consequent only on the supposition of their being solid bodies in motion. They maim and dismember one another by forcible collisions.

Example 2. "Those whose minds are dull and heavy do not easily penetrate into the folds and intricacies of an affair, and therefore can only scum off what they find at the top."t

Analysis. That the writer had a right to represent his affair, whatever it was, either as a bale of cloth, or a fluid, nobody can deny. But the laws of common sense and perspicuity demanded of him to keep it either the one or the other, because it could not be both at the same time. It was absurd, therefore, after he had penetrated the folds of it, an operation competent only on the supposition of its being some pliable body, to speak of scumming off what floated on the surface, which could not be performed unless it was a fluid..

272. The only other rule concerning metaphors, which we shall add, is, that they be not too far pursued. If the resemblance on which the figure is founded, be long dwelt upon, and carried into all its minute circumstances, we make an allegory instead of a metaphor; we tire the reader, who soon becomes weary of this play of fancy; and we render our discourse obscure. This is called straining a metaphor.

Critick 1. Cowley deals in this to excess; and to this error is owing, in a great measure, that intricacy and harshness, in his figurative language, which we before remarked. (Art. 207.)

2. Lord Shaftesbury is sometimes guilty of pursuing his metaphors too far. Fond, to a high degree, of every decoration of style, when once he had hit upon a figure that pleased him, he was extremely loath to part with it.

3. Dr. Young also often trespasses in the same way. The merit, however, of this writer, in figurative language, is great, and deserves to be remarked. No writer, ancient or modern, had a stronger imagination than Dr. Young, or one more fertile in figures of every kind. His metaphors are often new, and often natural and beautiful. But his imagination was strong and rich, rather than delicate and correct. Hence, in his Night Thoughts, there prevail an obscurity, and a hardness in his style. The metaphors are frequently too bold, and frequently too far pursued; the reader is dazzled rather than enlightened; and kept constantly on the stretch to keep pace with the author.

4. Of all the English authors, none is so happy in his metaphors as Addison. His imagination was neither so rich nor so strong as Dr. Young's; but far more chaste and delicate. Perspicuity, natural grace, and ease, always distinguish his figures. They are neither

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