him the seeds of an ungrateful scoundrel, until he has been refused the hundredth good turn. If true there,

he is a true man.

SENTENCES ON SIMILES.

HAM. Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in the shape of a camel? POL. By the mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed.

HAM. Methinks it is like a weasel.

POL. It is backed like a weasel.

HAM. Or like a whale.

POL. Very like a whale.

Hamlet.

IN estimating the merits of a portrait, there is one condition more essential than the rest; it must be like. Truth of likeness is the first point of excellence. So in the affair of a simile, however employed, whether in an epic poem or in ordinary table-talk, there must be a likeness in the case; some positive point of resemblance between two objects, to warrant the introduction of the ominous word "like."

Portrait-painters, however, in defiance of the imperativeness of the condition specified, often give a preference to an imaginary past likeness over the present, and assume some features of resemblance which probably never existed. Again, in as many instances, they persist in looking forward to a period of similitude, anticipating a likeness to be hereafter recognised.

"Oh, sir," said the disappointed mother, when the artist had finished her child's portrait, "you have done it beautifully indeed, only it is not in the least like my little boy."

"My dear madam," said the far-seeing R. A., “he will grow like it, astonishingly like."

But the makers of similes, by pen and speech, often proceed upon a plan far more unrestricted than this, which seems nevertheless to have no limit, as it includes with the present the past and future. Their plan appears to be to look for the likeness not merely where it is not, but where it never was and never will be.

Poets, of course, are privileged people; and though not allowed to invent resemblances non-existent and impossible, have a licence to detect in things inward and remote a lurking and most unlikely similarity. Their similes may either imply a likeness immediate, exact, and undeniable, or an analogy existing only in feeling, in sympathy, in the dimness of association, in the impalpable depths of the obscure. Of the two kinds, the latter is the more poetical; and, strange to say, that in this respect swarms of plain prosy people are in their hourly household discourse poetical exceedingly.

Where can one turn for an hour's chat, east or west of the city; on what topic can we hold a ten minutes' gossip either with the busy or the idle, the rough or the refined, the matter-of-fact or the imaginative; and not find a passion for seeking resemblances, for pursuing similes under difficulties, breaking out at every second sentence of the conversation? Why, the habit of hunting up similitudes is universal. These are the likes that beget likes.

Some matter-of-fact man took the pains once, it is said, to count up the number of similes scattered by Moore over the "Life of Sheridan ;" but did the cunning critic skilled in Cocker, though probably blessing his stars, as he read over his own naked prose, that he was no poet, ever tax his arithmetic so far as to count up the number of similes and no similes he himself might be heard to let drop, in the course of one day's

disjointed discursive talk upon the hundreds of common-places that are continually arising? Why, it is a faculty which the highest and the lowest have in common; and it would doubtless happen, if we were to leave out the consideration of excellence and beauty, and confine ourselves to numbers alone, that the very dullest of Mr. Moore's commentators would perpetrate in a day more similes than he would.

In what degree the organ of comparison is ordinarily developed on the heads we see about us, phrenology best knows; but if there be any external token, corresponding in dimensions with the excess and constancy of the habit, some of our acquaintances ought to find it impossible to get their hats on.

Not one in a hundred, of the ten thousand who having something to say for themselves, are pretty sure to say it if you give them the opportunity, but cultivates the practice; often unconsciously, it is true, but always finding in it some relief or convenience, as children do in the pictures that embellish their story-books. They are both helps and ornaments. Whatever the image in the speaker's mind, to think of something like it, not merely assists his description, and presents it more vividly, but it helps him to define it more clearly to himself, and to comprehend all its bearings more completely.

When he has found this out, the faculty gets more frequently into play, and similes come to him of their own accord. He finds one in a case of perplexity a wonderful interpreter of his unexpressed meanings. When his object is not clear, whether for want of clear thoughts or plain words, the simile is held up like a mirror, and displays the doubtful object with distinctness. It is like the good luck of happening to think of a church of the same name," when you cannot

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recollect how your new acquaintance is called, Nokes or Styles. The use of a simile is as convenient for clearing up, as the production of a miniature in the final act of a play, when a general consanguinity among the characters is the author's last card.

Where such effects are producible, no wonder that the habit becomes catching, and that every idea begets another, the instant it is born, to image and represent it; as the swan that floats double on St. Mary's Lake, is imaged by its shadow in the water. Thus people who, as some would inconsiderately suppose, are unblessed with one single idea, are in reality possessed of a pair; the one having no sooner taken its first peep into existence, than you find it is "like" something else, so dissimilar and remote, that it would never by any possible chance have entered into your imagination to conceive it. Actual likeness soon, of course, comes to be little thought of, and similes are naturally adopted quite at random.

But even an entire want of appropriateness is not found to destroy the efficacy of the simile; though it should at last turn out to be as complete a mystification as that native of Ireland of whom his countrymen said, that "he was like nothing in the world but himself, and not much of that."

There is a capital pair of similes in one of the Falstaff scenes; the first as illustrative of exactness and appropriateness, as the second is illustrative (in appearance) of that total inapplicability, and that innocence of all resemblance in the things compared, of which we have been speaking.

"The rogue," saith Sir John, panting at the mere idea of a running-match, "the rogue fled from me like quicksilver."

"I' faith," cries Doll, "and thou followedst him like a church!"

This last is wonderfully like the similes current in general company, and now in hourly use; but in reality it is a very counterpart of its companion for exactness and for truth. A running dodging fellow would naturally enough awaken in Falstaff's mind the idea of quicksilver; while of fat Jack's running after him, the young lady had the same idea as of the lively movements, the unassisted velocity, of a church. Doll could have done nothing whatever in the way of description of Falstaff's hopeless incapacity for following the fugitive, like producing the picture of immovability conveyed by that extraordinary simile.

The necessity of resorting to the simile in all such desperate cases is felt even from earliest boyhood. Even in schooldays, when events so fall out that it is difficult at the moment to call to mind anything like them, they yet must be likened to something or other; and accordingly we hear how "Thwaites has been punching Wiglins's head like anything!" Like what, it were impossible to say; but anything is better than nothing, and the sentence could not be terminated without a comparison.

It is on this principle, found out so early in life, and in the consciousness of this want which accompanies us all through it, that certain phrases have been invented and dispersed through the world, as legitimate and recognised substitutes for this too general and indefinite simile, "like anything." It was felt in the process of time, to be more dignified to mention explicitly some one object of comparison, no matter for its absolute and notorious non-resemblance in the particular case; and hence by a happy social fiction, profound as some of the