Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1854, By DAVID N. LORD, In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York, DOVER TAFOL STRINAR! AUG 91905 ELIBRARY 56,7.59 R. CRAIGHEAD, Printer and Stereotyper, 53 Vesey Street, N. Y. PREFACE. THE views presented in the ensuing work-of the nature of the several figures, the office they fill, and the laws by which they are governed-are quite unlike those of Quintilian, Kaimes, Lowth, Blair, and other rhetoricians, and of the commentators on the poets, and the expositors of the sacred writings. Those writers give no exact analysis of them; they enter into no consideration of the principles on which they are used; they present no hint of the rules by which they are to be interpreted; and no intimations are found on the pages even of the most recent works on language and interpretation, of the necessity of an accurate understanding of their nature, in order to the just exposition of the sacred word, and the rejection and refutation of the false constructions to which large portions of it are now subjected. The several figures are here minutely analysed; the particulars in which they differ from each other pointed out; the principles stated on which they are employed; the rules given by which their meaning is determined; and their characteristics and laws verified by a large variety of examples from the sacred writings and the poets. The subject will be found, by those who thoroughly study it, to be one of the finest in the whole circle of knowledge, both for the development and discipline of the intellect, and the evolution and refinement of the taste. The application of the characteristics and laws to the identification and interpretation of the figures of the sacred word, though after practice involving little difficulty, requires close and discriminative attention; and the perception of the analogies on which they are founded, and the delicate graces with which they are fraught, is eminently adapted to unfold and quicken the sensibility to what is beautiful and grand, and imbue the taste with delicacy and elegance. The seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth chapter on musical feet and the modulation of verse, should be studied immediately after the introduction, that their principles may be applied by the learner to the passages from the poets that occur in the chapters on the figures. |