_D'ambitieux pygmées_ _Qui sur leurs pieds vainement redressés_ _Et sur des monts d'argumens entassés_ _De jour en jour superbes Encelades,_ _Vont redoublant leurs folles escalades._ When philosophers are to be written against, it should be done better. How do ambitious pygmies, reared on their hind legs on mountains of arguments, continue escalades? What a false and ridiculous image! What elaborate dulness! In an allegory by the same author, entitled the "Liturgy of Cytherea," we find these lines: _De toutes parts, autour de l'inconnue,_ _Ils vont tomber comme grêle menue,_ _Moissons des cœurs sur la terre jonchés,_ _Et des Dieux même à son char attachés._ _De par Venus nous venons cette affaire_ _Si s'en retourne aux cieux dans son sérail,_ _En ruminant comment il pourra faire_ _Pour ramener la brebis au bercail._ Here we have harvests of hearts thrown on the ground like small hail; and among these hearts palpitating on the ground, are gods bound to the car of the unknown; while love, sent by Venus, ruminates in his seraglio in heaven, what he shall do to bring back to the fold this lost mutton surrounded by scattered hearts. All this forms a figure at once so false, so puerile, and so incoherent--so disgusting, so extravagant, so stupidly expressed, that we are astonished that a man, who made good verses of another kind, and was not devoid of taste, could write anything so miserably bad. Figures, metaphors, are not necessary in an allegory; what has been invented with imagination may be told with simplicity. Plato has more allegories than figures; he often expresses them elegantly and without ostentation. Nearly all the maxims of the ancient orientals and of the Greeks were in the figurative style. All those sentences are metaphors, or short allegories; and in them the figurative style has great effect in rousing the imagination and impressing the memory. We know that Pythagoras said, "In the tempest adore the echo," that is, during civil broils retire to the country; and "Stir not the fire with the sword," meaning, do not irritate minds already inflamed. In every language, there are many common proverbs which are in the figurative style. FIGURE IN THEOLOGY. It is quite certain, and is agreed by the most pious men, that figures and allegories have been carried too far. Some of the fathers of the church regard the piece of red cloth, placed by the courtesan Rahab at her window, for a signal to Joshua's spies, as a figure of the blood of Jesus Christ. This is an error of an order of mind which would find mystery in everything. Nor can it be denied that St. Ambrose made very bad use of his taste for allegory, when he says, in his book of "Noah and the Ark," that the back door of the ark was a figure of our hinder parts.