§ 164. TRANSGRESSIO.

With hyperbole may be associated a form of statement once considered as a separate figure, and called "transgressio," which consists of any kind of exaggeration. It therefore includes the following in addition to those which have already been noticed :

1. Animated description passing beyond literal truth. This may be allowed as legitimate hyperbole, or, if a separate name be preferred, transgressio. Poets, orators, and writers of fiction all indulge in this exaggerated statement, and Victor Hugo's writings abound in it.

"This is our bad condition here. How much worse it is ten miles from Boston you may conceive. The darkness might be felt."-FISHER AMES.

2. Many colloquial expressions illustrate this figure; as "to cry one's eyes out," "to weep as if one's heart would break," "to split one's sides with laughing." "If a young merchant fails," says Emerson, "men say he is ruined."

3. Humorous writing abounds in this; indeed, a distinct department of this sort of literature, i. e., American, is based upon exaggeration.

Hyperbole, when improperly used, is certain to degenerate into bombast.

CHAPTER VI.

FIGURES OF GRADATION.-DECREMENTIVE.

§ 165. DECREMENTIVE FIGURES.

UNDER this class is included those various forms of expression by which any given subject is diminished before the mind and divested of its ordinary importance. They are the opposite of those which have just been considered; but like them are applicable to leading propositions, deductions, and conclusions. While the augmentative figures present these in the most striking and effective manner, so that they may arrest the attention, the decrementive forms are used to lessen their importance, and

make them appear of little value. The former would be applied by the writer to his chief topics to enhance their value, and the latter would be applied by his opponent to the same topics to diminish that value.

§ 166. DIMINUTION.

Diminution is the opposite of amplification, and may be defined as the lowering of the importance of any topic by the assemblage of particulars designedly introduced for the purpose of lessening its force and proper value. As amplification may proceed through many stages of expansion, so this lowering process may consist of many gradations, from the slightest diminution of any given subject to the lowest possible depreciation, accompanied with contempt and ridicule. All the modes by which the one may be effected have also their counterparts in the other.

1. This figure is exhibited, first, in the form of direct statement; as"Will God incense his ire

For such a petty trespass?"-MILTON.

Here the offence is affirmed to be "petty" simply in itself.

"Did ye not hear it? No. 'Twas but the wind."-BYRON.

2. Sometimes diminution is made by means of a comparison with some other object :

"Nature will not have us fret and fume. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the temperance meeting, or the Transcendental Club into the fields and woods, she says to us—‘So hot, my little sir !"—Emer

SON.

Here the excitement of common life is made to seem trivial beside the grand calm of Nature.

“How it aggravates the disgust with which these paste diamonds are now viewed, to remember that they were paraded in the presence of Edmund Burke-nay (credite posteri), in jealous rivalry of his genuine and priceless jewels. Irresistibly one is reminded of the dancing efforts of Lady Blarney and Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Skeggs against the native grace of the Vicar of Wakefield's family."-DE QUINCEY.

The style of Sheridan, when set in comparison with that of Burke, is thus made to appear tawdry and meretricious.

"And what is this world in the immensity which teems with them, and what are they who occupy it? The universe at large would suffer as little

in its splendor and variety, by the destruction of our planet, as the verdure and sublime magnitude of a forest would suffer by the fall of a single leaf.” -CHALMERS.

Here this world and all its concerns are made to appear insignificant in comparison with the immensity of the universe.

"An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise."-DR. R. SOUTH.

Man at his best is here represented as of little worth when compared with the possibilities which lay before him, had he kept his first estate.

3. It is also sometimes effected by accumulation; that is to say, a number of particulars are gathered together for the express purpose of lowering the importance of any given subject:

"What, then, have you made Ireland? Look at her again. This fine country is laden with a population the most miserable in Europe, and of whose wretchedness, if you are the authors, you are beginning to be the victims; the poisoned chalice is returning in its just circulation to your own lips. Your domestic swine are better housed than the people. Harvests the most abundant are reaped by men with starvation in their faces, famine covers a fruitful soil, and disease inhales a pure atmosphere; all the great commercial facilities of the country are lost; the deep rivers that should circulate opulence and turn the machinery of a thousand factories flow to the ocean without wafting a boat or turning a mill; and the wave breaks in solitude in the silent magnificence of deserted and shipless harbors."-DANIEL O'CONNELL.

