our own fancy, these thoughts and images are, as it were, for the moment, ours; and we have only the delightful impression, that we are of a race of nobler beings than we conceived. This delightful identification, however, lasts only as long as the thoughts and images, that are presented to us, arise in the order in which nature might have spontaneously presented them to our own mind. When there is any obvious and manifest violation of the natural course of suggestion,-as there must be, when the labour of the composition is brought before us, this illusion of identity is dissolved. It is no longer our common nature which we feel; but the toil and constraint which are peculiar to the individual, and which separate him, for the time, from our sympathy. The work of labour seems instantly something insulated and detached, which we cannot identify with our own spontaneous thought; and we feel for it that coldness, which, by the very constitution of our nature, it is impossible for us not to feel, with respect to every thing which is absolutely foreign.

After these remarks, on the influence of the various species of resemblance, in the objects themselves,-in the analogy of some of their qualities,-and in the arbitrary symbols, which denote them, I proceed to consider the force of contrast, as a suggesting principle. I consider it, at present, as forming a class apart, for the same reason, which has led me, in these illustrations of the general principle, to class separately the suggestions of resemblance, though, I conceive, that all, or at least the greater number of them, on a more subtile analysis, might be reduced to the more comprehensive influence of former proximity.

Of this influence, whether direct or indirect, in contrast, the memory of every one must present him with innumerable instances. The palace and the cottage, the cradle and the grave, -the extremes of indigence and of luxurious splendour, are not connected in artificial antithesis only, but arise, in ready succession, to the observer of either. Of all moral reflections, none are so universal as those which are founded on the instability of mortal distinctions,-the sudden reverses of fortune, -the frailty of beauty,-the precariousness of life itself,-all which reflections are manifestly the result of that species of suggestion which we are considering,-for the very notion of instability implies the previous conception of that state of decay, which is opposite to the flourishing state observed by us. If we see the imperial victor moving along, in all the splendour of majesty and conquest, we must have thought of sudden disaster, before we can moralize on the briefness of earthly

triumph. If we see beauty, and youth, and joy, and health, on the cheek, we must have thought of age, or sickness, or misfortune, before we can look on it with sorrowful tenderness. This transition, in our trains of thought, from one extreme to its opposite, is perhaps a happy contrivance of nature, for tempering excess of emotion, by interrupting the too long continuance of trains of any kind. It must occasionally produce some little tendency to salutary reflection, even in the gay licentious proud," who are fated by their situation," to "dance along" through life,-though it is certainly not on them, but on those by whom they are surrounded, that its beneficial influence most fully operates. This natural tendency is, in truth, what the lyre of Timotheus is represented to have been in Dryden's Ode, when, with a sudden change of subject, he checked the too triumphant exultation of the conqueror of Darius:-

"With downcast looks, the joyless victor sat,
Revolving in his alter'd soul

The various turns of chance below;
And, now and then, a sigh he stole ;
And tears began to flow."*

I cannot help thinking, in like manner, that the everlasting tendency to hope,-that only happiness of the wretched, which no circumstances of adverse fortune, not even the longest oppression of unchanging misery can wholly subdue, derives much of its energy from this principle. The mere force of contrast must often bring before the imagination, circumstances of happier fortune, and images of past delight. These very images, indeed, are sad, in some respects, especially when they first arise, and coexist, as it were, with the images of misery, which produce them, so as to present only the mortifying feeling of the loss which has been suffered; but they cannot long be present to the mind, without gradually awakening trains of their own, and, in some degree, the emotions with which they were before associated,-emotions which dispose the mind more readily to the belief, that the circumstances which have been, may yet again recur. It is, at least, not unsuitable to the goodness of that mighty Being, who has arranged the wonderful faculties of man, in adaptation to the circumstances in which he was to be placed, that he should thus have formed us to conceive hope, where hope is most needed, and provided an internal source of comfort, in the very excess of misery itself.

Much of the painful retrospection, and, therefore, of the sa• Alexander's Feast, Stanza IV. v. 19-23. VOL. II.-D

lutary influence of conscience, may arise, in like manner, from the force of this suggesting principle, which must frequently recall the security and happiness of the past, by the very anguish of the present, and which, thus, though it cannot restore innocence itself, may, at least, by the images which it awakes, soften the mind to that repentance, which is almost innocence under another form.

