What need I be so forward with Death, that calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter, Honor pricks me on. But how if Honor prick me off, when I come on? how then? Can Honor set a leg? No: or an arm? No: or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honor? a word. What is that word honor? Air: a trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Is it insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it; honor is a mere scutcheon; and so ends my catechism.

First Part of Henry IV. Act V. Sc. 2.

And even without dialogue, a continued discourse may be justified, where a man reasons in a soliloquy upon an important subject; for if in such a case it be at all excusable to think aloud, it is necessary that the reasoning be carried on in a chain; which justifies that admirable soliloquy in Hamlet upon life and immortality, being a serene meditation upon the most interesting of all subjects. And the same consideration will justify the soliloquy which introduces the 5th act of Addison's Cato.

405. The next class of the grosser errors which all writers ought to avoid, shall be of language elevated above the tone of the sentiment; of which take the following instances:

Zara. Swift as occasion, I

Myself will fly; and earlier than the morn

Wake thee to freedom. Now 'tis late; and yet
Some news few minutes past arrived, which seem'd
To shake the temper of the King-Who knows
What racking cares disease a monarch's bed?
Or love, that late at night still lights his lamp,
And strikes his rays through dusk, and folded lids,
Forbidding rest, may stretch his eyes awake,
And force their balls abroad at this dead hour.

I'll try.

Mourning Bride, Act III. Sc. 4.

The language here is undoubtedly too pompous and labored for describing so simple a circumstance as absence of sleep.

406. Language too artificial or too figurative for the gravity, dignity, or importance of the occasion, may be put in a third class. Chimène demanding justice against Rodrigue who killed her father, instead of a plain and pathetic expostulation, makes a speech stuffed with the most artificial flowers of rhetoric:

Sire, mon père est mort, mes yeux ont vu son sang
Couler à gros bouillons de son généreux flanc:
Ce sang qui tant de fois garantit vos murailles,
Ce sang qui tant de fois vous gagna des batailles,
Ce sang qui, tout sorti, fume encore de courroux
De se voir répandu pour d'autres que pour vous,
Qu'au milieu des hasards n'osait verser la guerre,
Rodrigue en votre cour vient d'en couvrir la terre.
J'ai couru sur le lieu sans force, et sans couleur:
Je l'ai trouvé sans vie. Excusez ma douleur,
Sire; la voix me manque à ce récit funeste,

Mes pleurs et mes soupirs vous diront mieux le reste.

404. Properties of a natural soliloquy. Authors that fail in this.-Soliloquies without turbulence of passion how constructed. Falstaff. Hamlet.

405. Error of language elevated above the tone of the sentiment. Mourning Bride.

Bride

Nothing can be contrived in language more averse to the tone of the passion than this florid speech: I should imagine it more apt to provoke laughter than to inspire concern or pity.

407. In a fourth class shall be given specimens of language too light or airy for a severe passion.

Imagery and figurative expression are discordant, in the highest degree, with the agony of a mother who is deprived of two hopeful sons by a brutal murder. Therefore the following passage is un

doubtedly in a bad taste:

Again:

Queen. Ah, my poor princes! ah, my tender babes!
My unblown flowers, new appearing sweets!

If yet your gentle souls fly in the air,

And be not fixt in doom perpetual,

Hover about me with your airy wings,

And hear your mother's lamentation.-Richard III. Act IV.

K. Philip. You are as fond of grief as of your child.
Constance. Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garment with his form;
Then have I reason to be fond of grief.

King John, Act III. Sc. 6.

408. A thought that turns upon the expression instead of the subject, commonly called a play of words, being low and childish, is unworthy of any composition, whether gay or serious, that pretends to any degree of elevation: thoughts of this kind make a fifth class. To die is to be banish'd from myself: And Sylvia is myself: banish'd from her, Is self from self; a deadly banishment!

Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act III. Sc. 8.

Countess. I pray thee, lady, have a better cheer:
If thou engrossest all the griefs as thine,
Thou robb'st me of a moiety.

All's Well that Ends Well, Act III. Sc. 8.

