strictness be predicated only of the secondary, tree, are attributed to the primary, man.

Comparison, or Simile, is founded on resemblance, as well as metaphor, but it has nothing else in common with it; and though it has been sometimes called a lengthened metaphor, it is altogether a distinct figure. Metaphor always asserts what is manifestly false; comparison asserts nothing but what is true. In metaphor, the resembling qualities in the two objects must be distinguishing qualities of those objects. In comparison, any striking resemblance may be made the subject of the figure. The former asserts that one object has the properties of another; the latter, that one object resembles another. The two figures are, indeed, near akin, but they have a distinct personality they are sisters, the daughters of Likeness, by different fathers. The one is the child of Fancy, the other of 'Truth..

Q. Can you illustrate this difference by example?

A. When I say of a minister, "He upholds the state, like a pillar that supports an edifice," I use a comparison; but when I say, "He is the pillar of the state," I then use a metaphor.

Q. What is the first rule in the use of metaphors?

4. Do not employ them too profusely, and let them be such as accord with the natural train of the thoughts.

Q. What is the next?

A. Let the resemblance upon which the figures are founded be clear and perspicuous, and the metaphors drawn from such objects as are easily understood.

Q. On what is this rule founded?

A. On the circumstance that, if a word is unintelligible in a literal, it must be much more so in a metaphorical sense.

Q. What is the next rule?

A. Metaphorical and literal language should never be mixed together.

Q. Can you illustrate this by example?

4.

"To thee the world its present homage pays;

The harvest early, but mature the praise,"

is a mixed metaphor; for harvest is figurative, but praise is literal, in its meaning.

Q. What would it require to be to make it accurate?

A. "The harvest early, but mature the fruit," which would probably have been the word used, had it suited the poet's rhyme.

Q. What farther have you to remark respecting the use of met aphors?

A. We should neither pursue them too far, nor use, in reference to the same object, two metaphors that are inconsistent with each other.

By the first part of this rule is meant, that we should not seek to trace out a great number of resemblances between the thing illustrated by the figure, and the figure itself; for this would show that the writer's mind is wandering, and less intent upon sense than upon wit; which, when the matter requires seriousness and simplicity, is always offensive. Genius, regulated by correct taste, instead of fatiguing the attention with unnecessary circumstances, chooses rather to leave many things to be supplied by the reader's fancy; and is always too much engrossed by its subject to have leisure to look out for minute similitudes.

Q. Can you give any example of the latter part of the rule? "I bridle in my struggling muse with pain, That longs to launch into a bolder strain."

A.

Q. What is the error here?

A. The muse is first compared to a horse, held in by a bridle, that it may not launch, an action which belongs properly to a ship; and then it is to launch, not into water, but into, a strain or singing, which, being literal, produces a strange jumble of figures, altogether incompatible with correct writing. The nature of the thing expressed by the figure should not be confounded with that of the thing which the figure is intended to illustrate.

When Penelope, in Pope's Odyssey, calls her son a pillar of the state, the figure is good, because it signifies that he assisted in supporting the government; but when, in the next line, she complains that this pillar had gone away without asking leave or bidding farewell, there is a confusion of the nature of a pillar with that of a man:

"Now from my fond embrace by tempest torn,
Our other column of the state is borne,

Nor took a kind adieu, nor sought consent."

Flame is used metaphorically for the passion, of love; but to say of a lover that he whispered his flame into the ear of his beloved (meaning that in a whisper he gave her intimation of his love) would be faulty: because it is not the property of flame tó be blown into the ear, nor of a whisper to convey flame from one place to another.

Dr. Beattie informs us that he had heard of clergymen, in their intemperate use of figurative expressions in public prayer (in which it should be used as little as possible), committing strange blunders of this kind: as of one who prayed that God would be a rock to them that are afar off upon the sea; and that the British navy, like Mount Zion, might never be moved.

Moreover, figures should not be too frequent.

Blackmore, speaking of the destruction of Sodom,

says,

"The gaping clouds pour lakes of sulphur down, Whose livid flashes sickening sunbeams drown." "What a noble confusion!" says a witty critic: "clouds, lakes, brimstone, flames, sunbeams, gaping, pouring, sickening, drowning, all in two lines!" See the Art of Sinking in poetry, in which the abuse of figurative language is well illustrated by a variety of examples.

