2
"Those vile fawning wretches, each one of whom has lopped from his
country her fairest members, who have toasted away their liberty, first
to Philip, now to Alexander, who measure happiness by their belly and
their vilest appetites, who have overthrown the old landmarks and
standards of felicity among Greeks,--to be freemen, and to have no one
for a master."[2] Here the number of the metaphors is obscured by the
orator's indignation against the betrayers of his country.

[Footnote 2: _De Cor._ 296.]

3
And to effect this Aristotle and Theophrastus recommend the softening of
harsh metaphors by the use of some such phrase as "So to say," "As it
were," "If I may be permitted the expression," "If so bold a term is
allowable." For thus to forestall criticism[3] mitigates, they assert,
the boldness of the metaphors.

[Footnote 3: Reading +hupotimesis+.]

4
And I will not deny that these have their use. Nevertheless I must
repeat the remark which I made in the case of figures,[4] and maintain
that there are native antidotes to the number and boldness of metaphors,
in well-timed displays of strong feeling, and in unaffected sublimity,
because these have an innate power by the dash of their movement of
sweeping along and carrying all else before them. Or should we not
rather say that they absolutely demand as indispensable the use of
daring metaphors, and will not allow the hearer to pause and criticise
the number of them, because he shares the passion of the speaker?

[Footnote 4: Ch. xvii.]

5
In the treatment, again, of familiar topics and in descriptive passages
nothing gives such distinctness as a close and continuous series of
metaphors. It is by this means that Xenophon has so finely delineated
the anatomy of the human frame.[5] And there is a still more brilliant
and life-like picture in Plato.[6] The human head he calls a _citadel_;
the neck is an _isthmus_ set to divide it from the chest; to support it
beneath are the vertebrae, turning like _hinges_; pleasure he describes
as a _bait_ to tempt men to ill; the tongue is the _arbiter of tastes_.
The heart is at once the _knot_ of the veins and the _source_ of the
rapidly circulating blood, and is stationed in the _guard-room_ of the
body. The ramifying blood-vessels he calls _alleys_. "And casting
about," he says, "for something to sustain the violent palpitation of
the heart when it is alarmed by the approach of danger or agitated by
passion, sin