ENLARGING THE VOCABULARY.

Tools-Davy, Jemmy.

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Rubric-from red letters in church services, used in the directions to the priest or reader.

5. While some of the names obtained from contiguity enter into the staple of our vocabulary, others are merely rhetorical synonyms.

The turf' is not essential for designating the meaning, but it is an agreeable variation.

A 'roll' is much the same as a 'list'. A watering-place, a summer resort, a place of worship,-merely vary the expression of the things designated. The 'Son of David' has a certain advantage in respect of the importance of the parent.

6. As with metaphors, so with words obtained under the present figure: the keeping of the figure needs to be preserved, so long as the origin is borne in mind.

The word ranks' designates the common soldiery as actually formed into rank. To apply it to the men sitting in their barracks would be felt as an incongruity, seeing that the primary meaning is still prominent.

Eye service' has still the original force of the figure. When Tennyson speaks of Earl Doorm as calling 'for flesh and wine to feed his spears,' there is apparent incongruity; but the incongruity helps the effect intended -to suggest a fierce band of retainers used only for fighting.

In innumerable cases, however, the original meaning is so little felt, that there is scarcely any need for taking the same precaution. A 'roll' has ceased to suggest a rolled up parchment or sheet of paper. The 'bar has still a slight figurative relevance as regards a court of law, or a house of Parliament, but none as regards the legal profession. 'Green wood' has lost the signification of green as a colour.

The final remark to be made upon the wide range of this figure, as now set forth, is the occasion given to multiply the meanings of words, and produce the effect so inimical to clearness—namely, ambiguity. The same holds of the derivation of names by metaphor.

FIGURES FOUNDED ON CONTRAST.

1. It is a first principle of the human mind, that we are affected only by change of impression. Among the many consequences of this law is the efficacy of contrast in verbal composition.

According to the greatness of the change is the intensity of the feeling. Hence in computing the impression due to a present cause, we need to state what was the previous condition of the mind. Sunshine is agreeable, according as we have been previously in darkness or shade.

In knowledge likewise, there is a shock of transition. Light is known by passing out of the Dark. High is contrasted with Low; Straight with Crooked; Hard with Soft; Male with Female. Red is contrasted with all the other colours of the spectrum.*

It is the prevailing habit of language to express only one term of these couples and to leave the other to be implied or understood." We say a man is free, without adding that he is not bound or constrained in any way, although this is equally necessary to the full meaning. When we call a line 'straight,' we might also say it is not crooked, but generally leave this to be mentally supplied.

There are occasions, however, when the full statement of the opposite, or obverse, side of a feeling or a fact, is of value in making a thing either more impressive or else more intelligible. Now, as this is, so to speak, a departure from the habitual or common form of language, which is content with naming one side alone, we call it a figurative usage, and hence look upon Contrast as a Figure of Speech. More

* A remarkable illustration of the principle of correlation in language is furnished by the earliest known forms of human speech, especially the Egyptian hieroglyphics. In this language there is a considerable number of primitive words designating simple ideas, which bear two opposite significations. Examples are the words signifying good-bad, high-low, give-take, bring-send, hill-dale, up-down, withwithout, &c. Such words are accounted for on the assumption that primitive races, in expressing to themselves any conception, needed to have the two opposite phases present to their minds, and not merely implied, as in the later forms of language. Both sides of the contrast were therefore recalled by the word; the side that was intended on any particular occasion appears to have been indicated by gesture (which still forms a great part of the language of uncivilized races), while in the hieroglyphic writings it is shown by additional symbols or simple pictures accompanying the words. The phenomenon has been called 'countersense' and was not confined to Egyptian, though most fully preserved to us in its primitive forms in that language. Relics of it can still be traced even in languages of the IndoEuropean family: for example, Latin altus (high and low), cedere (to go and to come); Greek axon (leisure and industry); English let (to permit and to prevent); German borgen (to lend and to borrow), &c. See an article entitled 'Countersense,' in the Contemporary Review for April, 1884, by Dr Carl Abel.

FUNDAMENTAL ANTITHESIS.

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over, it is a portion of the rhetorical and critical art, to judge of the proper occasions for employing the figure.

The term Antithesis is also made use of as a designation of the same artifice.

2. The Antithesis, in its fullest sense, consists in explicitly stating the contrast implied in the very meaning of a term or a fact.

