relieved, of a bad habit to be changed, a law to be repealed or enacted, an institution to be reformed. The public are apathetic and indifferent. An enthusiast in the cause addresses them. He believes the distress to be worse than it really is; he ascribes all sorts of pernicious consequences to the bad habit: he expects too much from his scheme of reform. He uses hyperbolical language. But the impression he produces is no stronger than the bare truth ought to produce. If he used sober language, his apathetic public would not stir; he would produce no impression at all. His hearers are at a distance from him, wrapt up in their own concerns; he must raise his voice, or they will not hear. A statue intended to be seen at a height must be carved larger than life size, otherwise it will appear diminutive. It is by the impression produced that the work must be judged.

There is a certain amount of truth in this. It may be conceded that no great cause was ever won without enthusiasm, and enthusiasm always exaggerates. It is the natural corrective of apathy, which is just as far from the truth on the other side.

Is exaggeration, then, to be recommended? That is another affair. You must remember that if you are in earnest, you will probably exaggerate enough without trying. The man who exaggerates deliberately is a charlatan, a puffer of spurious goods; besides he is almost certain to be found out. The accent of insincerity is easily detected, whether in speech or in writing. In rhetoric as in other things honesty is the best policy. The question of taste in the use of hyperbole is more subtle. This often arises when there is no question of moral truth or falsehood, of leading or misleading opinion. It is rather, as it were, an affair of dress; "expression is the dress of thought," and we may dress in quiet colors cut after the fashion of our time, or in glaring colors and eccentric disregard of both fashion and propriety.

The common ideal of good expression is that it should exactly fit the subject, keeping close to the proportions of things as they are; that descriptive phrases and epithets should present objects as they exist in nature, neither exaggerated nor diminished. It is an excellent ideal to aim at, and the principle holds absolutely good of scientific expression. But there are kinds of descrip

tion in which it is quite possible to pursue this ideal in such a way as to defeat your own end, and distort and falsify what you wish to present to your reader's mind. Often what you have to describe is not an abstract object detached from all human emotion, but your own feeling about an object and in trying to tone down your description in obedience to rhetorical precept, you may tone down the feeling and so change it that the description neither truly expresses your own feeling nor corresponds adequately to the feeling of your reader.

This is the danger of aiming at an elegant sobriety of expression. Even elegance and sobriety may be carried to extremes.

I have heard of a Professor of Divinity who advised his students after writing their sermons to go over them pen in hand and strike out all the adjectives. I believe this is not uncommonly considered a good way of correcting the natural tendency of youth to superlatives and hyperboles.

The advice seems to me to be essentially erroneous, and fatal to the acquisition of a style that shall really communicate your thoughts and feelings. It is good enough, perhaps, if the adjectives are heaped up out of the parrot memory without any reference to the subject. But it is bad in so far as it tends to fix attention on the words by themselves, and abstract it from the thoughts and feelings expressed, with which rather than the words the correction should begin. A really expressive style is not to be acquired by pruning and weeding out in cold blood epithets that have been applied in the heat of composition. One should learn rather to control the heat of composition. The best way, indeed the only sound way, of curing the tendency to extravagance of expression is by reforming the habit of mind from which it proceeds.

This opens up a large subject, which I must leave with my reader's own intelligence, content if I have made him think of the fact that there is such a thing as a tendency to hyperbole, and that it needs correction. I should like briefly to indicate further another risk that attends any deliberate effort to correct it.

To correct this tendency was one of the persistent aims of the late Mr. Matthew Arpold. According to him the essence of culture on the intellectual side lies in learning to see things as they are. Read, for exam

ple, in his "Essays in Criticism," the paper on "The Literary Influence of Academies," when he traces certain extravagances of expression to their roots in narrow and limited habits of thought. By looking at things too exclusively from the point of view of our own village or occupation or sect or party or province, we are apt to attach an exaggerated importance to them, and to feel and speak of them fiercely and immoderately as if they were objects of vital concern to the whole world. To this narrow habit of mind Mr. Arnold attached the nickname of Philistinism.

Mr. Arnold's doctrine I believe to be in the main most wholesome. I do not pretend to do more than roughly indicate it. You cannot do better as a student of style than give your days and nights to reading Mr. Arnold himself. He is one of the most charming writers of his century as well as one of the most instructive.

