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WIT. Clever, unexpected playing on words, ingenious turns of expression, epigrams, etc. make up wit. It has two broad divisions-kindly, genial, as in Steele: bitter, sarcastic, as in Swift. Examples of wit abound in Shakespeare's As You Like It and Twelfth Night; and in Fuller, Sheridan, Lamb, Sydney Smith, Douglas Jerrold.

A painter was once described as mediocre. Jerrold heard this, and remarked, "The worst ochre that an artist can paint with." Lamb praises the Oxford wit who met a rustic carrying a hare, and asked, "Is that your own hare or a wig?"

CONCEITS. Far-fetched, fantastic turns of expression, and figures of speech are called conceits. Donne and others who indulged in conceits were called "metaphysical" poets by Dr Johnson. Here is an example from Cowley. Speaking of his mistress's heart, he says:

"Woe to her stubborn heart if once mine come

Into the selfsame room!

'Twill tear and blow up all within,

Like a grenado shot into a magazine.”

See Addison's criticism in The Spectator, No. 62.

FRIGID. When words intended to rouse and inspire leave the reader unimpressed and cold, the style is said to be frigid. Crashaw's conceits in The Weepers are frigid. The eyes of St Mary Magdalen are, he says, "Heavens of ever-falling stars," the tears of which are "the cream of the milky way," and

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Angels with crystal vials come

And draw from those full eyes of thine
Their Master's water, their own wine."

Dr Johnson's allegories in The Rambler are examples of frigidity (e.g. No. 96).

3. Aesthetic Qualities.

MELODY. See ch. VII. Add from Burke: "In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every part, and the gloss of novelty fresh

upon all the objects that surround us, how lively at that time are our sensations, but how false and inaccurate the judgments we form of things"; and from Landor: "A bell warbles the more mellifluously in the air when the sound of the stroke is over, and when another swims out from underneath it, and pants upon the element that gave it birth." Many examples will be found in De Quincey, e.g. in The English Mail-Coach.

ELEGANCE, GRACE. In securing melody, everything harsh in sound is avoided: elegance, or grace, demands, not merely smooth and easy rhythm, but also propriety of diction, and felicitous arrangement-everything in harmony. Take for example a passage from Landor:

"I will sing to thee one song more, my wakeful Rhodopè! my chirping bird! over whom is no mother's wing! That it may lull thee asleep, I will celebrate no longer, as in the days of wine and plenteousness, the glory of Mars, guiding in their invisibly rapid onset the dappled steeds of Rhesus. What hast thou to do, my little one, with arrows tired of clustering in the quiver? How much quieter is thy pallet than the tents which whitened the plains of Simois ! What knowest thou about the river Eurotas? What knowest thou about its ancient palace, once trodden by the assembled gods, and then polluted by the Phrygians? What knowest thou of perfidious men and sanguinary deeds?"

Addison will also supply examples; as

"Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful. A noble metaphor, when it is placed to an advantage, casts a kind of glory round it and darts a lustre through a whole sentence. These different kinds of allusion are but so many different manners of similitude; and that they may please the imagination, the likeness ought to be very exact or very agreeable, as we love to see a picture where the resemblance is just or the posture and air graceful."

Goldsmith, both in his poetry and in his prose, is preeminently graceful.

EXERCISES

LXV. Select from your own reading passages to illustrate the different kinds of style.

LXVI. Apply suitable descriptions to the style of the following passages. If you know the authors of the passages, name them. If not, say who you think is the author of each: give reasons for your answer.

I. Making this protestation, I refuse all revolutionary tribunals, where men have been put to death for no other reason than that they have obtained favours from the Crown. I claim, not the letter, but the spirit of the old English law--that is, to be tried by my peers. I decline his Grace's jurisdiction as a judge. I challenge the Duke of Bedford as a juror to pass upon the value of my services. Whatever his natural parts may be, I cannot recognise in his few and idle years, the competence to judge of my long and laborious life. If I can help it, he shall not be upon the inquest of my quantum meruit.

