contradictions and incongruities, that continually occur to excite interest in real life. Antithesis in this broader signification is one of the most spontaneous resources of literature.

EXAMPLE. — The following, from Dickens, will illustrate how contrast may be employed to make a scene or an incident vivid.

"There was a certain elderly gentleman who lived in a court of the Temple, and was a great judge and lover of port wine. Every day he dined at his club and drank his bottle or two of port wine, and every night came home to the Temple and went to bed in his lonely chambers. This had gone on many years without variation, when one night he had a fit on coming home, and fell and cut his head deep, but partly recovered and groped about in the dark to find the door. When he was afterwards discovered, dead, it was clearly established by the marks of his hands about the room that he must have done so. Now, this chanced on the night of Christmas Eve, and over him lived a young fellow who had sisters and young country-friends, and who gave them a little party that night, in the course of which they played at Blindman's Buff. They played that game, for their greater sport, by the light of the fire only; and once, when they were all quietly rustling and stealing about, and the blindman was trying to pick out the prettiest sister (for which I am far from blaming him), somebody cried, 'Hark! The man below must be playing Blindman's Buff by himself to-night!' They listened, and they heard sounds of some one falling about and stumbling against furniture, and they all laughed at the conceit, and went on with their play, more lighthearted and merry than ever. Thus, those two so different games of life and death were played out together, blindfolded, in the two sets of chambers."

Epigram.

This figure employs in modified form the principle of contrast or antithesis, in order to give point to a thought.

The term epigram has been so broadly and variously applied that it has come to be popularly taken as meaning any unusually pungent way of putting things. This idea is, however, too vague. To be epigrammatic an expression must have fundamentally two qualities it must be brief; and it must give some unexpected turn to the idea. This latter quality is obtained in various ways. EXAMPLES. The following will illustrate some of the means by which epigrammatic point is secured.

1. By an apparent contradiction. "Conspicuous for its absence."-"Verbosity is cured by a wide vocabulary." -"Language is the art of concealing thought."—"He is so good that he is good for nothing."-"Here he straight

way fell into new misadventure by conceiving an undying passion, that lasted several weeks, for a young countrywoman whom he found in Holland."

2. By emphatic assertion of a truism. "Fact is fact." '—"What I have written, I have written."

an event."

"His coming was

3. By a sudden turn of the thought in a different spirit. "He is full of information — like yesterday's Times." -"His memory (for trifles) is remarkable, and (where his own performances are not involved) his taste is excellent."- "What that man does not know is not worth knowing," was once said admiringly of an enthusiast in out-of-the-way learning. "True," was the reply, "and what he does know is not worth knowing."

4. By seeming irrelevance of associated idea. "Where snow falls, there is a freedom.". "Lapland is too cold a country for sonnets."

5. By play on words. "The time will come when America, too, will understand that her case is her disease."—"My habit of writing only to people who, rather than have nothing from me, will tolerate nothings."—"Those laborious orators who mistake perspiration for inspiration.”

In all the above examples the essential feature of the epigram—namely, the element of surprise — is easily detected.

The power of epigram lies very largely in the comparative rarity of its employment. It is too artificial, too elaborate, to be made common; it should be reserved for those thoughts which need to be compressed into especially striking and rememberable statement. Climax. - This figure, which depends upon the law that a thought must have progress, is the ordering of thought and expression so that there shall be uniform and evident increase in significance, or interest, or intensity. The derivation of the word, from the Greek kλíμaέ, a ladder, suggestively indicates the character of the figure.

The construction of a climax depends more on the character of the thought than on the mechanism of expression, and consequently directions for the management of the latter may, in a given case, give way to weightier considerations. In general, however, it may be said that, as volume of sound helps volume of sense, shorter and less sonorous words and constructions should, other considerations apart, precede the longer and more sonorous. That is the best climax where the structure corresponds to the progressive intensity of the thought.

EXAMPLES.

