She summ’d her life up ev’ry day, Modest as morn, as midday bright, Gentle as ev’ning, calm as night.[128] Later similes are less graceful, but they usually have the antithetical form of expression.[129] Fairly numerous similes are drawn from trees. Dryden gives typical examples, as, And lofty cedars as far upward shoot As to the nether heavens they drive their root.[130] This equal spread of roots and branches, the heavy fall of a great tree, and the superior height of some tall pine or cedar, are the chief sources of similitudes. The abundant commonplaces, the fluent ineptitudes, of these eighteenth-century similes did not escape satire in their own day. Now and then a critic looked with scorn upon the ingenious and exhausting attempts of the poet lovers to devise comparisons adequately expressive of the beauty, the fascination, the cruelty, the coldness, the inconstancy, of their Cynthias of the minute. Butler thus notes the tendency of poor and unmeaning metaphors to advance in a mob when female charms were to be depicted: In praising Chloris, moons, and stars, and skies, Are quickly made to match her face and eyes-- And gold and rubies, with as little care, To fit the colour of her lips and hair; And, mixing suns, and flowers, and pearl, and stones, Make them serve all complexions at once.[131] This easy method of praising a mistress is also humorously described by Ambrose Philips: To blooming Phyllis I a song compose, And, for a rhyme, compare her to the Rose; Then, while my Fancy works, I write down Morn, To paint the blush that does her cheek adorn, And, when the whiteness of her skin I show, With extasy bethink myself of Snow. Thus, without pains, I tinkle in the close, And sweeten into Verse insipid Prose.[132] And Swift in his “Apollo’s Edict,” 1720, specifically prohibits the use of some of the more wearisomely frequent similitudes. Some of the laws he imposes on the poets of his realm are: No simile shall be begun With _rising_ or with _setting_ sun, No son of mine shall e’er dare say, _Aurora ushered-in the day_, Or even name the _Milky-Way_. The bird of Jove shall toil no more To teach that humble wren to soar. Nor let my votaries show their skill By aping lines from Cooper’s Hill; For know, I can not bear to hear The mimicry of “deep, yet clear.” In general we may say of the similitudes of this period that in no other literary form was Nature so widely used, and in no other form with so little beauty and spirit; that they were based on an insufficient and inexact knowledge of Nature; and that they were used without any sympathetic sense of inner fitness.