In this passage there is an accumulation of particulars referring to the condition of Ireland, for the purpose of representing that country at its very worst.

§ 167. DEPRECIATION.

Depreciation is diminution associated with the feeling of contempt.

An illustration of this may be found in Sir Walter Raleigh's verses, "Go, Soul, the Body's Guest," from which are taken the following lines:

"Tell physic of her boldness,

Tell skill it is pretension,

Tell charity of coldness,
Tell law it is contention,

And as they do reply-
So give them both the lie."

Dean Swift's well-known lines convey still greater contempt:

"So, naturalists observe, a flea,

Has smaller fleas on him that prey;

And these have smaller ones to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.

Thus every poet in his kind

Is bit by him that comes behind,

Who, though too little to be seen,

Can tease, and gall, and give the spleen."

Contemptuous depreciation is nowhere more forcibly expressed than in the words of Sir Robert Walpole :

"A patriot, sir? Why, patriots spring up like mushrooms. I could raise fifty of them in four-and-twenty hours."

In the following passages De Quincey depreciates the eloquence of Sheridan :

"In the course of the Hastings trial upon the concerns of paralytic Begums and ancient Rannies-hags that, if ever actually existing, were no more to us and our British sympathies than we to Hecuba-did Mr. Sheridan make his capital exhibition. . . . Considered as rhetoric, it is evidently fitted to 'make a horse sick;' but, as a conundrum in the 'Lady's Magazine,' we contend that it would have great success."

Here depreciation is heightened by the employment of vituperative epithets, low images, and colloquialisms, such as "paralytic Begums," "hags," "making a horse sick," "conundrum," In the following passage from one of the speeches of Mr. John Bright, there will also be found depreciation by means of trivial associations :

etc.

"In pursuit of this Will-o'-the-Wisp-the liberties of Europe and the balance of power-there has been extracted from the industry of the people of this small island no less an amount than two thousand millions of pounds."

§ 168. ANTICLIMAX.

Anticlimax is usually considered in connection with climax, although it belongs to an opposite class of figures, the one being augmentative and the other decrementive; so that while the former enhances the importance of the subject, the latter diminishes or degrades it.

In climax the thoughts are arranged in an ascending series, the most important being reserved until the last. In anticlimax the thoughts are also arranged in an ascending series, but

in the last place, instead of the most important, there suddenly occurs something trivial:

"The king of France, with twice ten thousand men,
Marched up the hill, and then-marched down again."
"Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,

Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes-tea."

The effect of anticlimax is generally ludicrous, and when used intentionally it tends to depreciate the subject to which it is applied by covering it with ridicule. It is, therefore, very frequently employed in humorous and satirical composition. But it is sometimes used unintentionally, and then it is called "bathos," the effect being to turn the ridicule with which it is associated upon the writer himself. The following are examples:

"And thou, Dalhousie, the great god of war,
Lieutenant-colonel to the Earl of Mar."

66

They gazed in awe upon the Corsican,

That mighty-minded—but small-bodied man.'

"The arm of the Lord," said a preacher, "is as fixed as fate, as sure as eternity-as strong as the rock of Gibraltar."

"Were Russia to possess the Bosporus," says a recent writer, "and the Turks be driven out, progress would cease. The missionaries would be exiled, religious freedom crushed out, and ninety millions of people speaking one language would be brought under the yoke of an iron despotism, which in its strength and noiseless movement is as resistless as the great Corliss engine at Philadelphia."

CHAPTER VII.

FIGURES OF EMPHASIS.-DIRECT STRESS AND
ITERATION.

§ 169. FIGURES OF EMPHASIS.

EMPHASIS in general means a certain stress placed upon words. Figures of emphasis include all those by which any given word or subject is presented before the mind with the greatest possible strength and energy. Words, phrases, and whole sentences may thus be emphasized.