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She had long since schooled herself into the acceptance of her stupidly maimed life, seeing herself in no pathetic similes at all, but, rather, as a foolish, unformed creature who, partly through blindness, partly through recklessness, had managed badly to cripple herself at the outset of life's walk, and who must make the best of a hop-skip-and-jump gait for the rest of it.
If I might give a hint to so consummate a rhetorician, you should be more careful in making your figures figures, and your similes like: for instance, when you talk of a book "swelling the tide of exhilaration incident to the inauguration of the new year," or of a book "bearing the stamp of its origin in vacuity," &c., or of a man diving sardonically; or of a pearl eclipsed in the display of a diseased oyster there are some people who will not apprehend your meaning: some will doubt whether you had a meaning: some even will question your great powers, and say, "Is this man to be a critic in a newspaper, which knows what English, and Latin too, and what sense and scholarship, are?"
The vision of Gerald, radiantly in love, flashed horridly for Althea. It was dim, yet bright, scintillating darkly; she could only imagine it in similes; she had never seen anything that could visualise it for her. The insufferable dogs, like tethered bubbles, bounded before them, constantly impeding their progress.
The "L" trains crawl over the Wells Street bridge and the water below them becomes alive with a moving silver image. For a moment the reflection of the "L" trains in the river seems like a ghostly waterfall. Then it changes and becomes something else. What? The light reflections in the dark water are baffling. It is a game to stand on the bridge and make up similes about them.
One is the unsounded purple sea of marching billows." "A very fine distinction." "I conceive you to be now commending the similes. They pertain to the time of the first critics of those poets. Touch the Greeks, and you can nothing new; all has been said: 'Graiis . . . praeter, laudem nullius avaris. Genius dedicated to Fame is immortal. We, sir, dedicate genius to the cloacaline floods.
"Not a rag of evidence," said the attorney's clerk when he delivered the little brief "not a shadder of evidence, Mr. 'Awkins. It's a walk-over, sir." I knew that meant a nominal fee, but wondered how many more similes he was going to deliver instead of the money.
'I don't want to see you there, sir; I want to see you go, and not stand rapping your breast-bone, sounding like a burst drum, as you are, retorted the unappeasable old man. I begged him in exasperation to keep his similes to himself. Janet and my aunt Dorothy raised their voices. My father said: 'I am broken.
Fresh from this polite encounter, the squire vows money for his personal protection: and he determines to speak his opinion of Sherwood's latest captain as loudly as ever. That he will, I do not say. It might involve a large sum per annum. Similes are very well in their way. None can be sufficient in this case without levelling a finger at the taxpayer nay, directly mentioning him.
As the simile was so assiduously cultivated by the Latin epicists and forms a distinctive feature of their style, we shall give in the appendix to this chapter a comparative table of the more important similes of the three chief epic poets. At present we shall quote only two from the Thebaid, both admirable in their way, and each exemplifying one of Statius's prominent faults or virtues.
How many hours the action of a play may be allowed to occupy, how many similes an Epic Poet may introduce into his first book, whether a piece, which is acknowledged to have a beginning and an end, may not be without a middle, and other questions as puerile as these, formerly occupied the attention of men of letters in France, and even in this country.
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