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.”
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.”
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.
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, their mellowness, their dignity, their energy, their power, and all their other graces, and that it is this which endows the facts with a vocal soul; to say all this would, I fear, be, to the initiated, an impertinence. Indeed, we may say with strict truth that beautiful words are the very light of thought.