that surpass all computation, and the se primary colours may be diversified without end. If each variety of external perception were to have a name, language would be insurmountably difficult; nay, if men were to appropriate a class of names to each particular sense, they would multiply words exceedingly, without adding any thing to the clearness of speech. Those words, therefore, that in their proper significations denote the objects of one sense, they often apply tropically to the objects of another; and say, sweet taste, sweet smell, sweet sound; sharp point, sharp taste, sharp sound; harmony of sounds, harmony of colours, harmony of parts; soft silk, soft colour, soft sound, soft temper; and so in a thousand instances; and yet these words, in their tropical signification, are not less intelligible than in their proper one; for sharp taste and sharp sound, are as expressive as sharp sword; and harmony of tones is not better understood by the musician, than harmony of parts by the architect, and harmony of colours by the painter.

Savages, illiterate persons, and children, have comparatively but few words in proportion to the things they may have occasion to speak of; and must therefore recur to tropes and figures more frequently, than persons of copious elo

cution. A seaman, or mechanick, even when he talks of that which does not belong to his art, borrows his language from that which does; and this makes his diction figurative to a degree that is sometimes entertaining enough. "Death, "(says a seaman in one of Smollet's novels) has "not yet boarded my comrade; but they have "been yard arm and yard arm these three glasses. "His starboard eye is open, but fast jamm'd "in his head; and the haulyards of his under "jaw have given way." These phrases are exaggerated; but we allow them to be natural, because we know that illiterate people are apt to make use of tropes and figures taken from their own trade, even when they speak of things that are very remote and incongruous. In those poems, therefore, that imitate the conversation of illiterate persons, as in comedy, farce, and pastoral, such figures judiciously applied may render the imitation more pleasing, because more exact and natural.

Words that are untuneable and harsh the poet is often obliged to avoid, when perhaps he has no other way to express their meaning than by tropes and figures; and sometimes the measure of his verse may oblige him to reject a proper word that is not harsh, merely on account of its being too long, or too short, or in any other way

unsuitable to the rhythm, or to the rhyme. And hence another use of figurative language, that it contributes to poetical harmony. Thus, to press the plain is frequently used to signify to be slain in battle; liquid plain is put for ocean, blue serene for sky, and sylvan reign for country life.

2. Tropes and figures are favourable to delicacy. When the proper name of a thing is in any respect unpleasant, a well chosen trope will convey the idea in such a way as to give no offence. This is agreeable, and even necessary, in polite conversation, and cannot be dispensed with in elegant writing of any kind. Many words, from their being often applied to vulgar use, acquire a meanness that disqualifies them for a place in serious poetry; while perhaps, under the influence of a different system of manners, the corresponding words in another language may be elegant, or at least not vulgar. When one reads Homer in the Greek, one takes no offence at his calling Eumeus by a name which, literally rendered, signifies swineherd; first, because the Greek word is well sounding in itself; secondly, because we have never heard it pronounced in conversation, nor consequently debased by vulgar use; and, thirdly, because we know, that the office denoted by it was, in the age of Eumeus, both important and honour

able. But Pope would have been blamed, if a name so indelicate as swineherd had in his translation been applied to so eminent a personage; and therefore he judiciously makes use of the trope synecdoche, and calls him swain;* a word both elegant and poetical, and not likely to lead the reader into any mistake about the person spoken of, as his employment had been described in a preceding passage. The same Eumeus is said, in the simple, but melodious language of the original, to have been making his own shoes when Ulysses came to his door; a work which in those days the greatest heroes would often find necessary. This too the translator softens by a tropical expression:

Here sat Eumeus, and his cares applied

To form strong buskins of well season'd hide.

A hundred other examples might be quoted from this translation; but these will explain my meaning.

There are other occasions, on which the delicacy of figurative language is still more needful: as in Virgil's account of the effects of animal love, and of the plague among the beasts, in the third Georgick; where Dryden's style, by

* Pope's Homer's Odyssey, book 14. vers. 41.

being less figurative than the original, is in one place exceedingly filthy, and in another ob

scene.

Hobbes could construe a Greek author: but his skill in words must have been all derived from the dictionary: for he seems not to have known, that any one articulate sound could be more agreeable, or any one phrase more dignified, than any other. In his Iliad and Odyssey, even when he hits the author's sense, (which is not always the case), he proves, by his choice of words, that of harmony, elegance, or energy of style, he had no manner of conception. And hence that work, though called a translation of Homer, does not even deserve the name of poem; because it is in every respect unpleasing, being nothing more than a fictitious narrative delivered in mean prose, with the additional meanness of harsh rhyme, and untuneable measure. Trapp understood Virgil well enough as a grammarian, and had a taste for his beauties; yet his translation bears no resemblance to Virgil; which is owing to the same cause, an imprudent choice of words and figures, and a total want of harmony.

I grant, that the delicacy we here contend for may, both in conversation and in writing, be carried too far. To call killing an innocent