Q. Can you give another example of a faulty metaphor, and correct it?

A. "Well indeed might he love this little mountain flower, for she was the last link of that broken chain which had bound him to the world."

EXERCISES ON METAPHORS.

Fill up the blanks with the metaphorical words needed to complete the sense.

"As there are some who have naturally a meager intellect, so there are others whose minds seem to be barren of those finer sympathies and affections of our nature which are

eye always rests with pleasure."
"In Rome eloquence was a
"Fame is

of the soul, and upon which the

of late growth and of short duration." that pays but little attention to the living, but bedizens the dead, furnishes out their funerals, and follows them to the grave.'

"Nobility is a

that sets with a constant current directly into the great Pacific of time; but, unlike all other it is more grand at its source than at its termination." "Many causes are now conspiring to increase the materialism is the main root of them all."

H

of infidelity, but

CHAPTER XXVI.

OF ALLEGORY.

Q. What is an Allegory?

A. It is generally considered, but incorrectly, as a continuation of metaphor. No continuation of metaphor ever becomes an allegory; indeed, there are several essential properties that distinguish these figures. Allegory presents to immediate view the secondary object only; metaphor always presents the primary also. Metaphor always imagines one thing to be another; allegory, never. Every thing asserted in the allegory is applied to the secondary object; every thing asserted in the metaphor is applied to the principal. In the metaphor there is but one meaning; in the allegory there are two, a literal and a figurative. Allegory is a veil; metaphor a perspective-glass.

One of the finest allegories is to be found in the lxxxth Psalm :

"Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt; thou hast cast out the heathen and planted it. Thou preparedst room before it, and didst cause it to take deep root, and it filled the land. The hills were covered with the shadow of it, and the boughs thereof were like the goodly cedars-she sent out her boughs unto the sea, and her branches unto the river. Why hast thou then broken down her hedges, so that all they which pass by do pluck her? The boar out of the wood doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it. Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts. look down from heaven, and behold and visit this vine."

Allegory is more seldom employed than either met aphor or simile. The latter require no study, and but a slight exertion of the imagination; but to form an allegory, the mind must look out for a likeness that will correspond in a variety of circumstances, and form an independent whole.

Q. What is the best occasion for the proper allegory?

A. It is, when it is of importance to gain a man's own judgment against himself, without exciting his suspicions of our intention. We all know the effect of the parable spoken by Nathan to David; and we can not fail to observe that no other form of speech could have supplied the place of allegory. Many of

the parables of Christ are of the same description ; and the Scribes and Pharisees were often obliged to give judgment against themselves.

Q. Among whom did this style of writing most prevail?

A. Among the ancients, though many modern writers have used it with good effect.

Q. What is the chief thing to be observed in the use of this figure?

A. The great requisite is, to make it as lively and interesting as possible, to preserve a proper distinction between the figurative expression and the literal, and to introduce nothing unsuitable to the nature, either of the thing spoken of, or of the thing alluded to. Q. What is to be observed concerning the length of allegories? A. Some are quite short, others very long. Of the latter kind is the " Pilgrim's Progress," by John Bunyan, of immortal fame. This work is an allegory, continued through the volume, in which the commencement, progress, and conclusion of the Christian life, are ingeniously illustrated by the similitude of a journey.

A great deal of Homer and Virgil's machinery, that is, of the use they make of gods and goddesses, and other fictitious beings, is allegorical. Thus it is Apollo that raises the plague in the first book of the Iliad, agreeably to the old opinion that the sun, by drawing up noxious vapors from the earth, is the cause of pestilence. Thus it is Juno who instigates Eolus, in the first book of the Eneid, to raise a storm for destroying the Roman fleet; which intimates that a certain disposition of the air, over which Juno was supposed to preside, is the cause of wind. Thus, when Pallas, in the beginning of the Iliad, appears to Achilles and forbids him to draw his sword against Agamemnon, it is an allegory; and the meaning is, that Achilles was restrained on this occasion by his own good sense, Pallas being the goddess of wisdom. And when Vir

gil tells us that Juno and Venus conspired to decoy Dido into an amour with Æneas, it signifies that Dido was drawn into this amour partly by her ambition ; Venus being the representative of the one passion and Juno of the other.