AMUSING METAPHORS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1858, 1 July 1887, Page 32

AMUSING METAPHORS.

An Englishman once asked a son of Erin ,if, the roads in Ireland were good. Pat; /replied: "YeS; they are so fine, that. I wonder you do not import some of them into .England.' Let me see — there's the road to love, strewed, with roses; to matrimony, through nettles; to, honour through the camp ; to prison, through the law; and to the undertakers, through physic." — " Have you any road to preferment?" asked the Englishman. " Yes, faith, we have ; but that is the dirtiest road in the kingdom," The answer of Apollonius to Vespasian is, not without humour and instruction. • Vespasian asked him : " What caused . Nero's overthrow, ?" He ■ answered : " Nero could touch and tune the harp well ; but in Government, sometimes he used to wind the pins too high, sometimes to let, them down too low." And certain it is that nothing destroys, authority so much as the unequal and, untimely interchange of power pressed too far and relaxed too much. George Stephenson was once asked by a scientific lady what he considered the most powerful force in nature. " Ojh," said he in a gallant spirit, "I will soon answer that question:, it is, the eye of the woman for the man who loves her ; for if a" woman look with affection on a young man, and he should go to the uttermost ends of the earth, the recollection of that look will bring him back. There is no other force in nature that could do that."

• Equally ready with a similitude was Jbhe negro who, when giving evidence in court, was asked about the honesty of a neighbour. VI know nothing against him," was ,the reply ; " but if I was a chicken, I would roost nigh when he .was hanging around." A thoughtful writer describes one-eyed travellers, who see a great deal of some particular class of objects and are blind to all others, and adds : "The Irish jaunting car, in which the passengers sit back to back, isa sort of type of what befalls many tourists in Ireland. Each sees a great deal, and reports faithfully what he has seen on one side of the road, and the other on the other. One will have seen all that is green, and the other, all that is orange" " A cunning knave can form no notion, of a nobler nature," says the same writer. "He is like the goats on Robinson Crusoe's island, which saw clearly everything below them, but very imperfectly what was above them ; so that Robinson could never get at them from the valleys ; but when he came upon them from the hilltop, he took them quite by surprise." ' Ridicule, says a German critic, is like a blow from the fist ; wit, like the prick of a

needle; irony, like' the sting of a thorn; and ' humour, the plaster which heals all these wounds. All of these qualities may be found in some metaphors. Man is said to be an animal that has a mania for getting up societies and making himself president. If the presidency has been already claimed, he contents himself with the position of treasurer. In a cynical old bachelor's opinion, ideas are like beardsmen only get them when they are grown up, and women never have any. It was probably another old bachelor who said: "Nature shudders when she sees a woman throw a stone ; but when a woman attempts to split Wood, nature covers her head and retires to a dark and mouldering cave in temporary despair." A spinster says old bachelors are frozen-out old gardeners in the flower-bed of love. To say that a coquette is a rosebush from which each young beau picks a leaf, and the thorns are left for the husband, is not very complimentary. Compliments are the coin that people pay a man in his face ; sarcasm, with what they pay him out with behind his back. ' ' A fanner said: "One thing I don't like about city folks — they be either so stuck up that yer can't reach 'em with a haystack pole, or so blamed friendly that they forget to pay their board." A rural poet said of his lady-love : " She is graceful .as a water-lily, while her breath 'is like an armful of clover." An American poet wrote a eulogy of Washington, whose glorious life should compose a volume as Alps immortal, spotless as its snows. The stars should be its types, its press the age, the earth its binding, and the sky its page. Truly, some American poets go in for marvels of metaphor. The Chinese call over-doing a thing, a hunchback making a bow. When a man values himself overmuch, they compare him to a rat falling into a scale and weighing itself. A. fanatical Sabbatarian writes : " The

Sunday newspaperis a crayfish in the dikes of misrule, a crayfish which undermines the banks, behind- which the racecourses, the theatres, the saloons, the gambling dens, &c, are roaring for exit." Another newspaper described afire by saying that the red flames tianeed in the heavens, and flung their fiery

arms about like a black funeral pall, until Sam Jones got on the roof and doused them out with a' pail of water. Gordon Cumming likened an African jungle to a forest of fishhooks relieved by an occasional patch of penknives. > ■■^YGtrlooV'said an Irishman to a pale haggard smoker, v as if you had got out of your grave to light your oigar, and .couldn't find your way back again." A schoolmaster describing a money-lender,

says : °He serves you in the present tense, he lends you in the conditional mood, keeps you in the subjunctive, and ruins you in the, fature." A close observer of human nature remarks : " Time marches on with the slow measured tread of the man working by the day." A French author is charged with the prediction that France will throw herself into the arms of the liberating sword. This is not quite so bad as the Democrat's speech : "We will burn our ships, and with every gail unfurled, steer boldly out into the ocean of freedom ,1" , > A clergyman on board a ship began, a Bermon dn the following manner : • " Dear friends, I shall .embark my . exhortation on

the barge" of my lips, in order to - cross the stormy ocean of your attention,arid ( in hope of arriving safely at the port of your ears." A learned counsellor, in" the middle of an affecting appeal in court on a slander suit, treated his hearers to th« following flight of genius: "Slander, gentlemen, like a boaconstrictor of gigantic size and immeasurable proportions, wraps the coils of its nnwieldly body about its unfortunate victim, and heed^ less of the shrieks of agony that come from •the uttermost depths 'of its * victim's soul — loud and yerberating as the night-thunder that rolls in the heavens — it finally breaks its unlucky neck upon the iron wheel. of public opinion; forcing .hinvfirsb^o desperation, then to. madness, and finally, crushing him in the hideous jaws ,of mortal death." , A young American lawyer employed to defend a culprit charged with stealing a pig resolved to convince the court that he was born, to shine. Accordingly, he pro- 1 ceeded to deliver the following brilliant exordium: "May it please the court and gentlemen of the jury, while Europe \is bathed, in blood; while classic Greece, is struggling for . her rights and liberties, and trampling the unhallowed altars of the bearded infidels to . dust ; while • America' shines forth the brightestorb in the politicalsky — I, with due diffidence, rise to defend the cause of this humble hog»thief ."

" Pray my lord," said a gentleman to a late respected and rather whimsical judge, "what is the difference between law and equity courts V — " Very little in the end," replied his lordship ; " they only differ as far as time is concerned. At common law, you are done for at once ; in equjty, you are, not so easily disposed of. . The , former is, abullet, which is instantaneously and charmingly effective ; the latter is an angler's hook, which plays -with its victim before it kills jit. The one is prussicacid, the other laudanum."

A curious metaphor was- used by the orator who proposed to grasp a ray of light from the great orb of day, spin it into threads of gold, and with them weave a shroud in which to wrap the -whirlwind which dies, upon the bosom of the west. A writer remarks, we are afraid the machinery will break down before the fabric can get through the loom.

But the following piece of soul-stirring eloquence equals anything in the way [of amusing metaphors. Colonel Zell, at the time when Grant was up for the Presidency, and when the Democratic ' watchword was, "Anything to beat Grant," was addressing an enthusiastic meeting of Republicans, when a Democrat snng oub : " It's easy talkin', Colonel ; but we'll show you something next fall." The Colonel was a great admirer of Grant. He at once wheeled about, and with uplifted hands, hair bristlingj and eyes flashing fire, cried out: "Build a worm-fence round a winter supply of summer weather ; catch a thunderbolt in a bladder ; break a hurricane to harness ; hang out the ocean on a grape vine to dry ; but never, sir, never for a moment delude yourself with the idea that you can beat Grant." — Chambers' Journal.