[480] Who besides Webster has called syllepsis “substitution,” I do not know. Substitution and conception are terms of quite different import, and many authors have explained syllepsis by the latter word.  Dr. Webster gives to “SUBSTITUTION” two meanings, thus:  “1.  The act of putting one person or thing in the place of another to supply [his or] its place.—­2.  In grammar, syllepsis, or the use of one word for another.”—­American Dict., 8vo.  This explanation seems to me inaccurate; because it confounds both substitution and syllepsis with enallage.  It has signs of carelessness throughout; the former sentence being both tautological and ungrammatical.—­G.  B.

[481] Between Tropes and Figures, some writers attempt a full distinction; but this, if practicable, is of little use.  According to Holmes, “TROPES affect only single Words; but FIGURES, whole Sentences.”—­Rhetoric, B. i, p. 28.  “The CHIEF TROPES in Language,” says this author, “are seven; a Metaphor, an Allegory, a Metonymy, a Synecdoche, an Irony, an Hyperbole, and a Catachresis.”—­Ib., p. 30.  The term Figure or Figures is more comprehensive than Trope or Tropes; I have therefore not thought it expedient to make much use of the latter, in either the singular or the plural form.  Holmes’s seven tropes are all of them defined in the main text of this section, except Catachresis, which is commonly explained to be “an abuse of a trope.”  According to this sense, it seems in general to differ but little from impropriety.  At best, a Catachresis is a forced expression, though sometimes, perhaps, to be indulged where there is great excitement.  It is a sort of figure by which a word is used in a sense different from, yet connected with, or analogous to, its own; as,

“And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, as heaven’s cherubim Hors’d upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind.”—­Shak., Macbeth, Act i, Sc. 7.

[482] Holmes, in his Art of Rhetoric, writes this word “Paraleipsis” retaining the Greek orthography.  So does Fowler in his recent “English Grammar,” Sec.646.  Webster, Adam, and some others, write it “Paralepsis.”  I write it as above on the authority of Littleton, Ainsworth, and some others; and this is according to the analogy of the kindred word ellipsis, which we never write either ellepsis, or, as the Greek, elleipsis.

[483] To this principle there seems to be now and then an exception, as when a weak dissyllable begins a foot in an anapestic line, as in the following examples:—­

   “I think—­let me see—­yes, it is, I declare,
    As long ago now as that Buckingham there.”—­Leigh Hunt.