There is a passage, in the only remaining oration of the younger Pliny, that expresses strongly the power, which the associating principle of contrast holds over the conscience of the guilty. It is in the Panegyric of Trajan, an emperor, of whom it has been said, that, to deserve the magnificent eulogium pronounced on him, the only merit wanting to him was that of not being a hearer of it. The panegyric is unques tionably written with much eloquence, and is not the less impressive, from those circumstances which gave occasion to a very just remark,-" that the Romans have in it the air of slaves, scarcely escaped from their chains; who are astonished at their own liberty, and feel grateful to their master, that he does not think proper to crush them, but deigns to count them in the rank of men." "Merenti gratias agere facile est," says Pliny, "non enim periculum est, ne cum loquar de humanitate, exprobrari sibi superbiam credat; cum de frugalitate, luxuriam; cum de clementia, crudelitatem; cum de liberalitate, avaritiam; cum de benignitate, livorem; cum de continentia, libidinem; cum de labore, inertiam; cum de fortitudine, timorem."* In this allusion to times that had scarcely passed away, what a striking picture is presented to us, of that despotism, which, not satisfied with the power of doing evil, was still greedy of the praise of good, which it despised, and of which it dreaded to hear the very name, even while it listened to the forced eulogium! and how still more sad a picture does it afford, of that servile cowardice, which was doomed, with ready knee, but with trembling tongue, to pay the perilous tax of adulation,-" cum dicere quod velles, periculosum; quod nolles, miserum esset?"—that reign of terror, and flattery, and confiscation, and blood,-when, to borrow the eloquent description which a panegyrist of Theodosius has given us, of a similar period, with every misery around, there was still added the dreadful necessity of appearing to rejoice,—the informer wandering, to mark down countenances, and calumniate looks and glances,-the plundered citizen driven from opulence into sudden poverty, fearful of seeming sad, because there was yet left to him life, and he, whose brother had been

Sect. IV. p. 6.-Edit. Venet. 1728.

assassinated, not daring to appear in the dress of mourning, because he had still a son.

Alas! in such times, eloquence could be nothing more than what it was said to be for many ages of national servitude,— "the unhappy art of exaggerating a few feeble virtues, or of disguising atrocious crimes."-" tristis illa facundiæ ancillantis necessitas, cum trucem dominum auras omnes plausuum publicorum ventosa popularitate captantem, mendax adsentatio titillabat, cum gratias agebant dolentes,-et tyrannum non prædicasse tyrannidis accusatio vocabatur."* Yet, it is pleasing to think, that, in the long detail of praises, which were addressed to guilty power, that suggesting principle, which we are considering, must often have exerted its influence, and, in spite of all the artifices of the orator, to veil under magnificence of language, that hateful form of virtue, which he was under the necessity of presenting, must sometimes have forced upon the conscience of the tyrant, the feeling of what he was, by the irresistible contrast of the picture of what he was not.

It is this tendency of the mind, to pass readily from opposites to opposites, which renders natural the rhetorical figure of antithesis. When skilfully and sparingly used, it is unquestionably a figure of great power, from the impression of astonishment which the rapid succession of contrasted objects must always produce. The infinity of worlds, and the narrow spot of earth which we call our country, or our home, the eternity of ages, and the few hours of life,-the Almighty power of God, and human nothingness,-it is impossible to think of these in succession, without a feeling like that which is produced by the sublimest eloquence. This very facility, however, of producing astonishment, at little cost of real eloquence, renders the antithesis the most dangerous and seductive of all figures to a young orator. It is apt to introduce a symmetry of arrangement, in which scarcely an object is brought forward, that has not to run a parallel of all its qualities, with the qualities of some other object, till even contrast itself becomes monotonous and uniform, by the very frequency of opposition. The thoughts and sentences are so nicely tallied, as to be like pieces of Dutch gardening,-where

"Half the platform just reflects the other."

It is not so that nature operates. She gives variety to the field of our thought, in the same manner, as she diversifies her own

• Pacati Panagyr. Sect. II.

† Pope's Moral Essays, Ep. IV. v. 118.

romantic scenery. Now and then, on the banks of her rivers, rock answers to rock, and foliage to foliage; but, when we look along the wide magnificence of her landscapes, we discover, that still, as in that "wilderness of sweets," which Milton describes, she continues "to wanton as in her prime, and play at will,-wild without rule or art." It is the same in the field of our associations. Sometimes she presents objects together, in exact proportion of resemblance or contrast; but more frequently she groups them according to other relations, especially according to their former accidental concurrence in time or place, and thus communicates, if I may so express it, to the scenery of thought, that very variety which she spreads over external things.

In the use of antithesis, then,-as much as in the use of the other rhetorical forms of thought and expression before considered by us,-it is in the general nature of spontaneous suggestion, that we have to find the principle which is to direct us. Contrast is one of the forms of this suggestion; and occasional antithesis is, therefore, pleasing; but it is only one of the occasional forms of suggestion; and, therefore, frequent antithesis is not pleasing, but offensive. Our taste requires, that the series of thoughts and images presented to us should be exquisite in kind: but, even when they are most exquisite, it requires that, without any obtrusive appearance of labour, they should seem to have risen, as it were, spontaneously, and to have been only the perfection of the natural order of thought.

I shall proceed, in my next Lecture, to the consideration of nearness in place or time as an associating principle.