2. For seeing those things which are equal must needs all have one measure; if I cannot but wish to receive all good, even as much at every man's hand as any man can wish unto his own soul, how should I look to have any part of my desire herein satisfied, unless myself be careful to satisfy the like desire, which is in other men?

3. I had avoided him; I had slighted him; he knew it. He did not love me; he could not.

4.

Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,
Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise;
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer.

5. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them.

6. Tread softly and circumspectly in this funambulatory track and narrow path of goodness: maim not uprightness by halting concomitances, nor circumstantially deprave substantial goodness.

7. Strive not to run like Hercules, a furlong in a breath: festination may prove precipitation; deliberating delay may be wise cunctation, and slowness no slothfulness.

8. 'Tis all your business, business how to shun.

9.

IO.

The nodding promontories, and blue isles,
And cloud-like mountains, and dividuous waves
Of Greece, basked glorious in the open smiles
Of favouring heaven: from their enchanted caves
Prophetic echoes flung dim melody.

Then as a wild swan, when sublimely winging
Its path athwart the thunder-smoke of dawn,
Sinks headlong through the aerial golden light
On the heavy sounding plain,

When the bolt has pierced its brain;

As summer clouds dissolve unburthened of their rain;
As a far taper fades with fading night;
As a brief insect dies with dying day,
My song, its pinions disarrayed of might,

Drooped; o'er it closed the echoes far away
Of the great voice which did its flight sustain,

As waves which lately paved his watery way

Hiss round a drowner's head in their tempestuous play.

II. I came out presently on the edge of the ravine: the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine boughs; and, on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it was by gray cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, and with the shadows of the pines flickering upon his plumage from above; but with a fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes moving with him as he flew.

12. It was dark; and she stood, as you may see an Etonian do at times, rocking her little boat from side to side, until it had taken in water as much as might be agreeable. Too much it proved for the boat's constitution, and the boat perished of dropsy-Kate declining to tap it. She got a ducking herself; but what cared she?

13.

Since in truth

The highest is the measure of the man,

And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay,

Nor those horn-handed breakers of the glebe,

But Homer, Plato, Verulam; even so

With woman: and in arts of government
Elizabeth and others; arts of war

The peasant Joan and others; arts of grace
Sappho and others vied with any man.

14.

Now, when the winter's keener breath began
To crystallize the Baltic ocean;

To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods,
And periwig with snow the bald-pate woods.

15. It was impossible to read so many passionate exclamations and soothing descriptions, without feeling some desire to enjoy the state in which all this felicity was to be found: and therefore I received with raptures the invitation of my good aunt; and expected that by some unknown influence I should find all my hopes and fears and jealousies and competitions vanish from my heart upon my first arrival at the seats of innocence and tranquillity; that I should sleep in halcyon bowers and wander in elysian gardens; where I should meet with nothing but the softness of benevolence, the candour of simplicity, and the cheerfulness of content; where I should see Reason exerting her sovereignty over life, without any interruption from Envy, Avarice, or Ambition, and every day passing in such a manner as the severest wisdom should approve.

16. If beneficence be judged by the happiness which it diffuses, whose claim, by that proof, stands higher than that of Mrs Montagu, from the munificence with which she celebrated her annual festival for those helpless artificers who perform the most abject offices of any authorized calling, in being the active guardians of our blazing hearths? Not to vain glory, then, but to kindness of heart, should be adjudged the publicity of that superb charity which made its jetty objects, for one bright morning, cease to consider themselves as degraded outcasts from all society.

17. Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.

18.

19.

But with a crash like thunder
Fell every loosened beam,

And, like a dam, the mighty wreck

Lay right athwart the stream;

And a long shout of triumph

Rose from the walls of Rome,

As to the highest turret-tops

Was splashed the yellow foam.

There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,

On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

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