English poetry -- History and criticism; Poetry -- Early works to 1800
For I tooke my leaue and kist her: And yet I cannot well say whether a man
vse to kisse before hee take his leaue, or take his leaue before he kisse,
or that it be all one busines. It seemes the taking leaue is by vsing some
speach, intreating licence of departure: the kisse a knitting vp of the
farewell, and as it were a testimoniall of the licence without which here
in England one may not presume of courtesie to depart, let yong Courtiers
decide this controuersie. One describing his landing vpon a strange coast,
sayd thus preposterously.
_When we had climbde the clifs, and were a shore_,
Whereas he should haue said by good order.
_When we were come ashore and clymed had the cliffs_
For one must be on land ere he can clime. And as another said:
_My dame that bred me up and bare me in her wombe_.
Whereas the bearing is before the bringing vp. All your other figures of
disorder because they rather seeme deformities then bewties of language,
for so many of them as be notoriously vndecent, and make no good harmony,
I place them in the Chapter of vices hereafter following.
_CHAP. XIIII._
_Of your figures Auricular that worke by Surplusage_.
Your figures _auricular_ that worke by surplusage, such of them as be
materiall and of importaunce to the sence or bewtie of your language, I
referre them to the harmonicall speaches oratours among the figures
rhetoricall, as be those of repetition, and iteration or amplification.
All other sorts of surplusage, I accompt rather vicious then figuratiue, &
therefore not melodious as shalbe remembred in the chapter of viciosities
or faultie speaches.
_CHAP. XV._
_Of auricular figures working by exchange._
[Sidenote: _Enallage_, or the Figure of Exchange.]
Your figures that worke _auricularly_ by exchange, were more obseruable to
the Greekes and Latines for the brauenesse of their language, ouer that
ours is, and for the multiplicitie of their Grammaticall accidents, or
verball affects, as I may terme them, that is to say, their diuers cases,
moodes, tenses, genders, with variable terminations, by reason whereof,
they changed not the very word, but kept the word, and changed the shape
of him onely, vsing one case for another, or tense, or person, or gender,
or number, or moode. We, hauing no such varietie of accidents, haue little
or no vse of this figure. They called it _Enallage._
[Sidenote: _Hipallage_, or the Changeling.]
But another sort of exchange which they had, and very prety, we doe
likewise vse, not changing one word for another, by their accidents or
cases, as the _Enallage_: nor by the places, as the [_Preposterous_] but
changing their true construction and application, whereby the sence is
quite peruerted and made very absurd: as he that should say,
for _tell me troth and lie not, lie me troth and tell not._
For _come dine with me and stay not, come stay with me and dine not._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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