Quare, What are the glittering turrets of a man's head?

Upon the shore; as frequent as the sand,

To meet the prince, the glad Dimetians stand *.

Quare, Where these Dimetians stood? and of what size they were? add also to the jargon such as the following:

Destruction's empire shall no longer last,
And desolation lie for ever waste +.

Here Niobe, sad mother, makes her moan,
And seems converted to a stone in stone $.
But for variegation, nothing is more useful than

3. The PARANOMASIA, or PUN,

where a word, like the tongue of a jack-daw, speaks twice as much by being split: as this of Mr. Dennis. Bullets, that wound, like Parthians as they fly :

or this excellent one of Mr. Welsted,

Behold the virgin lye

Naked, and only cover'd by the sky §.

To which thou may'st add,

To see her beauties no man needs to stoop,
She has the whole horizon for her hoop.

4. The ANTITHESIS, OF SEE-SAW, whereby contraries and oppositions are balanced in such a way, as to cause a reader to remain suspended between them, to his exceeding delight and recreation. Such are these on a lady, who made herself

Pr. Arthur, p. 157. Poems 1693, p. 13. VOL. XVII.

+ Job, p. 89. 1 T. Cook, poems. § Welsted, poems, Acon & Lavin.

D

appear

appear out of size, by hiding a young princess under her clothes.

While the kind nymph, changing her faultless shape,
Becomes unhandsome, handsomely to scape *.

On the maids of honour in mourning.

Sadly they charm, and dismally they please +.

Let in the object and let out the light ‡.

The Gods look pale to see us look so red |.
The Fairies and their queen,

In mantles blue came tripping o'er the green §.

All nature felt a reverential shock,

The sea stood still to see the mountains rock ¶.

CHAP. XI.

The figures continued: of the magnifying and diminishing

figures.

A GENUINE writer of the profund, will take care never to magnify any object without clouding it at the same time; his thought will appear in a true mist, and very unlike what is in nature. It must always be remembered, that darkness is an essential quality of the profund, or if there chance to be a glimmering, it must be, as Milton expresses it,

No light, but rather darkness visible.

The chief figure of this sort is,

+ Steel, on Queen Mary.

Waller.
Lee, Alex.

§ Phil. Past.

↑ Quarles.

Blackm. Job, p. 176.

The

The HYPERBOLE, or impossible.

For instance, of a Lion.

He roar'd so loud, and look'd so wond'rous grim,
His very shadow durst not follow him *.

Of a Lady at Dinner.

The silver whiteness that adorns thy neck,
Sullies the plate and makes the napkin black.

Of the same.

The obscureness of her birth

Cannot eclipse the lustre of her eyes,
Which make her all one light +.

Of a Bull-baiting.

Up to the stars the sprawling mastives fly,
And add new monsters to the frighted sky.

Of a Scene of Misery.

Behold a scene of misery and woe!

Here Argus soon might weep himself quite blind,
Ev'n tho' he had Briareus' hundred hands

To wipe his hundred eyes

And that modest request of two absent lovers:
Ye gods! annihilate but space and time,
And make two lovers happy.

2. The PERIPHRASIS, which the moderns call the circumbendibus, whereof we have given examples in the ninth chapter, and shall again in the twelfth.

To the same class of the magnifying may be referred the following, which are so excellently modern, that

• Vet. Aut.

Blackm. p. 21.

+ Theob. Double Falshood.

|| Anon.

D 2

we

we have yet no name for them. In describing a country prospect,

I'd call them mountains, but can't call them so,
For fear to wrong them with a name too low;
While the fair vales beneath so humbly lie,
That even humble seems a term too high *.

III. The last class remains; of the diminishing. 1. the ANTICLIMAX, and figures where the second line drops quite short of the first, than which nothing creates greater surprize.

On the Extent of the British Arms.

Under the tropicks is our language spoke,
And part of Flanders hath receiv'd our yoke †.

On a Warrior.

And thou Dalhoussy the great God of war,
Lieutenant colonel to the earl of Mar ‡.

On the Valour of the English.

Nor art nor nature has the force

To stop its steady course,

Nor Alps nor Pyreneans keep it out
-Nor fortify'd redoubt .

At other times this figure operates in a larger extent; and when the gentle reader is in expectation of some great image, he either finds it surprisingly imperfect, or is presented with something low, or quite ridiculous a surprise resembling that of a curious person in a cabinet of antique statues, who behold's on the pedestal the names of Homer, or Cato; but looking up finds Homer without a head, and nothing to

• Anon. † Anon. † Anon.

Dean. on Namur.

be

be seen of Cato but his privy member.
these lines of a leviathan at sea:

His motion works, and beats the oozy mud,
And with its slime incorporates the flood,
'Till all th' incumber'd, thick, fermenting stream
Does like one pot of boiling ointment seem.
Where'er he swims, he leaves along the lake
Such frothy furrows, such a foamy track,
That all the waters of the deep appear

Hoary

with age, or gray with sudden fear *.

Such are

But perhaps even these are excelled by the ensuing.

Now the resisted flames and fiery store,
By winds assaulted, in wide forges roar,
And raging seas flow down of melted ore.
Sometimes they hear long iron bars remov'd,
And to and fro huge heaps of cinders shov'd t.

}

is also a species of the diminishing: by this a spear flying into the air is compared to a boy whistling as

The mighty Stuffa threw a massy spear,

Which, with its errand pleas'd, sung through the air ‡.

A man raging with grief to a mastiff dog.

I cannot stifle this gigantic woe,

Nor on my raging grief a muzzle throw .

And clouds big with water to a woman in great necessity.

Distended with the waters in 'em pent,

The clouds hang deep in air, but hang unrent.

Blackm. Job, p. 197.

+ Pr. Arthur, p. 157.

+ Pr. Arthur.

|| Job, p. 41.
D 3

3. The