“To live a life half dead, a living death, And buried; but oh, yet more miserable! Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave!” No person, if he heard this passage for the first time from the lips of an Irishman, could hesitate to call it a series of bulls; yet these lines are part of the beautiful complaint of Samson Agonistes on his blindness. Such are the hyperboles sanctioned by the genius, or, what with some judges may have more influence, the name of Milton. The bounds which separate sublimity from bombast, and absurdity from wit, are as fugitive as the boundaries of taste. Only those who are accustomed to examine and appraise literary goods are sensible of the prodigious change that can be made in their apparent value by a slight change in the manufacture. The absurdity of a man’s swearing he was killed, or declaring that he is now dead in a ditch, is revolting to common sense; yet the _living death_ of Dapperwit, in the “Rape of the Lock,” is not absurd, but witty; and representing men as dying many times before their death is in Shakspeare sublime: “Cowards die many times before their death; The brave can never taste of death but once.” The most direct contradictions in words do not (_in English writers_) destroy the eflect of irony, wit, pathos, or sublimity. In the classic ode on Eton College, the poet exclaims-- “To each their sufferings, all are men Condemned alike to groan; The feeling for another’s pain, Th’ _unfeeling_ for their own.” Who but a half-witted dunce would ask how those that are unfeeling can have sufferings? When Milton in melodious verse inquires, “Who shall tempt with _wandering feet_ The dark _unbottom’d_ infinite abyss, And through the _palpable obscure_ find out His uncouth way!”-- what Zoilus shall dare interrupt this flow of poetry to object to the palpable obscure, or to ask how feet can wander upon that which has no bottom? It is easy, as Tully has long ago observed, to fix the brand of ridicule upon the _verbum ardens_ of orators and poets--the “Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” CHAPTER VII. PRACTICAL BULLS.