K. Henry. O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows!
When that my care could not withhold thy riot,
What wilt thou do when riot is thy care?

Oh, thou wilt be a wilderness again,
Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants.

Second Part Henry IV. Act IV. Sc. 4.

Cruda Amarilla, che col nome ancora
D'amar, ahi lasso, amaramente insegni.

Antony, speaking of Julius Cæsar :

Pastor Fido, Act I. Sc. 1.

O world! thou wast the forest of this hart:
And this, indeed, O world, the heart of thee.
How like a deer, stricken by many princes,
Dost thou here lie!

Julius Caesar, Act III. Sc. 8.

406. Language too artificial or figurative for the occasion.
407. Too light or airy for a severe passion.-Richard III. King John,

Playing thus with the sound of words, which is still worse than a pun, is the meanest of all conceits. But Shakspeare, when he descends to a play of words, is not always in the wrong; for it is done sometimes to denote a peculiar character, as in the following passage: K. Philip. What say'st thou, boy? look in the lady's face. Lewis. I do, my lord, and in her eye I find

A wonder, or a wond'rous miracle;

The shadow of myself form'd in her eye;
Which, being but the shadow of your son,

Becomes a sun, and makes your son a shadow.
I do protest, I never loved myself

Till now infixed I beheld myself

Drawn in the flatt'ring table of her eye.

Faulconbridge. Drawn in the flatt'ring table of her eye!
Hang'd in the frowning wrinkle of her brow!

And quarter'd in her heart! he doth espy

Himself Love's traitor: this is pity now;

That hang'd, and drawn, and quarter'd, there should be
In such a love so vile a lout as he.-King John, Act II. Sc. 5.

409. A jingle of words is the lowest species of that low wit: which is scarce sufferable in any case, and least of all in an heroic poem; and yet Milton, in some instances, has descended to that puerility:

And brought into the world a world of woe.

-begirt th' Almighty throne

Beseeching or besieging

Which tempted our attempt

At one slight bound high overleap'd all bound.

With a shout

Loud as from number without numbers.

One should think it unnecessary to enter a caveat against an ex pression that has no meaning, or no distinct meaning; and yet somewhat of that kind may be found even among good writers. Such make a sixth class.

Cleopatra. Now, what news, my Charmion?
Will he be kind? and will he not forsake me?
Am I to live or die? nay, do I live?

Or am I dead? for when he gave his answer,
Fate took the word, and then I lived or died.

Dryden, All for Love, Act II.

If she be coy, and scorn my noble fire,
If her chill heart I cannot move;
Why, I'll enjoy the very love,

And make a mistress of my own desire.

Cowley, poem inscribed The Request.

His whole poem, inscribed My Picture, is a jargon of the same kind.

'Tis he, they cry, by whom

Not men, but war itself is overcome.-Indian Queen.

Such empty expressions are finely ridiculed in the Rehearsal :

Was't not unjust to ravish hence her breath,

And in life's stead to leave us naught but death.-Act IV. Sc. 1.

408. Play of words. 409. Jingle of words. ing to be avoided.

Examples from Shakspeare. When justifiable.

Instance from Milton.-Expressions that have no distinct mar

CHAPTER XVIII.

BEAUTY OF LANGUAGE.

410. Of all the fine arts, painting only and sculpture are in their nature imitative.* An ornamented field is not a copy or imitation

*[This remark of our author requires some qualification. A masterly view of the case is presented in the Third Discourse of Sir Joshua Reynolds, from which the following extracts are taken.-Ed.

"Nature herself is not to be too closely copied. There are excellencies in the art of painting beyond what is commonly called the imitation of nature.

A mere copier of nature can never produce any thing great; can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator. "The principle now laid down, that the perfection of this art does not consist in mere imitation, is far from being new or singular. It is, indeed, supported by the general opinion of the enlightened part of mankind. The poets, orators, and rhetoricians of antiquity are continually enforcing this position, that all the arts receive their perfection from an ideal beauty, superior to what is to be found in individual nature."

