while, to gnaw into it again; so that in every sense and in all directions it may bite and bite again into the heart of the criminal. Do not believe the indifferent or lofty air some persons put on; they disguise from you the terrors which perhaps their death-bed will too plainly reveal; but even supposing they have succeeded in freeing themselves from the fears felt by the majority, still they have had to free themselves. And how have they done this? By avoiding the thought of them. They are, you imagine, not alarmed at what terrifies you; but they are afraid of being afraid, which is much the same thing; and the very word-eternity-sounds like thunder in their ears."

Having now completed our discussion of Figures of Spelling and Figures of Syntax, it is the proper place to insert the true historic view of our English speech-the view which is now triumphant among scholars. Once or twice in the above pages we have not hesitated to talk of the Saxon or Anglo-Saxon tongue; we have even called the English our mother tongue, and the AngloSaxon our grandmother tongue; but, in strict accuracy, these two, English and Anglo-Saxon, are one languageessentially one; nay, before the Saxon pirates had left the shores of the Baltic, and when as yet there was no England, still there was English. As Sir F. Palgrave expresses it, the terms Anglo-Saxon and Semi-Saxon convey (at least, if we are not greatly on our guard) “ a most false idea of our civil history. They disguise the continuity of affairs, and substitute the appearance of a new formation (of a language) in the place of a progressive evolution"-of what is essentially one and the same language. Accordingly, King Alfred has these decisive words:

"Aelfred Kyning waes wealh stod thisse bec, and hie of boclaedene on Englisc wende."

—“ Alfred, King, was commentator of this book, and it from book-language into English turned." Besides, our weary plodding in Gower has been repaid by our obtain

ing for ourselves the sweeping conviction that as early as 1300 English was in full currency, and could not have sprung into recent birth. No; you will find English in the great epic lay of Beowulf, uttered ere the Angles had left Schleswig on the Baltic; in Caedmon, inspired cowherd and monk of Whitby, who died about 680, and gave Milton, it is likely, a hint of " Paradise Lost;" and in the "Brunanburh War Song," descriptive of the great battle at Brunanburgh in 937. There was Old English down to 1154; Middle English from 1154 to about 1500, when it was ridding itself of its inflections, and adopting words from many quarters, especially from the French; and Modern English, from about 1500 till now. glorious and very ancient speech, wherein to this hour we hear the roar of the northern seas, the thunder of the polar storms, the battle-cries of heroes, whose race, spite of Dane and Norman, has only grown nobler under even the training of the worst catastrophes.

Most

CHAPTER V.

FIGURES OF SYNTAX.

PART THIRD AND LAST.

Enallage or Exchange.-Antemeria.-Antiptosis, Heterosis.- Metastasis.- Hyperbaton or Inversion.- Antistrophe.

We trust that by this time you have fully adopted the opinion-no other enters more deeply into the philosophy of our subject-that figures of speech are not tawdry things called into existence artificially by rhetors, but beautiful and necessary phenomena produced by Nature, according to certain fundamental laws of mentality, acting on language-that next to miraculous instrument or incarnation of thought, and which is God's open proclamation that man hath the divine in him, and is of an order of being altogether superior to the brutes. The laws of the epic poem, for instance, came from Homer, the bard and man of feeling, to Aristotle, the rhetor, who collected and analyzed hundreds of years after the blind old "Maker;" assuredly they did not pass from Aristotle to Homer. Figures are as natural to the mind as breathing to the lungs. The prismatic colors of heaven's rainbow were not called into existence by Newton's analysis of the sun-ray; these colors can not but be painted by the day-beam on the rain-cloud; and so rainbows glistened long before a philosophy was constructed. In like manner figures have existed wherever Fancy has playfully sported, or Passion cataract-like has rushed; the Indian shouts them in his forest; Bridget screams

them from the kitchen, as when she cries: "Misthress, dear, the kittle's boiling;" for no kettle ever boiled or ever will, but only the water in it.

XXVIII. Enallage is the figure we proceed with—of very great value; the use of one part of speech, or of one modification of a part of speech, for another. We lay before you twenty-six varieties, each deserving to rank as a separate figure. Judge sternly for yourself if they lead you not deep, and with a Venus-like hand, into the inmost recesses of this vast forest which we call language. The following is the fullest account of Enallage that ever has appeared. Gather out of Scripture two hundred varieties—a feast of strawberries for your own private eating; and then a hundred individual cases of each sort.

1. Noun for adjective. In Henry Taylor's powerful tragedy," Philip Van Artevelde," are these lines:

"Forgiveness may be spoken with the tongue-
Forgiveness may be written with the pen;

But think not that the parchment-and mouth-pardon
Will e'er eject old hatreds from the heart."

Often the noun used like "mouth" in the above is joined to the noun it modifies by a hyphen. Thus John Mardley wrote:

"Thy mercy-gates are open wide

To them that mourn their sin."

Francis Turner Palgrave gives us this:

"Star of morn and even,

Shine on us from heaven.
From thy glory-throne

Hear thy very own."

So Shakespeare has "Carthage-queen" for Carthaginian queen. Very common in the Hebrew, as "sacrifices of righteousness" for righteous sacrifices.

In the following, very admirable, from Isaac Williams, you have "seraph-sound" and "shepherd-crowd:"

"In the depth of night profound,

There breaks a seraph-sound

Of never-ending morn

The Lord of Glory born,

Within a holy grot on this our sullen ground.

"Now with that shepherd-crowd,

If it might be allowed,

We fain would enter there;

With awful hastening fear;

And kiss that cradle chaste, in reverend worship bowed. "Within us, Babe divine,

Be born and make us thine;

Be born, and make our hearts thy cradle and thy shrine."

This figure, altogether, is so elegant and so racy that it is in the very frequent use of it that many of the coming improvements of English will be found. S., "Richard II., act iv., scene i., Richard's 3d speech, lines 7-9. 2. A.phrase for a noun, as in Burns

"But Downa do's come o'er me now,

And oh I find it sairly, O."

3. The use or misuse of the nominative for the objective. In a story told us by Sydney Smith, we have a rough case of it in "I" for "me." That witty divine, whose works are such a feast of wit and wisdom, went to a cumbrous dinner-party in the country. Every thing was very ostentatious; very ill-managed; the would-befine dishes ill-cooked; the lady of the house, and Betty the cook, and the overtasked servants were in a perfect broil and pother. In the solemn pause between course No. I and course No. 2, when every body felt awkward, suddenly the door was slammed open, and in rushed the servant-boy of all work, exclaiming, in piteous tones—

"Meester, meester! has Betty any right to lather I?”