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Updated: May 24, 2025
"Can any one," he said, with a pleasing foreign accent, "lend me a pin?" Mr. Lambert, who happened to be nearest, and who carried innumerable pins for the purpose of attaching innumerable buttonholes, lent him one, which was received with extravagant but dignified bows, and hyperboles of thanks.
All the peculiarities of the Anacreon of the guillotine, his words unknown to the Dictionary of the Academy, his conceits and his jokes, his Gascon idioms and his Gascon hyperboles, had become as odious as the cant of the Puritans was in England after the Restoration. Bonaparte, who had never loved the men of the Reign of Terror, had now ceased to fear them.
Hence posterity is too often deceived by the vague hyperboles of poets and rhetoricians, who mistake the splendour of a court for the happiness of a people. Fortunately, John Villani has given us an ample and precise account of the state of Florence in the early part of the fourteenth century.
I have tried half a dozen times to describe Burke's style without ever succeeding, its severe extravagance; its literal boldness; its matter-of-fact hyperboles; its running away with a subject, and from it at the same time, but there is no making it out, for there is no example of the same thing anywhere else. We have no common measure to refer to; and his qualities contradict even themselves.
This we know, but our difficulty is not with the form but with the content, that is, with that which these hyperboles symbolise. It is fairly inconceivable to us that a matter which, according to the Churches, merely concerns the body, soon to be resolved into its component gases, should exercise so miraculous a transformation on the soul, or the real man.
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.
Like music, poetry has its root in those natural modes of expression which accompany deep feeling. Its rhythm, its strong and numerous metaphors, its hyperboles, its violent inversions, are simply exaggerations of the traits of excited speech. To be good, therefore, poetry must pay attention to those laws of nervous action which excited speech obeys.
There are some puerile hyperboles, for which I know not whether he or Camoens is responsible; such as The mountain echoes catch the big swoln sighs. The yellow sands with tears are silver'd o'er. Johnson told him that he had once intended to translate the Lusiad.
He was launched upon his favourite theme, his native land, and was irresistible. England was the only country in the world. He stamped, he sawed the air, he used metaphors and similes and hyperboles in a vain endeavour to give some idea of her glory. He eulogized her commerce, her statesmen, her Queen.
As I still retained my resentment for the disgrace I suffered in my last rencontre with him, and, now that I the thought myself qualified, longed for an opportunity to retrieve my honour, I magnified the valour of the English with all the hyperboles I could imagine, and described the pusillanimity of the French in the same style, comparing them to hares flying before greyhounds, or mice pursued by cats; and passed an ironical compliment on the speed he exerted in his flight, which, considering his age and infirmities I said was surprising.
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