already given for similies; some are peculiar to metaphors and allegories.

And, in the first place, it has been observed, that a simile cannot be agreeable where the resemblance is either too strong or too faint. This holds equally in metaphor and allegory; and the reason is the same in all. In the following instances, the resemblance is too faint to be agreeable:

He cannot buckle his distemper'd cause
Within the belt of rule.

MACBETH.-ACT V. Sc. 2.

There is no resemblance between a distempered cause and any body that can be confined within a belt. Again:

Steep me in poverty to the very lips.

OTHELLO.-Act IV. Sc. 9. Poverty must here be conceived a fluid, which it resembles not in any manner.

Speaking to Bolingbroke, banished for six years:

The sullen passage of thy weary steps
Esteem a soil, wherein thou art to set
The precious jewel of thy home-return.

Again:

Here is a letter, lady,

RICHARD II.-ACT I. Sc. 6.

And every word in it a gaping wound,
Issuing life-blood.

MERCHANT OF VENICE.-ACT III. Sc. 3. The following metaphor is strained beyond all endurance. Timurbec, known to us by the name of Tamerlane the Great, writes to Bajazet, Emperor of the Ottomans, in the following terms:

Where is the monarch who dares resist us? where is the potentate who doth not glory in being numbered among our attendants? As for thee, descended from a Turcoman sailor, since the vessel of thy unbounded ambition hath been wrecked in gulf of thy self-love, it would be proper that thou shouldst take in the sails of thy temerity, and cast the anchor of repentance in the port of sincerity and justice, which is the port of safety; lest the tempest of our vengeance make thee perish in the sea of the punishment thou deservest.

Such strained figures, as observed above, are not unfrequent in the first dawn of refinement. The mind,

in a new enjoyment, knows no bounds, and is generally carried to excess, till taste and experience discover the proper limits.

Secondly, Whatever resemblance subjects may have, it is wrong to put one for another, where they bear no mutual proportion. Upon comparing a very high to a very low subject, the simile takes on an air of burlesque; and the same will be the effect, where the one is imagined to be the other, as in a metaphor; or made to represent the other, as in an allegory.

Thirdly, These figures, a metaphor especially, ought not to be crowded with many minute circumstances; for in that case it is scarcely possible to avoid obscurity. A metaphor, above all, ought to be short. It is difficult, for any time, to support a lively image of a thing being what we know it is not; and, for that reason, a metaphor drawn out to any length, instead of illustrating or enlivening the principal subject, becomes disagreeable by overstraining the mind. Here Cowley is extremely licentious: take the following in

stance:

Great and wise conqu'ror, who, where'er

Thou com'st, doth fortify, and settle there!
Who canst defend as well as get,

And who never hadst one quarter beat up yet;
Now thou art in, thou ne'er wilt part
With one inch of my vanquish'd heart:
For since thou took'st it by assault from me,
'Tis garrison'd so strong with thoughts of thee,

It fears no beauteous enemy.

}

For the same reason, however agreeable long allegories may at first be by their novelty, they never afford any lasting pleasure: witness the Fairy Queen, which, with great power of expression, variety of images, and melody of versification, is scarce ever read a second time.

In the fourth place, the comparison carried on in a simile, being in a metaphor, sunk by imagining the principal subject to be that very thing which it only resembles; an opportunity is furnished to describe it in terms taken strictly or literally with respect to its

imagined nature. This suggests another rule; That in constructing a metaphor, the writer ought to make use of such words only as are applicable literally to the imagined nature of his subject. Figurative words ought carefully to be avoided; for such complicated figures, instead of setting the principal subject in a strong light, involve it in a cloud; and it is well if the reader, without rejecting by the lump, endeavor patiently to gather the plain meaning, regardless of its figures:

A stubborn and unconquerable flame

Creeps in his veins, and drinks the streams of life.

LADY JANE GREY.-ACT I. Sc. 1.

Let us analyze this expression. That a fever may be imagined a flame, I admit; though more than one step is necessary to come at the resemblance. A fever, by heating the body, resembles fire; and it is no stretch to imagine a fever to be a fire. Again, by a figure of speech, flame may be put for fire, because they are commonly conjoined; and therefore a fever may be termed a flame. But now, admitting a fever to be a flame, its effects ought to be explained in words that agree literally to a flame. This rule is not observed here; for a flame drinks figuratively only, not properly.

