interesting, in his "Incidents of Travel," places us in an ancient Eastern city, such as Nineveh or Petra:

"I would that the skeptic could stand, as I did, among the ruins of this city, and there open the sacred book, and read the words of the inspired penman written when this desolate place was one of the greatest cities of the world. I see the scoff arrested, his cheek pale, his lip quivering, and his heart quaking with fear, as the ancient city cries out to him, in a voice loud and powerful as one risen from the dead. Though he would not believe Moses and the prophets, he believes the handwriting of God himself, in the desolation and eternal ruin around him.”

CHAPTER XVII.

FIGURES OF RHETORIC.

PART TWELFTH.

Egoism.-Self-depreciation.-Paranomasia.-Antanacla

sis.-Soliloquy.-Direct Address.-Dialogue.-Prediction.-Anticipation.-Pretended Omission.-Paralepsis, or Apophasis. Disparity.-Outward Illustration.-Accompaniment.-Meeting of Opposites.

CVIII. EGOISM, the introduction of one's own opinion, wants, or experience: the bringing one's self individually before the audience, is at times necessary to give an air of life to oratory; or to show befitting ear

nestness:

"The business I see is advancing,"

cries Demosthenes. Hear the energetic Lord Brough

am:

"I have read with astonishment, and I repel with scorn, the insinuation that I had acted the part of an advocate, and that some of my statements were colored to serve a cause. How dares any man so to accuse me? How dares any one, skulking under a fictitious name, to launch his slanderous imputations from his covert? I come forward in my own person. I make the charge in the face of day. I drag the criminal to trial. I openly call down justice on his head. I defy his attacks. defy his defenders. I challenge investigation.”

Cowper, the poet of the Cross, thus speaks of certain. vain speculations:

"Defend me, therefore, Common-sense, say I,
From reveries so airy; from the toil
Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
And growing old in drawing nothing up."

Dr. John M. Mason, in his deservedly admired sermon, "The Gospel for the Poor," gives us this form; the statement of a personal want common to him with all his hearers:

"He who pretends to be my comforter without consulting my immortality, overlooks my essential want. The Gospel supplies it. Immortality is the basis of her system. These are Christian views. They stamp new interest on all my relations and all my acts. They hold up before me objects vast as my wishes, terrible as my fears, and permanent as my being. And again: If I ask how I am to be delivered, human reason is dumb. The more I ponder the Gospel method of salvation, the more am I convinced that it displays the divine perfection. My worst fears are dispelled; the wrath to come is not for me; I can look with composure at futurity; and feel joy springing up with the thought that I am immortal."

This fine sermon is full of similar forms of egoism, all of them perfectly untainted with egotism. Musing on such sermons as this, we need no other proof of Christ's consummate wisdom as the Legislator for all nations and ages, than His having given to preaching the leading place He has assigned to it-"Go ye into all the world and preach." The pulpit never can be superseded by the newspaper or the printing-press. Nothing like the power of a living voice, which proclaims the consciencearousing, the heart-satisfying Gospel truths; and which need not be surpassed, in poesy, in sublimity, in pathos. Psa. lxvi., 13-20.

CIX. Self-depreciation may be used at times with good effect. Yet as egoism must not savor of egotism, so selfdispraise would be nauseous if in the least it resembles mock-modesty. The eloquent and tasteful Esprit Flé

chier gives us an inoffensive example in his masterpiece on the death of Marshal Turenne:

"Pardon a little confusion in my treatment of a subject that has caused us so much grief. I may sometimes confound the general of the army with the sage and the Christian. Through the whole I shall strive to win your attention, not by the force of eloquence, but by the reality and greatness of the virtues. about which I am engaged to speak."

In a form somewhat different, Saurin says, at the close of a sermon, very affectingly:

"Alas! it is this general influence which these exhortations ought to have over our lives, that makes us fear we have addressed them to you in vain. How often have you sent us empty away, even when we demanded so little. What will you do to-day?"

CX. Paranomasia, the Pun, we have at length arrived at: emphatically, the wit of words; a trick of verbal cleverness, founded on the circumstance of two or more words of similar sound having different meanings. A certain law lord in Scotland was noted for his pompous way of speaking. Telling Harry Erskine one day that an acquaintance had fallen from a stile and sprained his ankle, said Erskine:

"It is a mercy he did not fall from your style, else he would have broken his neck."

CXI. In the precise language of Rhetoric, when the same word is repeated in a different sense, this species of pun is called Antanaclasis, as in the expression :

"While we live, let us live;"

or in this:

"Learn some craft while you are young, that when old you may live without craft."

A person explaining about acids in a very prosy way

to Charles Lamb, Lamb stopped him with the remark:

"The best of all acids is assiduity."

Said Hancock, on the sublime occasion when your fathers were signing the Declaration of American Independence, and when the English king would have hanged them if he could:

"We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling different ways."—"Yes," said Franklin, “we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Paranomasia has obtruded itself even on tombstones. Nothing in Greek learning is more difficult than the particles-the numerous one-syllabled adverbs and conjunctions. A certain Dr. Walker had won considerable fame by a treatise on these. But the word particles means, too, grains of dust; so the Doctor ordered this for his epitaph:

"Here lies Walker's particles."

In a similar strain, the celebrated Thomas Fuller has this inscription over his dust in Westminster Abbey: "Here lies Fuller's earth."

From the old city of Byzantium there came, as embassador to Athens, Leon, a very little and deformed He stood up to speak. At sight of him the Athenians burst into violent laughter, so that he could not be heard. At length he said:

"What would you say, then, did you but see my wife? She hardly reaches to my knees. Yet, little as we are, when we disagree the city of Byzantium is not large enough to hold us."

Or go once again to the Scottish lawyer and wit, Harry Erskine. Some acquaintances came on him suddenly as he was digging potatoes in his garden:

"This is otium cum diggin' a tattie," quoth he

(Otium cum dignitate, Ease with dignity).