ture collateral," he knows not what to think he pauses, and is perplexed, but not instructed. You will, perhaps, think I have selected this example to show what perplexed figures may be, or that it is taken from an author remarkably dull, neither of which is the case; you will find it in Dr. Johnson's preface to his Dictionary of the English Language. There is a metaphor equally harsh and obscure in Dr. Armstrong's Poem on Health, where he speaks of "tenacious paste of solid milk," which no ordinary reader would be likely to take for a cheese! Dr. Young is an author, many of whose metaphors are new, striking, and admirably conducted, and yet he is very often faulty in this respect. Mr. Addison, on the contrary, excels in his metaphors; they seem always to arise naturally and unsought, from the very series of thought in which the subject engages him. Thomson is on the whole a chaste writer, yet the metaphors in his Seasons are often forced, and what some have called unideal such as, "Showery radiance, breezy coolness, moving softness, refreshing breaths, dewy light, lucid coolness," &c.

4thly. We should never confound the figura

tive and literal sense; as when Penelope, in the Odyssey, complains that her son had left her without taking leave.

"Now from my fond embrace by tempests torn, "Our other column of the state is borne:

"Nor took a kind adieu, nor sought consent," &c.

First Telemachus, in these lines, is made a column, and that with propriety; but that column is blamed for not bidding farewel and sa luting, which changes the column again into a person.

5thly. Metaphors should not be mixed or confounded together. Thus Shakspeare speaks of taking "arms against a sea of troubles," and of "war snarling at the very picked bone of majesty," "charms dissolve apace, &c. Mr. Addison himself has fallen into this mistake. In his letter from Italy he says,

"I bridle in my struggling Muse in vain,
"That longs to launch into a bolder strain."

Here the first line is proper enough; but when the Muse is changed from a horse to a ship, it becomes improper. It has, therefore, been given as a rule to be observed by orators, that

they ought to figure to themselves the metaphors they employ as if painted before them, and observe whether any thing would appear improper or ridiculous, if the whole was drawn by the pencil of an artist.

6thly. They ought not to be crowded or heaped one upon another. Horace is guilty of this, in joining three metaphors in a few lines, lib. ii. ode 1.

"Nondum expiatis uncta cruoribus:

"Periculosæ plenum opus alex

"Tractas: et incedis per ignes
Suppositos cineri doloso."

"Of warm contentions, wrathful jars,
"The growing seeds of civil wars;
"Of double fortune's cruel games,

"The specious means, the private aims,
"And fatal friendships of the guilty great,
"Alas! how fatal to the Roman state.

"Of mighty legions late subdued,

"And arms with Latian blood embru'd;
"Yet unaton'd (a labour vast,

"Doubtful the dice, and dire the cast)

"You treat adventurous, and incautious tread
"On fires with faithless embers overspread."

FRANCIS.

Under circumstances of great agitation, however, a flow of metaphors seems allowable, and even natural. No critic, I believe, ever found the following fine passage of Shakspeare too redundant in metaphor:

"Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?
"Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?
"Rase out the living tablets of the brain;

And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, "Cleanse the foul bosom of that per❜lous stuff, "That weighs upon the heart." MACBETH.

7thly. They should not be too far pursued. Cowley is often faulty in this respect. Shaftsbury also frequently pursues his metaphors too far; he is so fond of embellishing his style with them, that when he has once found one to please him, he can never think of parting with it. This author, indeed, from his strained me. taphors, and his inversion of language, is scarcely better understood than if he had writ ten in Greek or Latin.

LETTER XII.

Allegory-Allusion.--Catachresis.-Antithesis.

MY DEAR JOHN,

I HAVE already intimated that an allegory is a metaphor protracted to some considerable length. "When several kindred metaphors," Cicero observes, "succeed one another, they alter the form of a composition; and on that account a succession of this kind is called by the Greeks an allegory; and properly, as far as relates to the etymology of the word. Aristotle, however, instead of considering it as a new species of figure, has more judiciously comprised such modes of expression under the general appellation of metaphors.

I confess I should myself be disposed to adopt the sentiment of Aristotle, and to appropriate the term allegory to another form of composition, which I shall have presently to mention. Custom and authority have, however, decreed it otherwise, and we must therefore admit of