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All I distinctly recollect upon this occasion is, that on my arrival at Vincennes, I was in an agitation which approached a delirium. Diderot perceived it; I told him the cause, and read to him the prosopopoeia of Fabricius, written with a pencil under a tree. He encouraged me to pursue my ideas, and to become a competitor for the premium. I did so, and from that moment I was ruined.

Rousseau puts his vigorous remonstrance against pride of birth into the mouth of an English nobleman. This is perhaps an infelicitous piece of prosopopoeia, but it is interesting as illustrative of the idea of England in the eighteenth century as the home of stout-hearted freedom.

The figure prosopopoeia is often but an impotent straining to impart poetic life; but the personification in in his motion is apt and effective. Quiring is an amplification of the immediately preceding sings, and, signifying to sing in company with others, enlarges, while making more specific, the thought.

Honest Pantagruel, not understanding the mystery, asked him, by way of interrogatory, what he did intend to personate in that new-fangled prosopopoeia. I have, answered Panurge, a flea in mine ear, and have a mind to marry. In a good time, quoth Pantagruel, you have told me joyful tidings. Yet would not I hold a red-hot iron in my hand for all the gladness of them.

Comp. vii. 12, viii. 5, and following, ix., and in general ix.-xi. These prosopopoeia of Wisdom personified are found in much older books. At all events, the strictness of a studied theology by no means existed in such a state of society.

All I distinctly recollect upon this occasion is, that on my arrival at Vincennes, I was in an agitation which approached a delirium. Diderot perceived it; I told him the cause, and read to him the prosopopoeia of Fabricius, written with a pencil under a tree. He encouraged me to pursue my ideas, and to become a competitor for the premium. I did so, and from that moment I was ruined.

And this, when one addresses inanimate things, is a figure which is called by rhetoricians, Prosopopoeia, and the Poets often use it.

One is reminded here of Pascal's famous prosopopoeia: "I know not who has put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor myself. I am in a terrible ignorance about everything.... All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least of all is this very death which I cannot escape." The phrases of the Pensees are only the echo of the phrases of the Confessions. But how different is the tone!

All I distinctly recollect upon this occasion is, that on my arrival at Vincennes, I was in an agitation which approached a delirium. Diderot perceived it; I told him the cause, and read to him the prosopopoeia of Fabricius, written with a pencil under a tree. He encouraged me to pursue my ideas, and to become a competitor for the premium. I did so, and from that moment I was ruined.

In my opinion, little honour is due to such as are mere lookers-on, liberal of their eyes, and of their crowns, and hide their silver; scratching their head with one finger like grumbling puppies, gaping at the flies like tithe calves; clapping down their ears like Arcadian asses at the melody of musicians, who with their very countenances in the depth of silence express their consent to the prosopopoeia.