nd dignity in no common
measure to the thought. He takes the words in their naked simplicity and
handles them as a musician, investing them with melody,--harmonising
them, as it were,--by the use of periphrasis.

[Footnote 1: _Menex._ 236, D.]

3
So Xenophon: "Labour you regard as the guide to a pleasant life, and you
have laid up in your souls the fairest and most soldier-like of all
gifts: in praise is your delight, more than in anything else."[2] By
saying, instead of "you are ready to labour," "you regard labour as the
guide to a pleasant life," and by similarly expanding the rest of that
passage, he gives to his eulogy a much wider and loftier range of
sentiment. Let us add that inimitable phrase in Herodotus: "Those
Scythians who pillaged the temple were smitten from heaven by a female
malady."

[Footnote 2: _Cyrop._ i. 5. 12.]

XXIX

But this figure, more than any other, is very liable to abuse, and great
restraint is required in employing it. It soon begins to carry an
impression of feebleness, savours of vapid trifling, and arouses
disgust. Hence Plato, who is very bold and not always happy in his use
of figures, is much ridiculed for saying in his _Laws_ that "neither
gold nor silver wealth must be allowed to establish itself in our
State,"[1] suggesting, it is said, that if he had forbidden property in
oxen or sheep he would certainly have spoken of it as "bovine and ovine
wealth."

[Footnote 1: _De Legg._ vii. 801, B.]

2
Here we must quit this part of our subject, hoping, my dear friend
Terentian, that your learned curiosity will be satisfied with this short
excursion on the use of figures in their relation to the Sublime. All
those which I have mentioned help to render a style more energetic and
impassioned; and passion contributes as largely to sublimity as the
delineation of character to amusement.

XXX

But since the thoughts conveyed by words and the expression of those
thoughts are for the most part interwoven with one another, we will now
add some considerations which have hitherto been overlooked on the
subject of expression. To say that the choice of appropriate and
striking words has a marvellous power and an enthralling charm for the
reader, that this is the main object of pursuit with all orators and
writers, that it is this, and this alone, which causes the works of
literature to exhibit the glowing perfections of the finest statues,
their grandeur, their beauty,