Oui, fa pudeur n'est que franche grimace, Qu'une ombre de vertu qui garde mal la place, Et qui s'evanouit, comme l'on peut favoir Aux rayons du foleil qu'une bourse fait voir. Molliere, L'Etourdi, at 3.fc. 2. Et fon feu depourvû de sense et de lecture, Boileau, L'art poetique, chant. 3. l. 319. Dryden, in his dedication to the tranflation of Juvenal, says, When thus, as I may say, before the use of the loadstone, or knowledge of the compafs, I was failing in a vast ocean, without other help than the pole-star of the ancients, and the rules of the French stage among the moderns, &c. There is a time when factions, by the vehemence of their own fermentation, ftun and disable one another. Bolingbroke. This fault of jumbling the figure and plain expreffion into one confused mafs, is not less common in allegory than in metaphor. Take the following example. Heu! Heu! quoties fidem,'tra Mutatofque Deos flebit, et afperas wi> Nigris æquora ventis Emirabitur infolens, Qui nunc te fruitur credulus aureâ: jak i → Qui femper vacuam, femper amabilem Sperat, nefcius auræ Fallacis. Horat. Carm. l. 1. ode a 5. Lord Halifax, fpeaking of the ancient fabulifts: They (fays he) wrote in figns "and spoke in parables: all their fables carry a double meaning: the ftory is and entire; the characters the fame throughout; not broken or changed, and always conformable to the nature "of the creature they introduce. They "never tell you, that the dog which fsnapp'd "at a fhadow, loft his troop of horfe; that "would be unintelligible. This is his (Dry 8 den's) new way of telling a story, and confounding the moral and the fable together." After inftancing from the hind and panther, he goes on thus "What relation has the hind to our Sa"viour? or what notion 1 have we of a "panther's panther's bible? If you fay he means "the church, how does the church feed "on lawns, or range in the foreft? Let it "be always a church or always a cloven"footed beaft, for we cannot bear his fhifting the scene every line." A few words more upon allegory. Nothing gives greater pleasure than this figure, when the representative subject bears a ftrong analogy, in all its circumstances, to that which is reprefented. But the choice is feldom fo lucky; the resemblance of the representative subject to the principal, being generally fo faint and obfcure, as to puzzle and not please. An allegory is ftill more difficult in painting than in poetry. The former can fhow no resemblance but what appears to the eye: the latter hath many other resources for showing: the resemblance. With respect to what the Abbé du Bos* terms mixt allegorical compofitions, these may do in poetry, because in writing the allegory can eafily be diftinguished from the hiftorical part: no perfon *Reflexions fur la Poefie, &c. vol. 1. fect. 24. VOL. III. R mistakes mistakes Virgil's Fame for a real being. But fuch a mixture in a picture is intolerable; because in a picture the objects must appear all of the fame kind, wholly real or wholly emblematical. The history of Mary de Medicis, in the palace of Luxenbourg, painted by Rubens, is in a vicious tafte, by a perpetual jumble of real and allegorical perfonages, which produce a difcordance of parts and an obfcurity upon the whole: witness in particular, the tablature reprefenting the arrival of Mary de Medicis at Marseilles mixt with the real perfonages, the Nereids and Tritons appear founding their shells. Such a mixture of fiction and reality in the fame group, is ftrangely abfurd. The picture of Alexander and Roxana, defcribed by Lucian, is gay and fanciful but it fuffers by the allegorical figures. It is not in the wit of man to invent an allegorical reprefentation deviating farther from any appearance of refemblance, than one exhibited by Lewis XIV. anno 1664; in which an overgrown chariot, intended to reprefent that of the fun, is : choredragg'd dragg'd along, furrounded with men and women, representing the four ages of the world, the celestial figns, the seasons, the hours, &c. a monstrous composition; and yet fcarce more abfurd than Guido's tablature of Aurora. In an allegory, as well as in a metaphor, terms ought to be chofen that properly and literally are applicable to the representative fubject. Nor ought any circumstance to be added, that is not proper to the representa tive fubject, however juftly it may be applicable figuratively to the principal. Upon this account the following allegory is faulty. Ferus et Cupido, Semper ardentes acuens fagittas Cote cruenta. Horat. 1. 2. ode 8. For though blood may fuggeft the cruelty of love, it is an improper or immaterial circumftance in the reprefentative subject : water, not blood, is proper for a whetstone. We proceed to the next head, which is, to examine in what circumftances these fi |