This would be shown in such forms as-Motion, not-Rest; Hot, not-Cold; Pleasure, not-Pain; Industrious, not-Idle. 'To be a blessing, and not a curse.' 'I love the country, I hate the town.' " The one shall be taken, and the other left.' 'Man wishes to be happy, and dreads to be miserable.' • Two men I honour, and no third.' The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.'

In all these cases, the second member might be omitted: the first containing, by implication, the whole fact on both sides. But there are instances where the obverse iteration gives greater clearness or greater emphasis; while, on other occasions, it is useless, and therefore enfeebling.

Keats says, 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,' and regards it as unnecessary to introduce a contrast with other things that are of merely temporary duration. In Tennyson's Brook, the refrain is

Men may come and men may go

But I go on for ever

the perpetual being made more emphatic by a fully expressed contrast with something transitory.

Browning has the following

That low man seeks a little thing to do,

Each member of the contrast is rendered impressive through the comparison to the other, the effect being also helped by the balance of the sentence.

There is a well sustained emotional antithesis in Macbeth (Act v. Scene 3), the contrast of honourable old age with Macbeth's outlook. The two sides of the picture support each other, and double the impression; although, in strictness, one implies all that the other explicitly states. See also the contrast of peace and war (Henry V. iii. 1).

The following example of effective antithesis is from

Froude's Henry VIII. 'The petition claims especial notice, not only because it was the first active movement towards a separation from Rome, but because it originated, not with the King, not with the parliament, not with the people, but with a section of the clergy themselves'.

3. Another form of expository Antithesis is the contrast of terms not generically, but specifically opposed.

Light and Darkness, Motion and Rest, Wisdom and Folly, Liberty and Slavery, may be called generic contrasts. Their opposition is total. Light and Heat are different species under the genus Sensation, or the genus Natural Agent. Liberty and Plenty are members of the class Worldly advantage.

It is common to contrast points of character that are different modes of excellence or defect, as Sense and Sensibility, Genius and Judgment, the Irascible and the Pusillanimous; these are not fundamentally opposed, as are sense and folly, which are merely the two sides of the same property.

Such secondary, or specific, contrasts are used in comparing different kinds of merit in great men; as in the contrast of Homer and Virgil by Dryden, and of Dryden and Pope by Johnson. The elaborate antithesis of the sycophant and the counsellor in Demosthenes (Oration for the Crown) is a more thoroughgoing contrast, as playing off merit against demerit.

To compare two poets of first-class excellence is specific comparison, with the smallest difference; to compare a poetic genius with a scientific genius involves a wider difference still, with smaller generic agreement; to compare a man of genius with a common-place man, not to say a fool, may be called (although not in strict Logic) a generic opposition, or total contrast.

4. A further variety of Antithesis is the limiting of a term by some other term, as a help to definition.

'The parrot has the word, but not the sign,' is a mode of expressing more precisely the parrot's powers of language. The cup that cheers, but not inebriates.'

'The lord and not the tyrant of the world.' "Your servant, not your slave.'

'Spenser's antiquated figures were his choice and not his necessity.'

LIMITING ANTITHESIS.

'Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius.'
'Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.'

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'Representation (in Parliament) is not delegation.' 'Oscillation, without progression."

This form of Antithesis is four times employed in the following passage from Pope

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou dost not see:
All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good.

'Wollaston saw them (the dark lines of the spectrum), but did not discover them.' (Sir Wm. Thomson.) A maiden of our century, yet most meek : A daughter of our meadows, yet not coarse; Straight, but as lissome as a hazel wand.

These contrasts have an abbreviating effect. The second word is supposed to subtract from the first the part of the meaning that is too much for the occasion. A servant' may be pushed to the extreme limit of servitude: this is negatived by the addition, 'not a slave'.

The abuse of the artifice may be seen in Johnson, and still more in Samuel Parr, whose style, in this particular, fell under the ridicule of Sydney Smith.

5. The figure of Antithesis may be made to comprehend a class of emotional contrasts, intended to rouse the feelings, especially in Oratory.

As in Chatham: Who is the man that has dared to call into civilized alliance the wild and inhuman inhabitant of the woods?-to delegate to the merciless Indian the defence of disputed rights, and to wage the horrors of his barbarous war against our brethren?'

So in the speech of Brutus over the body of Lucretia-
Now look ye where she lies,

That beauteous flower, that innocent sweet rose,

Torn up by ruthless violence.

'Is dust and ashes proud?' Want of intellect 'makes a village an Eden, a college a sty’.

"God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.'