the teaching of art. Upon a due consideration, as I said, of these particulars, the censor of the studious will no longer, I believe, deem the investigation of our present subject superfluous or unprofitable. III. On Bombast, Affectation, and forced Emotion. "Yea, let them quench their hearth-fire's mighitest beam; For should but smoke be lingering on that hearth, I, mingling it with torrent-wreath of flame, Will make their home a blazing heap of ruin.— THIS ceases to be tragedy, and becomes bombast, with its "wreaths of flame," "outspueing to the sky," its "piping Boreas," and the rest. The commencement of this chapter is wanting in the original. The poetical fragment is supposed to come from a lost play by Æschylus, called "The Orithyia." It may be well illustrated, as Ruhnken observes, by the speech of Boreas in Ovid, Metam. vi. 687. The North Wind expresses his rage at being denied the maiden of his choice, and his determination at length to have recourse to his natural weapons which he had laid aside during his courtship. Supposing this to be the position, we may gather the sense of the bombastic fragment before us. He would blow the very smoke into a flame, forsooth, to consume the dwelling, and, after that, he had some more terrible blast in reserve, unless, we may presume, his suit had in the meantime been successful, 1 The passage is marred by the verbiage, and instead of gathering awe, gathers nothing but confusion from the various images, each of which, as it comes under the light of criticism, begins to decline from the terrible to the ridiculous.* But if inordinate inflation of style is unpardonable even in tragedy, the native element for pomp and grandeur of diction, how much more must it be inappropriate in the language of reality. Hence Gorgias of Leontini is laughed at for calling Xerxes "the Jove of the Persians," and vultures "living tombs;" Callisthenes, for passages which have nothing of the spiritual but a want of solidity; and still * In Macpherson's Ossian the reader has continually to decide between sublimity and fustian, when the edges of the clouds are tinged with lightning,' when 'Hidalla's bushy hair sighs in the wind,' or when the dreadful spirit of Loda comes in the roar of a thousand storms, and scatters battles from his eyes.' + Cowley, contrasting whales with minnows, calls the former, "living islands." How Milton handles the like comparison, without the least touch of the burlesque, may be seen in his "Paradise Lost," i. 204. more Cleitarchus, who is in truth a blustering performer, puffing away, as one might say with Sophocles, "Small though his pipe, with full-distended cheek." Amphicrates, Hegesias, and Matris are other cases in point; for often when they fancy themselves in an ecstatic rapture, instead of writing under inspiration, they are talking nonsense. Certainly bombast seems to be one of the snares most difficult to avoid. For men ambitious of eloquence, in seeking to escape from a flat prosaic style, almost inevitably split upon this rock, trusting to the proverb, "Aim highly, fall nobly." But like tumours in the body, all unsubstantial and illusory inflation in style ist mischievous, and productive of effects the opposite of those intended; for "nothing," they say, "is drier than a dropsical patient." But while bombast endeavours to soar beyond Sublimity itself, we have in affectation the very antipodes to true grandeur of style; a mean little-minded fault, with nothing noble about it. What, then, may this affectation consist in? Clearly in that pedantic mode of thinking, which with its perverted ingenuity produces nothing but miserable conceits. Into this mode men slip in the effort at originality or high finish, or, above all, at elegance, instead of attaining which, they run into tawdry, meretricious ornament.* The many curious instances of this fault which Cowley's writings exhibit, have deprived him of the lasting fame which his genius might otherwise have earned. Take for instance his ode on "The Resurrection," in which the loss of Virgil's Æneid is made a climax to the passing away of the whole visible universe : "Till all gentle notes be drown'd In the last trumpet's dreadful sound, That to the spheres themselves shall silence bring, Then all th wide-extended sky, And all the harmonious worlds on high, And Virgil's sacred work shall die." Dryden mars the resounding harmonies of his two sublime odes, the "Song for St. Cecilia's Day," and "Alexander's Feast," by concluding each with a poor antithetical conceit : "So, when the last and dreadful hour, |