And yet I have often seen a grave error committed by men who tried to form themselves on his ideal of culture. Thinking it a mark of Philistinism to use strong language about merely local or sectarian concerns, they conceive it to be a mark of culture to adopt an indifferent, superior, fleering, or depreciatory tone toward every thing in which they happen not to be interested themselves. Now this is not to see things as they are; this is not to be a man of culture, but a man of culture who has missed his aim, a prig or superior person. You may put yourself quite as much out of proportion by affecting a grand indifference as by taking a fierce and immoderate interest; to treat the affairs of Little Peddlington* from a cosmical point of view may be as absurd as to treat them from a provincial point of view. If your writing is intended for Little Peddlington, or for men and women of your own occupation or sect or province, there is nothing gained by writing as if your reader were the Man in the Moon, or even "a calm strong angel surveying mankind."

Hyperbole carried to excess is stigmatized by such names as rant, bombast, inflation, "tall talk," turgid magniloquence. But no formal rule can be laid down fixing the alti

"An imaginary village in which quackery, humbug, cant, selfishness, and other social vices abound. It is described by John Pool in a satirical work overflowing with racy humor, entitled 'Little Peddlington and the Peddlingtonians.'"

tude to which you may rise without transgressing the bounds of good taste. In every community there is an unwritten standard; this is unwritten because it is unwritable. Each individual must find it out for himself in the reception given him by his readers.

IRONY, INNUENDO, AND EPIGRAM. The next figure I shall deal with is Irony, which consists in saying something different from what you mean, leaving it to your reader's intelligence to apprehend your real meaning.

This is a very different literary weapon. The use of hyperbole-of "forceful sounds and colors bold"—is to stimulate torpid intelligence, to stir dull sensibilities, to drive impressions home by violence. In ironical writing something is left to the free action of the reader's wits. The quicker the intelligence of your reader, the more prosperous is likely to be your use of the figure.

"Irony," Quintilian says, "is understood either from the mode of delivery or from the character of the speaker, or from the nature of the subject; for if any of these be at variance with the words, it is apparent that the intention is different from the expression."

The danger obviously is that you be taken literally. This actually happened to De Foe. His "Shortest Way with the Dissenters," in which ironically assuming the rôle of a Highflying Tory he argued that they ought to be exterminated by hanging and banishing whoever was found at a conventicle, brought him to the pillory. He afterward admitted that perhaps he was justly punished for being such a fool as to trust his meaning to irony.

Goldsmith is another instance of a martyr to misunderstood irony. A good many of the tales told to prove his egregious vanity are merely samples of ironical jesting at his own expense. When, for instance, he turned away in apparent indignation when two handsome ladies beside him were attracting a great deal of attention, and exclaimed that elsewhere he too had his admirers, it is easy to see that the indignation was ironical. A practical hint may be drawn from this that in writing you must remember that you have not the tone of the voice to point to irony.

Irony was a prevalent fashion in the age of Queen Anne. Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Addison were all masters of it in various degrees of subtlety. The reason why the figure

was so common among the eighteenth century essayists probably was that they wrote for a comparatively small audience which prided itself on its wit, and was consequently flattered by indirect expression. A light, bantering, ironical tone was naturally preferred, and the strong, direct expression of strong feeling regarded as a waste of force. With a mixed audience at different levels of culture, irony is much more apt to be misunderstood. And perhaps this is partly the reason why ironical writing is much less practised in the present century. Writers address wider and much more miscellaneous audiences, and their irony runs greater risk of being misinterpreted unless it is so broad as to lose all literary charm.

A figure extremely common in modern American comic literature might be classed as ironical hyperbole, exaggeration for the mere fun of the thing. The test of good and bad is originality.

A variety of figures has been distinguished by rhetoricians all of which turn like irony on some contrast between the form of the expression and the meaning. The writer, as it were, plays with the medium of communication; there is a sort of game of hide-andseek between him and his readers. We may put together under the general name of Epigram all those cases in which the writer constructs his statement so as to lead the reader to expect a certain meaning and then suddenly suggests another; all sayings in which the writer by some artifice of construction prepares a surprise for the reader.

What is technically known as the condensed sentence is an example of this. "Heaven defend us from the Evil One and from metaphors !" A friend's advice to Mark Twain when in traveling he began to talk about private matters before some Germans: "Speak in German; these Germans may understand English," is classed as an instance of Innuendo.* The epigram proper is seen in such sayings as South's: "Speech was given to the ordinary sort of men whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men whereby to conceal it "; or the Master of Trinity's rebuke to a Junior Fellow: "We are none of us infallible, not even the youngest of us."

