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2 "Those vile fawning wretches, each one of whom has lopped from his country her fairest members, who have toasted away their liberty, first to Philip, now to Alexander, who measure happiness by their belly and their vilest appetites, who have overthrown the old landmarks and standards of felicity among Greeks,--to be freemen, and to have no one for a master."[2] Here the number of the metaphors is obscured by the orator's indignation against the betrayers of his country. [Footnote 2: _De Cor._ 296.] 3 And to effect this Aristotle and Theophrastus recommend the softening of harsh metaphors by the use of some such phrase as "So to say," "As it were," "If I may be permitted the expression," "If so bold a term is allowable." For thus to forestall criticism[3] mitigates, they assert, the boldness of the metaphors. [Footnote 3: Reading +hupotimesis+.] 4 And I will not deny that these have their use. Nevertheless I must repeat the remark which I made in the case of figures,[4] and maintain that there are native antidotes to the number and boldness of metaphors, in well-timed displays of strong feeling, and in unaffected sublimity, because these have an innate power by the dash of their movement of sweeping along and carrying all else before them. Or should we not rather say that they absolutely demand as indispensable the use of daring metaphors, and will not allow the hearer to pause and criticise the number of them, because he shares the passion of the speaker? [Footnote 4: Ch. xvii.] 5 In the treatment, again, of familiar topics and in descriptive passages nothing gives such distinctness as a close and continuous series of metaphors. It is by this means that Xenophon has so finely delineated the anatomy of the human frame.[5] And there is a still more brilliant and life-like picture in Plato.[6] The human head he calls a _citadel_; the neck is an _isthmus_ set to divide it from the chest; to support it beneath are the vertebrae, turning like _hinges_; pleasure he describes as a _bait_ to tempt men to ill; the tongue is the _arbiter of tastes_. The heart is at once the _knot_ of the veins and the _source_ of the rapidly circulating blood, and is stationed in the _guard-room_ of the body. The ramifying blood-vessels he calls _alleys_. "And casting about," he says, "for something to sustain the violent palpitation of the heart when it is alarmed by the approach of danger or agitated by passion, sin
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