that is, till death; for the kye come home at the gloaming; and gloaming, or the twilight of day, stands for the evening of life; and at the evening of life comes death -the great mystery which is the solver of mysteries. Very wondrous is metalepsis, our thirty-fourth kind of metonymy. S., "Lear," act i., scene i., Lear's 4th speech, line 6. But we hurry to a close. This chapter is by far the most complete treatment of metonymy the world has ever seen. Yet it is evident to you that we hasten to an incomplete close. Easily might you specify a hundred varieties instead of our scanty thirty-four. Of each of these thirty-four we implore you to cull a hundred specimens: a month's work at least. Zech. xi., 10; S., "Julius Cæsar," act i., scene i., 4th speech of Flavius, line 10.

We take leave of metonymy, this elegant department of our subject, by giving a specimen of our own. "Lama sabachthani?"-" why hast Thou forsaken me?" —is one of the dying cries of our Saviour on the cross. Let us use, then, the cry uttered by a person for the person himself, and term the Great Martyr "the Lama Sabachthani of lost mankind." Further, we trust our readers will hold with us that as metonymy is a change of name or noun, no other figure ought to be permitted to refer to change of noun. Trope must not be suffered to intrude into this province. If ever distinctness is to reign on this subject, a change of a noun will no longer be admitted to be a trope. Trope must go, in search of a kingdom, to some other part of speech. We hasten, therefore, to our next chapter. Yet we can not but apologize for the very few words we have given to our fifth variety of metonymy-the use of abstracts for concretes; than which there is nothing in language more refined, more susceptible of pocsy. Do not be satisfied. till you collect, into your herbarium, two hundred specimens at least. We have thrown away scores of examples, from the painful dread of making our volume too bulky.

CHAPTER X.

FIGURES OF RHETORIC.

PART FIFTH.

Tropes.

XL. OUR next figure, a very important one, is the Trope; yet is our subject in a condition so disgraceful to our language that never yet has the term Trope been precisely defined. Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary, thus decides: "In strict acceptation, the change of a word is a trope"-of a single word. But of what word? The term trope is from the Greek-τpiπw, I turn; the turning of a word from its original application, more or less. This brings us so far on our way; but it is far from sufficient, as it does not tell us what kind of word. Webster and all the rest are equally inadequate; you will search all our writers in vain for a clear distinction - which is what the language and the theme imperatively demand-between a trope and a metonymy. Every other commonly employed term is occupied—such as simile, metaphor, implication; metonymy especially is clear as day-it lies always in a noun; is trope to wander around loose, causing only confusion? Yet a large group of figures of the rarest fairy-like beauty, of coruscating might, are left to go destitute of a distinct appellation. Your author is daring enough to seize an unappropriated title, and to wed it to a magnificent group of figures, which that title most exquisitely suits; those turns that lie in adjectives, and which, as soon as you gaze on them, will triumphantly vindicate their deservingness of a wholly separate name. They are not sub

jects, but attributes or descriptives of subjects; in fact, adjectives.

1. An adjective of one operated on is ascribed to the cause, as in the expressions jovial wine, musing midnight, drowsy tinklings, blushing honors, eddying oar. William Motherwell calls the way weary. Not the way can be weary, but him operated on by the way: .

"I've wandered east, I've wandered west,

Through mony a weary way;

But never, never can forget

The love of life's young day."

Milton, in his unsurpassed "L'Allegro," has the ex

Apression

"The merry bells;"

Thomas Moore has

"Heaven's forgiving rainbow;"

neither the bells nor the rainbow, literally, possess these ascriptives. More delicate this than even metonymy. Disgraceful to make "trope" common to two so different things.

2. An adjective belonging to a subject is bestowed on one of the parts or members of that subject. We speak of one visiting a church with “religious footsteps." Robert Ferguson, the precursor of Burns, ascribes wisdom to the snout, in a panegyric on broadcloth:

"Braidclaith lends folk an unco heeze;
Makes mony kailworms butterflies;
Gies mony a doctor his degrees
For little skaith:

In short, you may be what you please
Wi' guid braidclaith.

For though you had as wise a snout on

As Shakespeare or Sir Isaac Newton,

Your judgment folk would hae a doubt on,
I'll tak' my aith,

Till they could see you wi' a suit on
O' guid braidclaith."

4

Mrs. Barbauld, a writer of uncommon vigor, writes of the discomforts of a washing-day. Not is it the hand that can be "impatient:"

"Thine eye shall rue

The budding fragrance of thy tender shrubs, .
Myrtle or rose all crush'd, beneath the weight
Of coarse-check'd apron, with impatient hand
Twitch'd off when showers impend."

Magnificent our example from Campbell's "Curse of O'Connor's Child;" not the faces were "dying," but her unpitying brothers themselves:

66

'Away! away! to Athunrie!

Where downward when the sun shall fall

The raven's wing shall be your pall!

And not a vassal shall unlace

The visor from your dying face!"

3. An adjective true of an agent is given to the instrument with which or on which he works, or which he or she employs: as in the expressions, "pious incense," "coward swords." In Spectator, No. 2, Addison speaks:

"I have seen a fan so very angry that it would have been dangerous for the absent lover to have come within the wind of it; and at other times so very languishing that I have been glad, for the lady's sake, that the lover was at a convenient distance."

Sir Walter, deploring Leyden's early death, applies an ascriptive, "varied in lore," to the lamp which Leyden studied by. S., "Antony and Cleopatra," act ii., scene. vi., line 6.

4. In Miss Landon's "Adieu to a Bride" the roof is called "fond"-an adjective true of the contained is turned over to the container:

"She wept to leave the fond roof where

She had been lov'd so long;

Though glad the peal upon the air,

And gay the bridal throng."

The Hon. William Herbert, celebrated for his elegant translations from the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, and especially from the Danish and Icelandic, published his " Helga," in 1815, in seven cantos. He describes the sudden. summer of the far North thus:

"Fair glens and verdant vales appear,

And warmth awakes the budding year."

Not the year buds, but the flowers which that year contains in its spring.

Similarly Joel Barlow, in his national American poem, "The Hasty Pudding," has this couplet:

"At last the closing season browns the plain,
And ripe October gathers in the grain."

5. An adjective of the possessor may be turned over to the thing possessed. Horace Walpole, the prince of letter-writers, calls one always grinning to show his fine set of teeth

"The gentleman with the foolish teeth."

Francis Beaumont speaks of "pale passion," though not the passion can be pale, but he whose the passion is: "Fountain-heads, and pathless groves— Places which pale passion loves."

Southey, in his excellent poem, "Madoc," terms the sunshine-"joyful."

6. An adjective expressive of the season, place, or person, is ascribed to an object which strongly characterizes that season, place, or person; as when Milton sings of the gray-fly

"Winding its sultry horn."

Not the horn is sultry, but the summer evening when its sleepy noise is heard.

7. The main history of an individual is marked fitly by an adjective, which adjective is ascribed to the indi