The balanced form of sentence is often used to give point to an epigram, but the essence *[In-nü-en'do.] Latin in, toward, and nuere, to nod. An indirect hint. Syn., insinuation, suggestion.

of epigrammatic writing is the surprise that lurks in the expression, by whatever art the ambush is contrived. It may consist in merely repeating a phrase after leading the reader to expect a reason as in the classical epigram on Dr. Fell.* The motto of the Marischal family, "Thay saye: Quhat say thay? Lat thame say "-is a genuinely epigrammatic expression of indifference to public opinion.

The aim of the witty epigrammatist is generally satire or harmless pleasantry, and we are here concerned primarily with the usefulness of figures in conveying knowledge. In this respect the value of the epigram is simply that it sticks better in the memory than plain expression. Truth is not made more luminous by being put in an epigrammatic form, but it is made more striking and memorable. The reader's own wits have to be exercised; and what the epigrammatist suggests or insinuates comes to him with something of the charm of a discovery. Most of us have read without emotion the ordinary grammatical statement that "the verb to be is a verb of incomplete predication"; when this is put by Hegel [ha'gel] in the epigrammatic form "being is nothing," how much more striking it is! Some people even think it profound, though it means nothing more than this, that to say that a thing is, without saying what it is, is as good as to say nothing at all about it.

SIMILES AND METAPHORS.

The exact sense of the word Simile as a figure of speech was acutely defined by Dr. Johnson in a criticism of Addison's poem "The Campaign." The poet compares Marlborough issuing his orders in the thick of the fight to an angel that "rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm." The critic raises the question whether this is technically a simile, and decides that it is not, but a mere exemplification, because the things compared are similar in kind. That a poet's verse flows like a torrent or that his fancy wanders about like a bee in quest of honey, is a simile; but that the Thames waters fields as the Po waters fields, or that Horace polished his verses as I-soc ́ra-tēs polished his orations, is a mere exemplifica

*I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

The reason why I cannot tell :
But this I'm sure I know full well

I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

+ See Addison, in Johnson's "Lives of the Poets."

is so like the angel in the poem that the action of both is almost the same and performed in the same manner."

The point of this is that before language can be called figurative, it must be a departure from the ordinary. Our ordinary way of thinking is to compare things that are the same in kind, one river with another, one general with another; it is a departure from this ordinary course of our thoughts to detect resemblances in things that are different in kind, a diplomatist and a fox, a child and an opening flower. It might be argued that Addison's comparison is figurative after all in as much as it compares a battle to a storm.

When the form of comparison is dropped, as when a man is simply called " a lion," or "an ape," or "a steam-engine in trousers," the figure is known as Metaphor. A metaphor is merely a condensed simile, a double figure, in as much as you not only compare things different in kind but assert identity when you mean only partial likeness.

The uses of similes and metaphors are various. Similitudes, comparisons, are the chief instruments of expression for all purposes. They may be purely ornamental, decorative, pretty, fanciful, "rhetorical" in the narrow sense; or they may be "poetic" in the strict sense, imaginative, transfiguring a subject with light borrowed from some image of grandeur or beauty or profound feeling; or merely illustrative, serving as a help to the understanding in exposition. On this last comparatively humble use there are some precepts that are obvious enough but yet are sometimes neglected.

The cardinal precept, which applies to all comparisons plain as well as figurative, is that the thing to which the comparison is made should be more intelligible than the subject of the comparison.

"Metaphors," Ben Jonson says in his "Underwood's," "farfetched, hinder to be understood; and affected, lose their grace. . . . As if a privy-councilor should at table take his metaphor from a dicing-house

from the mathematics . . . . or a gentleman of Northamptonshire should fetch all his illustrations to his country neighbors from shipping, and tell them of the mainsheet and the bowline."

When Mr. Disraeli * spoke at Glasgow as Lord Rector of the University, he seemed to remember that he was in a great commercial center, and made an effort to adapt his figures to his audience. "A civilized community," he said, “must rest upon a large realized capital of thought and sentiment; there must be a reserved fund of public morality to draw upon in the exigencies of national life." The merchants of Glasgow probably understood him easily, but these figures must have been as Sanscrit to the average undergraduate.

