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Lyly died in 1606, leaving, as he said, but three legacies; "Patience to my creditors, Melancholie without measure to my friends, and Beggarie without shame to my family." The deeper meaning of Lyly's work, which lies beneath the surface of his similes and antitheses, has escaped almost all his critics. It is suggested by the title, "Euphues, The Anatomy of Wit."

His tale was full of little similes, at which his audience nodded their heads now and then, approvingly. He had apparently already begun his story, for when Anthony had taken his seat and silence had been obtained, he went straight on without any further introduction. The landlord leaned over to Anthony. "The San Juan," he whispered behind his hot hairy hand, and nodded at him with meaning eyes.

He was seated on the Treasury-bench between his Attorney and Solicitor General, the two pillars of the law and state, magis pares quam similes; and the minister might indulge in a short slumber, whilst he was upholden on either hand by the majestic sense of Thurlow, and the skilful eloquence of Wedderburne.

"These are very fine figures," said the Abbé Marinier with vehemence; "but you are all aware that similes are not arguments!" Don Clemente, standing in the corner between the door leading into the corridor and the window, and Professor Minucci, seated near him, began to speak at the same moment, but both stopped short; each wishing to allow the other to speak first.

The blessings consequent on the gift of God's love are described in lovely imagery, drawn, like Hosea's other abundant similes, from nature, and especially from trees and flowers.

So much of the best in the world seems to have come fragrant out of fields, gardens, and hillsides. So many truths spoken by the Master Poet come to us exhaling the odours of the open country. His stories were so often of sowers, husbandmen, herdsmen: his similes and illustrations so often dealt with the common and familiar beauty of the fields. "Consider the lilies how they grow."

As he went by shore and upland, there gathered in his mind those resonant hexameters of warning or consolation, those similes from the life of husbandry and dumb things, which, set like diamonds in clay, lend to the most arid arguments their own incomparable splendour, or that homelier beauty which instantly pierces the defences of the heart.

For Edwin, it was a whole series of fresh formulae, brutal and shameless beyond his experience, full of images and similes of the most startling candour, and drawing its inspiration always from the sickening bases of life. Darius had remembered with ease the vocabulary to which he was hourly accustomed when he began life as a man of seven.

And this was the more unexpected because of the grace of curve and line, fold upon fold, with no sharp angles, but as full of charm of contour as their grays and olives were harmonious in color. Photographs showed a little of this; sketches revealed more; but the great splendid things themselves, devoid of similes and human imagination, were soul-satisfying in their simplicity.

Eggs in the shell, and masses of eggs, bacon delicately thin and curling like Apollo's locks at his temples, and cutlets, caviar, anchovies in the state of oil, were pressed with the captain's fervid illustrations upon the brothers, both meditatively nibbling toast and indifferent to the similes he drew and applied to life from the little fish which had their sharpness corrected but not cancelled by the improved liquid they swam in.