The Arte of English Poesie eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 355 pages of information about The Arte of English Poesie.

The Arte of English Poesie eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 355 pages of information about The Arte of English Poesie.

For I tooke my leaue and kist her:  And yet I cannot well say whether a man vse to kisse before hee take his leaue, or take his leaue before he kisse, or that it be all one busines.  It seemes the taking leaue is by vsing some speach, intreating licence of departure:  the kisse a knitting vp of the farewell, and as it were a testimoniall of the licence without which here in England one may not presume of courtesie to depart, let yong Courtiers decide this controuersie.  One describing his landing vpon a strange coast, sayd thus preposterously.
  When we had climbde the clifs, and were a shore,

Whereas he should haue said by good order.
  When we were come ashore and clymed had the cliffs

For one must be on land ere he can clime.  And as another said: 
  My dame that bred me up and bare me in her wombe.

Whereas the bearing is before the bringing vp.  All your other figures of disorder because they rather seeme deformities then bewties of language, for so many of them as be notoriously vndecent, and make no good harmony, I place them in the Chapter of vices hereafter following.

  CHAP.  XIIII.

Of your figures Auricular that worke by Surplusage.

Your figures auricular that worke by surplusage, such of them as be materiall and of importaunce to the sence or bewtie of your language, I referre them to the harmonicall speaches oratours among the figures rhetoricall, as be those of repetition, and iteration or amplification.  All other sorts of surplusage, I accompt rather vicious then figuratiue, & therefore not melodious as shalbe remembred in the chapter of viciosities or faultie speaches.

  CHAP.  XV.

Of auricular figures working by exchange.

[Sidenote:  Enallage, or the Figure of Exchange.] Your figures that worke auricularly by exchange, were more obseruable to the Greekes and Latines for the brauenesse of their language, ouer that ours is, and for the multiplicitie of their Grammaticall accidents, or verball affects, as I may terme them, that is to say, their diuers cases, moodes, tenses, genders, with variable terminations, by reason whereof, they changed not the very word, but kept the word, and changed the shape of him onely, vsing one case for another, or tense, or person, or gender, or number, or moode.  We, hauing no such varietie of accidents, haue little or no vse of this figure.  They called it Enallage.

[Sidenote:  Hipallage, or the Changeling.] But another sort of exchange which they had, and very prety, we doe likewise vse, not changing one word for another, by their accidents or cases, as the Enallage:  nor by the places, as the [Preposterous] but changing their true construction and application, whereby the sence is quite peruerted and made very absurd:  as he that should say, for tell me troth and lie not, lie me troth and tell not. For come dine with me and stay not, come stay with me and dine not.

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