RECREATIONS.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 142, 17 November 1871, Page 6

RECREATIONS.

No. IV.—A CHAPTER OP ELTJNDEBB AND MISTAKES. (Continued from our last.) JUMBLED METAPHOBB. Another and exceedingly common kind of slip is the jumbling together of different figures or similes, as when Lord Castlereagh said, "I will now enter upon the fundamental feature on which this question hingesor when Mr. Robert Montgomery says, in the poem to which Macaulay's criticism gave a gibbet immortality—- " One great helmed the harmonious •whole." One of the most famous on record is that of Sir Boyle Eoche, when expressing his suspicion, in the Irish Parliament, that underhand dealing was going on in regard to certain negotiations—

" I smell a rat!" cried the excited baronet, " I smell a rat! I see it floating in the air before me. But mark me, sir, I will nip it in the bud!" " Dicky " Turner, the Preston operative—the originator, it is said, of the word "teetotal" as now used—was a rousing speaker, with an imagination that ran riot through all kinds of images. Old Jacob Livesey said he remembered him in one of his speeches making the following extraordinary appeal :

" Let us be up and doing, comrades! Let us take our axes over our shoulders, and plough the deep till the good ship of temperance sails gaily over the land!"

Cases of similar license could probably be found in almost every writer who has written much. Even Milton, in ' Paradise Lost,' make a curious medley when he says, in describing the lazar house—

" What heart of rock could long Dry-eyed behold!"

Shakespeare also, in ' Borneo and Juliet,' has an angel, who

And sails upon the bosom of the air."

—a strange thing, surely, a bosom to sail upon. He speaks, also, in one of the best-known passages in ' Hamlet,' of

"Taking arms against a sea of troubles."

In such cases the incongruity probably arises from images succeeding one another with such rapidity in the poet'B mind that they trample on each other's heels and get into confusion. A very curious metaphor occurs in one of St. Peter's epistles, where we have members of the Church compared to " living stones" growing. The Oriental imagination, however, often worked by way of addition—taking, for instance, a lion to symbolise streugth> giving ir wings to add the idea of swiftness, and so on. " Living stones" maybe an illustration of this peculiarity rather than an unintentional confusion.

The living: writer whose works are the richest of any I know in the matter of jumbled metaphors, is Dr. Macfarlane of London. The Doctor is an eloquent preacher and an interesting writer, but is cursed with a craze for figurative language, along with an apparent inability to produce anything but a kind of mermaid metaphor—woman as to its head, and fish as to its tail.