CHAPTER XIV. FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART NINTH. Litotes, Meiosis, or Lessening.- The Bull, usually called Irish. - Repetition: Seventeen Varieties.—Translation from the German, by the Author. LXII. LITŎTES, Meiosis, or Lessening, is the figure that naturally finds a place soon after its boisterous or copious opposite, hyperbole. Hereby, while we seem to lessen, we increase the force of the expression—a striking proof of the flexibility of language when wielded with skill. Hyperbole means less than it says; litotes means more. But very unfortunate the name; for whether the o in the middle shall be long or short is always to be a dispute, though scholars are well aware that short it ought to be. Satan uses a lessening, when in a despair and envy that hate all things bright, happy, unfallen, he thus bespeaks God's unsinning servant, the Sun: "To thee I call, But with no friendly voice, and add thy name, O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams." The apostle Paul-sage, hero, man of ceaseless action, ceaseless thought, and ceaseless love-warns a Roman official that he was "A citizen of no mean city." When we say "the man is no fool," we are understood to admit that he is wise. "I can not praise such conduct," means that we condemn it. Chaucer, of his fat, rosy monk, affirms— "He was not pale as a forpinėd ghost." But Chaucer's poor clerk was the living antithesis, he and his horse, of the monk: "As lené was his horse as is a rake, And he was not right fat, I undertake." Under Lessening much sly insinuation may be carried on-it being well fitted for purposes of humor. And as, when a person is not praised enough, the reader or hearer feels challenged to do him better justice, so this figure often suggests to us those stronger epithets, from the use of which the author or speaker purposely abstains, and we have in this way the gratification of doing fully what has been left but half done. Lessening is continually used to express affection; we depict an object as small in order to excite ourselves to love and cherish it. Jesus and John loved to say: Little children. The language of the nursery abounds in diminutives. Such terms are honorable to human nature, proving how deep the fountains of perfectly disinterested affection are in man's heart. Be helpless and you will be cared for. In the following, by Emerson, the claims of smallness and weakness are very cleverly set forth: "The Mountain and the Squirrel Had a quarrel; And the Mountain called the Squirrel 'Little Prig.' 'You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together To make up a year And a sphere; And I think it no disgrace If I'm not so large as you, I'll not deny you make A very pretty squirrel track: If I can not carry forests on my back, Edwin Arnold coins a delicate usage for our not yet half-developed language-he going in the right direction, mark it well-Saxonward. He thus addresses the Almond Blossom, in an exquisite little poem: "Blossom of the almond-trees, LXIII. A usage of a very different sort now presents itself: The Bull, usually called Irish; though Rhetoric blushes a little to recognize it as a legitimate figure of speech. Exaggerated hyperboles are, however, secondcousins, half removed. Bulls are the result partly of confusion of ideas, and partly of confusion of words, yet preserving a certain odd plausibility. Coleridge defines them thus: "A bull consists in a mental juxtaposition of incongruous ideas; with the sensation, but without the reality, of connection." Said Jerrold's tipsy fellow, after long fumbling in the dark with the key in his hand, at the door of his house: "I see how it is; some scoundrel has stolen the key-hole." John Claudius Beresford, banker in Dublin, was very unpopular with the mob at the time of a rebellion in Ireland: "We'll ruin the rascal,' was the cry; 'we'll destroy every note of his bank we can lay our hands on;"" and they actually burned some twenty thousand pounds' worth of them. Milton tries to impart some dignity to this Hibernian way of speech in these terms: "Adam the goodliest man of men since born His sons-the fairest of his daughters, Eve." But Wordsworth, though seemingly it was a bull, in reality expressed a great verity, that the foundations of the character of the man are laid in infancy even, and in earliest boyhood; and so he uttered the expression : "The child's the father of the man." We will be forgiven for purloining the following group of bulls, the best we ever found collected; too valuable for our honesty to stand proof against. Pray let us indulge in one good theft: "Why the Irish, of all people, should be distinguished for bullmaking, or why there should exist among the natives of Ireland such an innate and irresistible propensity to blunder, it is difficult to conjecture. Mr. and Miss Edgeworth, in their inquiry into the etymology of Irish bulls, endeavor to account for it thus: "That the English not being the mother-tongue of the natives of Ireland, to them it is a foreign language, and, consequently, it is scarcely within the limits of probability that they should avoid making blunders both in speaking and writing.' However this may be, an Irish bull is a thing more easily conceived than defined. Perhaps, did we search for its precedent among the long lists of bold tropes and figures which come down from the old Greek writers and orators, the nearest approach we could find to it would be under the title of Catachresis-a catachresis being the 'boldest of any trope, necessity makes it borrow and employ an expression or term contrary to the thing it means to express. This certainly conveys a just idea of what an Irish bull is or should be. "Many of the following examples we give as original, as they occurred within our own personal knowledge; the rest we have selected from a variety of sources, and have been careful always to distinguish between blunders and bulls-a distinction which is often neglected. "One of the richest specimens of a real Irish bull which has ever fallen under our notice was perpetrated by that clever and witty, but blundering Irish knight, Sir Richard Steele, when inviting a certain English nobleman to visit him. If, sir,' said he, 'you ever come within a mile of my house, I hope you will stop there! Another by the same gentleman is well worth recording. Being asked how he accounted for his countrymen making so many bulls, he said: 'I can not tell, if it is not the effect of the climate. I fancy, if an Englishman was born in Ireland, he would make just as many.' "This, again, reminds us of that well-known instance of wounded Irish pride related of the porter of a Dublin grocer, who was brought by his master before a magistrate on a charge of stealing chocolate, to which he could scarcely plead 'Not guilty.' On being asked to whom he sold it, the pride of Patrick was exceedingly wounded. To whom did I sell it?' cried Pat. 'Now, do you think I was so mane as to take it to sell?' 'Pray, then, sir,' said the J. P., 'what did you do with it?' 'Do wid it? Well, then, since you must know, I took it home, and me and my ould 'oman made tay of it.' "A rich bull is recorded of an Irishman at cards, who, on inspecting the pool, found it deficient: 'Here is a shilling short,' said he; 'who put it in?' "This bull was actually perpetrated; so also was the following Two eminent members of the Irish bar, Doyle and Yelverton, quarreled one day so violently that from hard words they came to hard blows. Doyle, the more powerful man of the two (at the fists, at least) knocked down his antagonist twice, vehemently exclaiming: 'You scoundrel, I'll make you behave yourself like a gentleman.' To which Yelverton, rising, replied with equal indignation: 'No, sir, never. I defy you! You could not do it!' "The next declaration of independence we record occurred to our knowledge. It was uttered by an exasperated rural lover, |