"The Demon, Jealousy, with Gorgon frown, Blasts the sweet flowers of Pleasure not his own, Or drives o'er rattling plains his iron car, Flings his red torch, and lights the flames of war." The old English poets, on the contrary, make Jealousy a female. Thus Daniel, in his complaint of Rosamond:" "O Jealousie, daughter of Env'y and Love, Most wayward issue of a gentle sire ; Fostred with feares, thy fathers joyes t' improve, The Edition of Daniel's Works, from which we have made the preceding extract, was printed in 1602; at and previous to which period, every English Substantive was either masculine or femenine.* The modern custom, of refusing the sexual distinctions (except poetically) to every thing that is inanimate, has given us two degrees of Prosopopoeia: one a simple personification, and the other where the person is endowed with a * See "Analytical Dictionary."-Introduction Page cxvii. specified sex Unless the poetical gender is so well known as to be easily and universally understood, the simple personification is always imperfect. It produces no Imagery. The groups, indeed, figure in the page as they would on the canvas of the painter; but, without the distinction of sex, the portraits must remain unfinished, because the drapery cannot be ascertained. The Prosopopoeia appears very frequently in the form of Address or APOSTROPHE (Greek apo, from, and strepho, I turn) when the Orator turns from his subject to address himself to some other being whether real, or imaginary,—to the absent, or to the dead. The poems ascribed to Ossian are filled with this species of Imagery: 66 "Green thorn of the hill of ghosts,—that shakest thy head to nightly winds! I hear no sound in thee; is there no spirit's windy skirt now rustling in thy leaves? Often are the steps of the dead, in the dark-eddying blasts; when the moon, a dun shield, from the east, is rolled along the sky. Ullin, Carril and Ryno, voices of the days of old! Let me hear you, while yet it is dark, to please and awake my soul. I hear you not, ye sons of song; in what hall of the clouds is your rest? Do you touch the shadowy harp, robed with morning mist, where the rustling sun comes from his green-headed waves?" IRONY.-SARCASM. Irony (Greek eironeia, dissimulation,) is mock praise, and of all the figures of speech is the most insulting: it is contempt pretending to cover herself with a veil. Mr. Burke was an adept in this species of warfare. In his famous "Letter to a noble Lord" respecting the attack made upon himself and his pension, by the Duke of Bedford, he draws the following parallel: "The persons who have suffered, from the cannibal philosophy of France, are so like the Duke of Bedford, that nothing, but his Grace's probably not speaking quite so good French, could enable us to find out any difference. A great many of them had as pompous titles, and were of full as illustrious a race: some few of them had fortunes as ample; several of them, without meaning the least disparagement to the Duke of Bedford, were as wise, and as virtuous, and as valiant, and as well educated, and as complete in all the lineaments of men of honour as he is: And to all this they had added the powerful outguard of a military profession, which, in its nature, renders men somewhat more cautious than those, who have nothing to attend to but the lazy enjoyment of undisturbed possessions. But security was their ruin. They are dashed to pieces H in the storm, and our shores are covered with the wrecks." When Irony, or any similar figure, is so strong as to be termed bitter (hiting) or cutting, it is SARCASM; from the Greek sarkasmos, flesh. The Irony of Junius is seldom playful. It is sarcasm always inflicting a wound. Witness the following from one of his Letters to the Duke of Grafton: "The character of the reputed ancestors of some men, has made it possible for their descendants to be vicious in the extreme, without being degenerate. Those of your Grace, for instance, left no distressing examples of virtue even to their legitimate posterity; and you may look back with pleasure to an illustrious pedigree, in which heraldry has not left a single good quality upon record to insult or upbraid you. You have better proofs of your descent, my Lord, than the register of a marriage, or any troublesome inheritance of reputation. There are some hereditary strokes of character, by which a family may be as clearly distinguished as by the blackest features of the human face. Charles the First lived and died an hypocrite. Charles the Second was an hypocrite of another sort, and should have died upon the same scaffold. At the distance of a century, we see their different characters revived and blended in your Grace. Sullen and severe without religion, profligate without gaiety, you live, like Charles the Second, without being an amiable companion; and, for aught I know, may die as his father did, without the reputation of a martyr." We shall add another example of sarcastic Irony from the "Letter to a noble Lord" already quoted; because it will serve a twofold purpose. The comparison of the styles of different authors is a profitable exercise; and this will show how closely that of Junius in 1769 was imitated (or rather preserved) by Burke in 1806: "In the name of common sense, why should the Duke of Bedford think, that none but of the House of Russel are entitled to the favour of the Crown? Why should he imagine that no King of England has been capable of judging of merit but King Henry the Eighth? Indeed, he will pardon me; he is a little mistaken: all virtue did not end in the first Earl of Bedford;-all discernment did not lose its vision when his Creator closed his eyes. Let him remit his rigour on the disproportion between merit and reward in others, and they will make no enquiry into the origin of his fortune. They will regard with much more satisfaction, as he will contemplate with infinitely more advantage, whatever |