ained to be "an _abuse_ of a trope." According to this sense, it seems
in general to differ but little from impropriety. At best, a Catachresis is
a forced expression, though sometimes, perhaps, to be indulged where there
is great excitement. It is a sort of figure by which a word is used in a
sense different from, yet connected with, or analogous to, its own; as,

"And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, as heaven's cherubim
_Hors'd_ upon the sightless _couriers_ of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind."--_Shak., Macbeth_, Act i, Sc. 7.

[482] Holmes, in his Art of Rhetoric, writes this word "_Paraleipsis_"
retaining the Greek orthography. So does Fowler in his recent "English
Grammar," Sec.646. Webster, Adam, and some others, write it "_Paralepsis_." I
write it as above on the authority of Littleton, Ainsworth, and some
others; and this is according to the analogy of the kindred word
_ellipsis_, which we never write either _ellepsis_, or, as the Greek,
_elleipsis_.

[483] To this principle there seems to be now and then an exception, as
when a weak dissyllable begins a foot in an anapestic line, as in the
following examples:--

"I think--let me see--yes, it is, I declare,
As long _ago now_ as that Buckingham there."--_Leigh Hunt_.

"And Thomson, though best in his indolent fits,
Either slept himself weary, or blasted his wits."--_Id._

Here, if we reckon the feet in question to be anapests, we have
dissyllables with both parts short. But some, accenting "_ago_" on the
latter syllable, and "_Either_" on the former, will call "_ago now_" a
bacchy, and "_Either slept_" an amphimac: because _they make them such_ by
their manner of reading.--G. B.

[484] "Edgar A. Poe, the author, died at Baltimore on Sunday" [the
7th].--_Daily Evening Traveller_, Boston Oct. 9, 1849. This was eight or
ten months after the writing of these observations.--G. B.

[485] "Versification is the art of arranging words into lines of
correspondent length, so as to produce harmony by the regular alternation
of syllables differing in quantity"--_Brown's Institutes of E. Gram._, p.
235.

[486] This appears to be an error; for, according to Dilworth, and other
arithmeticians, "_a unit is a number_;" and so is it expounded by Johnson,
Walker, Webster, and Worcester. See, in the _Introduction_, a note at the
foot of p. 117. Mulligan, however, conte