human fentiments, which will be mentioned hereafter as a distinct pleafing object. This rule is to be understood with the fame exception, as the rule fimilar to it refpecting comparisons.

Shakespeare uses a low and degrading metaphor when he makes King John exhort the people of Angiers to save unscratched their city's threatened cheeks; meaning that they should fave their walls from being battered.

The allufion is merely verbal, when, in the fame play, Constance, lying on the ground, is made to say,

Figures of this fort are nothing more than puns; for the sense of the paffage depends upon the double-meaning of the word. Grief is faid to be supported in a figurative sense, but the earth fupports things in a literal fenfe..

ALLEGORIES are continued metaphors; that is, they are defcriptions of certain objects in terms borrowed from others: fo that though one set of objects only be named, whenever allegories be used, there must be a conftant attention to the fimilar properties of them both. The following account of the fons of Edward in Shakespeare's Richard the Second is allegorical:.

Edward's feven fons, whereof thyself art one,

Were feven fair branches fpringing from one root.
Some of these branches by the deftinies cut.:
But Thomas, my dear lord, my life, my Glo'fter,.
One flourishing branch of his most royal root,
Is hacked down, and his fummer leaves all faded,,
By Envy's hand, and Murder's bloody axe.

All

All the rules respecting propriety and confiftency that are neceffary to be observed in metaphors, are equally requifite in allegories! They differ only in this; that allegories, in common with comparisons, imply a confiderable excursion of the mind from the principal object of its thoughts; and therefore, though a man in the greatest agitation of 'mind would not refuse a metaphor, he may easily be supposed to have his thoughts so much engaged as not to be at liberty to attend fo particularly to a foreign object, as is neceffary in order to note many points of refemblance, and make an allegory. Allegories, therefore, as well as comparisons, are the language of men tolerably composed, or only moderately elevated. The following allegorical speech of Califta, in the Fair Penitent, is unnatural:

Is it the voice of thunder, or my father?
Madness! confufion! Let the ftorm come on;
Let the tumultuous roar drive all upon me;
Dash my devoted bark. Ye furges, break it.
'Tis for my ruin that the tempest rises.
When I am loft, funk to the bottom low,
Peace shall return, and all be calm again,

FAIR PENITENT, A& IV.

It requires uncommon skill and caution to conduct a long allegory with propriety; because few things are analogous in many respects, at the same time that they are fufficiently different to make the analogy pleafing. Moreover, it is very difficult to make an allusion intelligible, and at the fame time never name the thing we mean in direct terms, which we muft by all means avoid; as it would introduce the greatest confusion into the metaphor.

Bunyan, whofe invention was certainly very fertile, has often forgotten himself, and helped out his wire-drawn allegories by the thing allegorized. Thus, defcribing the passage of Christian and Hopeful through the river which reprefents death, he introduces fome perfons telling them they would find it deeper or fhallower" according to their faith in the Lord of the place to "which they were going."

Dryden's Hind and Panther contains much of the fame abfurd mixture of allegory and the thing allegorized. "What rela-. "tion" (fays Lord Halifax in his remarks upon it) " has the "Hind to our Saviour? or what notion have we of a Panther's. "title? If you fay he means the Church, how doth the Church "feed on lawns, or range in the foreft? Let it be always a "Church, or always a cloven-footed beaft; for we cannot bear: this shifting the fcene every line."

LECTURE

LECTURE XXIV.

Of CONTRAST in general, and particularly of Wit, the rifible, and the ridiculous..

AVING confidered the pleasure we receive from the exer

HAVI

cife of our faculties, and all thofe pleasures of taste in which it is a principal ingredient, we pass to another medium of pleasure in works of genius and imagination, viz. CONTRAST.. And it the more naturally folicits our attention in this place, as we have seen that it hath a confiderable share in the pleasure arifing from comparisons and metaphors, which were last treated of.

Indeed, I fhall have no objection to any perfon's confidering contrast as one particular manner in which our minds are strongly affected.

If two objects, in any refpect fimilar, prefent themselves to our view at the fame time, we naturally expect, and, as it were, wish to find a complete refemblance in them; and we are, in some measure, furprized and difappointed to find them different. This difpofition to make every thing perfect and complete in its kind, will be taken notice of, and farther illuftrated, in its proper place hereafter. Here then, as in all other cafes of furprize and disap-pointment, our attention is ftrongly engaged to the circumstances in which the two objects differ, as ftrongly as it was at first en-gaged

gaged to those in which they agreed; fo that the fame principle, by which we are led to make every thing complete, now leads us to enlarge and extend the circumftances in which they differ. These, in their turn, will make the circumstances of resemblance appear furprizing. And thus the mind will naturally turn its attention alternately to the circumstances of refemblance and those of difference with great celerity, and both will have the advantage of being confiderably augmented. In all this time, the furprize, the quick fucceffion of thought, and the enlargement of our ideas, cannot fail to introduce a pleasureable state of mind. I may add, that the greater is the resemblance in fome things, and the greater the difference in others, the more fenfible will the effect be, and the greater the pleasure resulting from it. These obfervations any perfon may exemplify to himself, by viewing at the fame time even two houses, two gardens, or two trees of the fame kind, that are very different in fize. In this position they both affect us more fenfibly and more pleasurably than if they had been viewed separately, when their resemblance and their difference had not been fo apparent, or fo perfectly afcertained.

A familiar example will ferve to make us fenfible how neceffary strong circumftances of refemblance are to make us feel the greateft effect of the circumftances of difference. A dog is not confidered as diminutive with refpect to an elephant; though, therefore, they be placed ever fo near together, our ideas of the elephant are not raised, nor our ideas of the dog diminished. We did not expect they fhould be equal. But upon introducing another dog confiderably larger than the former, we immediately cry out, What a prodigious large dog! while the other appears to our imagination lefs than he did before. Our furprize, and,

confe