ooks that have outlived copy-right. But this has
detained us long enough: for the present, my brain is quit of its
heathenish exculpations: let us pass on; many regiments are yet to be
reviewed; their uniforms [_Hibernice_] are various, but their flag is
one.

A last serious subject--(they grow tedious)--is a fair field for
ingenious explanation and Oriental poetry,

THE SIMILES OF SCRIPTURE:

(of course "similes" is an English word: the author of a recent '_Essay
on Magna Charta_' has been _learned_ enough to write it "similae," for
which original piece of Latinity let him be congratulated; I safely
follow Johnson, who would have roared like a lion at "similia;" and,
though Shakspeare does write it "similies," it may stoutly be contended
that this is of mixed metal, and that Matthew Prior's "similes" is the
purer sample: all the above being a praiseworthy parenthesis.)

The similes of Scripture, then, were to have been demonstrated apt and
happy: for there is indeed both majesty, and loveliness, and propriety,
and strict resemblance in them. "As a rolling thing before the
whirlwind,"--"as when a standard-bearer fainteth"--"as the rushing of
mighty waters,"--"as gleaning grapes when the vintage is done,"--"as a
dream,"--"as the morning dew,"--"as"--but the whole book is a garden of
similitudes; they are "like the sand upon the sea-shore for multitude."
It is, however, too true, that often-times the baldness of translation
deprives poetry, Eastern especially, of its fervour, its glow, its gush,
and blush of beauty: to quote Aristotle's example, it too frequently
converts the rosy-fingered Morn into the red-fisted; and so the poetry
of dawning-day, with its dew-dropped flowers, its healthy refreshment,
its "rosy-fingers" drawing aside the star-spangled curtain of night,
falls at once into the low notion of a foggy morning, and is suggestive
only of red-fisted Abigails struggling continuously with the deposits of
a London atmosphere. In like manner, (for all this has not been an
episode beside the purpose,) many a roughly rendered similitude of
Scripture might be advantageously vindicated; local diversities and
Orientalisms might be explained in such a treatise: for example, in the
'_Canticles_,' the "beloved among the sons," is compared with an
apple-tree among the trees of the wood:" now, amongst us, an apple-tree
is stunted and unsightly, and always degenerates in a wood; whereas the
Eastern apple-tree, probably o