on, and could reverse the sense of
his distich so that it read no less irrationally:

Yet Antony's case was better than Photinus':
One for his master moved, one for himself.

Hence this whole category of controvertible ideas lacks literary merit
and should be studiously avoided by those who aim at beauty, which in
the last analysis is to be found in truth alone, and in truth of such
a sort that as soon as it is proposed the reader recognises as true
and accepts it.

_The second virtue of ideas, that they should agree with the inner
nature of the subject; and thence on ideas foreign and accidental to
the subject._

The second virtue of ideas with respect to the subject-matter is that
they should agree with its inner nature: that is, that they should be
elicited out of the very inners of the subject and not far-fetched or
drawn from external accidents which are only the accompaniments of
things. By this rule we have been delivered from numerous frigid
epigrams, of which I subjoin a few examples:

Foreign and far-fetched is Owen's on a lyre:

That there is concord in so diverse chords
Discordant mankind some excuse affords.[15]

As if nothing were more pertinent for making men ashamed of their
discords than the concord of strings on a lyre.

From concomitant accidents, and not from the very heart of the subject
itself, is drawn this epigram of Germanicus Caesar, though the verses
are otherwise sufficiently polished:

The Thracian boy at play on the stiff ice
Of Hebrus broke the waters with his weight
And the swift current carried him away,
Except that a smooth sherd cut off his head.
The childless mother as she burned it said:
"This for the flames I bore, that for the waves."[16]

Certainly the mother had a deeper and more native cause of grief than
that her son was destroyed partly by water and partly by fire; she
would have grieved no less had he perished wholly in water or wholly
in fire. The whole reason for grief, then, ought not be sought in such
a slight circumstance, which was an accompaniment of and not the
grounds for grief.

Negative descriptions labor under the same fault, namely those in
which are enumerated not what the endowments of the subject are but
what they are not. This is justly censured in one of Barlaeus'
epigrams, which is in other respects quite polished:

Of royal Bourbon blood, by whose aid once
Belgium believed that God incline