"All the objects which are exhibited to our view by nature, upon close examination will be found to have their blemishes and defects. The most beautiful forms have something about them like weakness, minuteness, or imperfection. But it is not every eye that perceives these blemishes. It must be an eye long used to the contemplation and comparison of these forms; and which, by a long habit of observing what any set of objects of the same kind have in common, has acquired the power of discerning what each wants in particular. This long laborious comparison should be the first study of the painter who aims at the " great style" (the beau idéal of the French). By this means he acquires a just idea of beautiful forms; he corrects nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect. His eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original; and, what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object. This idea of the perfect state of nature, which the artist calls the Ideal Beauty, is the great leading principle by which works of genius are conducted. By this Phidias acquired his fame."

"Thus it is from a reiterated experience and a close comparison of the objects in nature, that an artist becomes possessed of the idea of that central form, if I may so express it, from which every deviation is deformity. But the investigation of this form, I grant, is painful, and I know but of one method of shortening the road; that is by a careful study of the works of the ancient sculptors; who, being indefatigable in the school of nature, have left models of that perfect form behind them which an artist would prefer as supremely beautiful, who had spent his whole life in that single contemplation."-Works, vol. i. discourse iii.

Upon statuary, the same critical writer, in a similar strain, remarks:

"In strict propriety, the Grecian statues only excel nature by bringing together such an assemblage of beautiful parts as nature was never known to bestow on one object:

For earth-born graces sparingly impart

The symmetry supreme of perfect art. "

It must be remembered that the component parts of the most perfect statue never can excel nature,-that we can form no idea of beauty beyond her works; we can only make this rare assemblage an assemblage so rare that if we are to

of nature, but nature itself embellished. Architecture is productive of originals, and copies not from nature. Sound and motion may in some measure be imitated by music; but for the most part music, like architecture, is productive of originals. Language copies not from nature more than music or architecture; unless where, like music, it is imitative of sound or motion. Thus, in the description ef particular sounds, language sometimes furnisheth words, which, besides their customary power of exciting ideas, resemble by their softness or harshness the sounds described; and there are words which, by the celerity or slowness of pronunciation, have some resemblance to the motion they signify. The imitative power of words goes one step farther: the loftiness of some words makes them proper symbols of lofty ideas; a rough subject is imitated by harsh-sounding words; and words of many syllables, pronounced slow and smooth, are expressive of grief and melancholy. Words have a separate effect on the mind, abstracting from their signification and from their imitative power: they are more or less agreeable to the ear by the fulness, sweetness, faintness, or roughness of their tones.

411. These are but faint beauties, being known to those only who have more than ordinary acuteness of perception. Language possesseth a beauty superior greatly in degree, of which we are eminently sensible when a thought is communicated with perspicuity and sprightliness. This beauty of language, arising from its power of expressing thought, is apt to be confounded with the beauty of the thought itself: the beauty of thought, transferred to the expres sion, makes it appear more beautiful.* But these beauties, if we wish to think accurately, must be distinguished from each other. They are in reality so distinct that we sometimes are conscious of the highest pleasure language can afford, when the subject expressed is disagreeable: a thing that is loathsome, or a scene of horror to make one's hair stand on end, may be described in a manner so lively as that the disagreeableness of the subject shall not even obscure the agreeableness of the description. The causes of the original beauty of language, considered as significant, which is a branch

give the name of Monster to what is uncommon, we might, in the words of the Duke of Buckingham, call it

A faultless Monster which the world ne'er saw."

Sir J. Reynolds' Works, vol. ii. p. 811.] *Chapter ii. part i. sec. 5. Demetrius Phalereus (of Elocution, sec. 75) makes the same observation. We are apt, says that author, to confound the language with the subject; and if the latter be nervous, we judge the same of the former. But they are clearly distinguishable; and it is not uncommon to find subjects of great dignity dressed in mean language. Theopompus is celebrated for the force of his diction, but erroneously; his subject indeed has great force, but his style very little.

410. The fine arts that are imitativo. Sir Joshua Reynold's observations on this point. -The author's remarks on gardening, architecture, language, music.-Imitative power of words.-Agreeableness to the ear.