- Various aspects of the figure may here be exemplified. 1. Climax of intensity. The commonly cited example, from Cicero's oration against Verres, being also the clearest and most striking of examples, cannot well be omitted here: "It is an outrage to bind a Roman citizen; to scourge him is an atrocious crime; to put him to death is almost parricide; but to crucify him-what shall I call it?"- From Dr. Holmes: "I know it, I replied, I concede it, I confess it, I proclaim it."

2. Climax of structure, corresponding with climax of significance. From Burke: "This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their punishment in their success. Laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigor; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence; and to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power, the discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud, and beggared rapine, held out as a currency for the support of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized species that represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared and hid themselves in the earth from whence they came, when the principle of property, whose creatures and representatives they are, was systematically subverted." It will be observed how, as the sense advances, sentences, and clauses within a sentence, increase uniformly in length.

3. Neglect of climax, or bathos. "What pen can describe the tears, the lamentations, the agonies, the animated remonstrances of the unfortunate prisoners?"—"Such a derangement as, if immediately enforced, must have reduced society to its first elements, and led to a direct collision of conflicting interests." The flat effect of such inadvertent neglect of progress is obvious.

Two or three additional remarks on climax may be made.

1. Sometimes an intentional anti-climax is employed to give a special quality, usually humor or satire, to a statement. This is virtually a climax built on a new principle; that is, while it decreases in intensity, it increases as uniformly in the spirit that gives rise to it.

EXAMPLES.— From Macaulay: "Yet these stories are now altogether exploded. They have been abandoned by statesmen to aldermen, by aldermen to clergymen, by clergymen to old women, and by old women to Sir Harcourt Lees." From George Eliot: "When George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of Windsor, when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Min

ister, and Mr. Vincy was mayor of the old corporation in Middlemarch, Mrs. Casaubon, born Dorothea Brooke, had taken her wedding journey to Rome." -The following, from De Quincey's "Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts," is a good example of his elaborate humor: "Never tell me of any special work of art you are meditating — I set my face against it in toto. For, if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time."

2. The negation of a climax is naturally made in inverse order; the strongest statement being denied first. A climax may also be virtually negative; that is, some privative particle, such as without, against, unless, may operate to reverse the order of statement.

ILLUSTRATIONS. -1. The action of Alabama in seceding from the Union was denounced by Republicans as the consequence of "sudden, spasmodic, and violent passion." In answering this charge, the order would naturally be, "The action of Alabama was not due to violent passion, nor to spasmodic, nor even to sudden passion."

2. The following are virtually negative: "The chances were millions to one against its success, against its continued existence.”—“And thus he enters public life before he has any convictions, or perceptions, or right impressions even, of true citizenship."

3. The law of climax, which begins with the sentence, extends to all parts of a discourse. It is simply the law of uniform progress, employed to economize the reader's interpreting and realizing power by increasing intensity and amplitude of thought. See preceding, page 25.

CHAPTER IV.

COMPOSITION.

THUS far the consideration of our subject has had to do mainly with the selection of material for style; for such is fundamentally the task recognized in choosing words and estimating figures of speech. As we have seen, this work of selection demands not only skill and judgment for the occasion, but also thorough general discipline in carefulness, patience, scholarship, and taste. We come now to the business of building this material together into literary forms, into phrases, sentences, paragraphs; and here the same discipline is required, only now the writer's attention is directed to combination. Out of the scattered elements at command is to be formed a structure of thought, which is to be no crude congeries jumbled together as it happens, but a unified, coherent, organic system. It is to such skilled combination alone that we can rightly apply the name style.

-

This part of the writer's work has its distinctive problems. How words are related to one another grammatically; how they sound together; how they refer to what precedes or prepare for what follows; how their position is so to be determined as to give them force and distinction in themselves or make them a support to one another,—such questions as these arise at every step, questions to be answered only by constant and studious attention to the logical relations of the thought.

It is in composition, or what may be called thought-structure, that rhetoric shows its close relationship to grammar, and at the same time its fundamental advance beyond that science. Grammar discovers the facts of the language, from which it formulates the laws of correct expression; and these laws rhetoric must observe, because correctness lies necessarily at the foundation of all