Megillus, I should be on the side of Sparta, to let them sleep prostrate on the ground and never to rouse them up."* We have another illustration in the passage of Herodotus where fair women are called "eye-sores.' There

may

be some defence for this indeed, because the persons using the expression are barbarians, and in their cups. But putting it even into lips like theirs, it were better not for a frivolous conceit to disfigure a work to the end of time.

* Similar instances of perverted ingenuity may be found in Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis," where, for instance, he says that.

Angels drew wide the curtains of the skies, And heaven, as if they wanted lights above, For tapers made two glaring comets rise ; and again where the Fire of London is put out by "A broad extinguisher,"

while

"A solemn silence damps the tuneful sky.”

The Laws, Bk. vi.

f Herodotus, v. 18.

V.

On misplaced efforts at Originality.

ALL such blemishes of style are the result of a single cause, that pursuit of novelty in ideas, which has risen to a mania among authors of the present day. For it often happens that faults spring up out of the very sources of our excellence. Beauties of expression, all the characteristics of a lofty, and those also of a graceful, style, contribute to the perfection of a work. Yet these very elements of success may become the source and cause of failure. It is much the same with antithesis, hyperbole, and the use of plurals. These have their dangers, as I propose to shew hereafter. For the present we must seek for means and lay down rules by which to avoid, if possible, the errors to which eloquence itself is inherently liable.

C

VI.

That Taste is formed by rules and experience combined. To accomplish this, my friend, we are first of all to acquire a clear comprehension and discernment of what constitutes true sublimity. This is no easy acquisition; seeing that a just taste in literature is the tardy product of a large experience; although it may perhaps be possible

"" are well con

For this reason, perhaps, Milton names Longinus almost at the very end of his scheme of Education. "When all these employments," he says, quered, then will the choice histories, heroic poems, and attic tragedies of stateliest and most regal argument, with all the famous political orations, offer themselves; which, if they were not only read, but some of them got by memory, and solemnly pronounced with right accent and grace, as might be taught, would endue them even with the spirit and vigour of Demosthenes or Cicero, Euripides, or Sophocles. And now lastly will be the time to read with them those organic arts, which enable men to discourse and write perspicuously, elegantly, and according

from the following remarks to acquire as much of this critical faculty as precepts can convey.

to the fitted style of lofty, mean, and lowly. Logic, therefore, so much as is useful, is to be referred to this due place with all her well-couched heads and topics, until it be time to open her contracted palm into a graceful and ornate rhetoric, taught out of the rule of Plato, Aristotle, Phalereus, Cicero, Hermogenes, Longinus."

VII.

On the tests of true Sublimity.

IN the ordinary affairs of life, my dear friend, nothing is essentially noble, the contempt of which is noble; as wealth, honours, glory, sovereignty, and all things else that look grand on the surface: : no sensible man can count them great blessings, when it is in itself no small blessing not to care for them. And undoubtedly men feel less admiration for the actual possessors than for those who, having them within their reach, out of magnanimity decline them. In the same way we ought to review the sublimities in poems and other compositions; lest, with a similar display of grandeur to the eye, under a load of ill-assorted ornamentation, they be found when stripped of it, contemptibly unsubstantial,