These twisted and precious ideas were bound together with an adhesive and secret language full of phrase contractions, ellipses and bold tropes.

In our day we consider as figures of speech only the classical tropes, and indeed Aristotle pays little attention to the others.

Mr. Croker said of his "Don Carlos": "It is not easy to find any poetry, or even oratory, of the present day delivered with such cold and heavy diction, such distorted tropes and disjointed limbs of similes worn to the bones long ago.

I have already glanced at the possibility of a diabolical world manufacturing gramophone records for our bishops and statesmen and suchlike leaders of thought, but if we dismiss that as a merely elegant trope, I must confess I think it is the influence of Herbert Spencer.

As an example of the high degree of excellence attained by eloquence, he cites Lyly's Euphues. Whose workes surely in respecte of his singuler eloquence and brave composition of apt words and sentences, let the learned examine and make tryall thereof through all the partes of Rethoricke, in fitte phrases, in pithy sentences, in gallant tropes, in flowing speech, in plaine sence.

That he himself was infected appears in the examples of interminable "tropes" and "schemes" quoted by Fraunce in his Arcadian Rhetoric (1588) from Sidney's own Arcadia.

; Her touch endows her with imperious air, Self-valuing fancy, highly-crested pride, Strong sovereign will, and some desire to chide: 60 For which an eloquence, that aims to vex, With native tropes of anger arms the sex.

A clergyman preaching in the neighbourhood of Wapping, observing that most part of his audience were in the seafaring way, very naturally embellished his discourse with several nautical tropes and figures.

The atmosphere of prose, to be sure, is less favorable to Heine's habitual indulgence in romantic tropes.

Then follows another choral ode, similar in theme to the last, dwelling on the woe brought by the act of Paris upon Troy, the change of the bridal song to the trump of war and the dirge of death; contrasting, in a profusion of splendid tropes, the beauty of Helen with the curse to which it is bound; and insisting once more on the doom that attends insolence and pride.