I have heard a preacher of a scientific turn illustrate moral states by reference to crystallization, polarization, and deflection. This to a country congregation. We are all apt to take for granted that what is familiar to ourselves is equally familiar to others.

Many an apt illustration, really fitted to enlighten, is spoiled by being over the heads of the audience, not over their heads intellectually as being beyond their grasp but as being beyond their knowledge. The teacher's besetting sin is to over-rate the knowledge of his hearers and to under-rate their intelligence.

For merely intellectual purposes a simile cannot be too familiar and homely. It is a principle of artistic effect that it should be in harmony with the tone of the subject. A homely illustration, such as the comparison of a man struggling with difficulties to a fly in treacle, may be perfectly graphic and yet grotesquely offensive in a serious composition.

Writers with a passion for exactness often fall into the error of pushing a comparison into too much detail. This leads to what is technically called "straining" a metaphor or simile. You should be content generally with a bold, broad resemblance.

[Diz-rā'lee or diz-ree'lee.]

I

II.

T was between the middle of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the meeting of the Long Parliament that a great moral revolution was begun and ended in England. The first seeds of Puritanism were sowed when Bishop Bonner set up the first six English Bibles in St. Paul's Cathedral. From that moment the power of the book began to increase among the common people, who had, indeed, no other book that they could read. The Holy Scriptures afforded them their sole means of literary recreation as well as of religious comfort and encouragement, and their faithful study of the text was reflected not only in their manner of life but in their speech. This revival of religious interest, however, did not extend within the limits of the Court. Their profligacy proceeded from excess to excess, and the dividing line between the upper and the lower classes gradually broadened and deepened until it became a gulf in the days

of the Puritans and Cavaliers.

The Court of Elizabeth had been extravagant and immoral, but folly and vice were hidden decorously beneath a veil of refinement. But James was a monarch of a very different kind, a man at once weak and obstinate, far more deeply learned than his fair predecessor, and uncommonly shrewd, but selfish, coarse, and cowardly, with a jealous appreciation of the royal prerogative, but with no touch of regal nature. While extremely careful of his own privileges, he granted amost boundless license to his favorites, and set an example which, had it not been for the more sober influences at work among the masses of the people, might have resulted in a general demoralization of society. Vices of the grossest kind were practiced openly in the royal palaces. He himself was a confirmed drunkard, and some of the great ladies of his Court thought it no disgrace to be seen intoxicated. Although a thorough Scot in the close management of his own private finances he wasted enormous sums of public money in the preparation of elaborate masques and revels, in the hope of winning popularity.

• Special Course for C. L. S. C. Graduates.

He lavished titles, honors, land, and money, upon a series of unworthy favorites, and allowed just debts to go unpaid. He set morality at defiance by conniving at disgraceful divorces and condoning the most shameless social offenses, and demonstrated his own superstition and weakness by consulting astrologers and necromancers and experimenting in search of the philosopher's stone.+ Merit ceased to be regarded as the true test for preferment, which was now sought only through the agency of some favorite. ery was the easiest and the surest road to promotion, and even the judges yielded to the universal habit of corruption.

Brib

Soevil an example as this, set in high places, was fraught with dangerous consequences. Not only was there a distinct lowering of the moral tone of the aristocratic classes, but the public respect for the throne, which in the days of Elizabeth had amounted almost to veneration, was greatly diminished. Even the strolling players, who as yet were regarded as little better than vagabonds, ventured to hold up the King to open ridicule in their booths, and were not rebuked. The administration of the laws and of matters of state was practically in the hands of such men as the Earl of Rochester or George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, creatures of the King's fancy, who were invested with almost limitless authority. The life and the property of citizens and the honor of women were equally at the mercy of these upstart nobles who were swayed by no consideration but their own pleasure. If any person was obnoxious to them, there were many ways to be rid of him. He could be put on shipboard and sold into life-long slavery, assigned to secret imprisonment by some process of the infamous Star Chamber, or knocked on the head by some hired bravo and thrown into the Thames. The boundaries of Alsatia lay within easy reach of the St. James's Park and Palace.

Alsatia, a nickname for White Friars, was

ation. Those who reveal the future by means of pretended communications with the dead; magicians.

* [Nek'rō man-sers.] Greek nekros, dead, manteia, divin

†The substance which the ancient alchemists thought would convert all baser metals into gold.