King Henry to his son, Prince Henry:

Thou hid'st a thousand daggers in thy thoughts,
Which thou hast whetted on thy stony heart,
To stab at half an hour of my frail life.

SECOND PART HENRY IV.-Act IV. Sc. 11.

Such faulty metaphors are pleasantly ridiculed in the Rehearsal:

Physician. Sir, to conclude, the place you fill has more than amply exacted the talents of a wary pilot; and all these threatening storms, which, like impregnate clouds, hover o'er our heads, will, when they once are grasped but by the eye of reason, melt into fruitful showers of blessings on the people.

Bayes. Pray, mark that allegory. Is not that good? Johnson. Yes, that grasping of a storm with the eye is admirable. ACT II. Sc. 1.

Fifthly, The jumbling different metaphors in the

same sentence, beginning with one metaphor and ending with another, commonly called a mixed metaphor, ought never to be indulged.

K. Henry.

Will you again unknit
This churlish knot of all-abhorred war,
And move in that obedient orb again,

Where you did give a fair and natural light?

FIRST PART HENRY VI.-ACT V. Sc. 1.

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind, to suffer
The stings and arrows of outrageous fortune;
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them.

HAMLET. ACT III. Sc. 2.

In the sixth place, It is unpleasant to join different metaphors in the same period, even where they are preserved distinct; for when the subject is imagined to be first one thing and then another in the same period without interval, the mind is distracted by the rapid transition; and when the imagination is put on such hard duty, its images are too faint to produce any good effect.

In the last place, It is still worse to jumble together metaphorical and natural expression, so as that the period must be understood in part metaphorically, in part literally; for the imagination cannot follow with sufficient ease changes so sudden and unprepared. A metaphor begun and not carried on, hath no beauty; and, instead of light, there is nothing but obscurity and confusion. Instances of such incorrect composition are without number. I shall, for a specimen, select a few from different authors. Speaking of Britain:

This precious stone set in the sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happier lands.

RICHARD II.-ACT I. Sc. 1. .

In the first line, Britain is figured to be a precious stone. In the following lines, Britain, divested of her metaphorical dress, is presented to the reader in her natural appearance—

These growing feathers, pluck'd from Cæsar's wing,
Will make him fly an ordinary pitch :

Who else would soar above the view of men,

And keep us all in servile fearfulness.

JULIUS CESAR.-ACT I. Sc. 1.

The following is a miserable jumble of expressions, arising from an unsteady view of the subject, between its figurative and natural appearance:

But now from gath'ring clouds destruction pours,
Which ruins with mad rage our halcyon hours:
Mists from black jealousies the tempest form,
Whilst late divisions reinforce the storm.

DISPENSARY.-CANTO III.

To thee the world its present homage pays,
The harvest early, but mature the praise.

POPE'S IMITATION OF HORACE, B. 2. Dryden, in his dedication of the translation of Juvenal, says

When thus, as I may say, before the use of the loadstone, or knowledge of the compass, I was sailing in a vast ocean, without other help than the pole-star of the ancients, and the rules of the French stage among the moderns, &c.

There is a time when factions, by the vehemence of their own fermentation, stun and disable one another. BOLINGBROKE.

This fault of jumbling the figure and plain expression into one confused mass, is not less common in allegory than in metaphor.

A few words more upon allegory. Nothing gives greater pleasure than this figure, when the representative subject bears a strong analogy, in all its circumstances, to that which is represented: but the choice is seldom so lucky; the analogy being generally so faint and obscure, as to puzzle and not please. An allegory is still more difficult in painting than in poetry: the former can show no resemblance but what appears to the eye; the latter has many other resources for showing the resemblance; and, therefore, with respect to what the Abbé du Bos terms mixed allegorical compositions, these may do in poetry; because, in writing, the allegory can easily be distinguished from the historical part; no person, for example, mistakes Virgil's Fame for a real being. But such a mixture in a