CHAP. I. Of improved .. "such as fruit, which raises his desire, and "who requests another to give it to him. SupPerception. posing our savage to be unacquainted with words, he would, in that case, labour to make "himself be understood, by pointing earnestly 66 at the object, which he desired, and uttering, at the same time, a passionate cry. Sup"posing him to have acquired words, the first "word, which he uttered, would, of course, "be the name of that object. He would not express himself according to our English "order of construction, Give me fruit,' but according to the Latin order, Fruit give << me,' Pomum da mihi: for this plain reason, "that his attention was wholly directed towards "fruit, the desired object. This was the ex"citing idea; the object which moved him to "speak; and, of course, would be the first "named. Such an arrangement is precisely putting into words the gesture, which nature taught the savage to make, before he was acquainted with words; and, therefore, it may be depended upon as certain, that he "would fall most readily into this arrange "Accustomed now to a different method of "ordering our words, we call this inversion, "and consider it as a forced and unnatural "order of speech. But, though not the most logical, it is however, in one view, the most "natural order; because it is the order sug"gested by imagination and desire, which al ways impel us to mention their object in the "first place. We might, therefore, conclude, “à priori, that this would be the order, in "which words were most commonly arranged at the beginnings of language; and accordingly we find, in fact, that, in this order, "words are arranged in most of the ancient tongues; as in the Greek, and the Latin; “and, it is said, also in the Russian, the Sclavonic, the Gaelic, and several of the Ame"rican tongues *." 66 CHAP. I. Of improved Perception. "All the other modern languages of Europe "have adopted a different arrangement from "the ancient. In their prose compositions, very little variety is admitted in the colloca"tion of words: they are mostly fixed to one "order; and that order is what may be called "the order of the understanding. They place, first, in the sentence, the person or thing, "which speaks or acts; next its action; and lastly, the object of its action. So that the "ideas are made to succeed to one another, not according to the degree of importance, P. 135, 8vo. ed. CHAP. I. Of improved "which the several objects carry in the ima gination, but according to the order of nature, and of time *.” "It appears that, in all the successive "changes, which language has undergone, as "the world advanced, the understanding has gained ground on the fancy and imagination. "The progress of language, in this respect, re"sembles the progress of age in man. The imagination is most vigorous and predo"minant in youth; with advancing years the imagination cools, and the understanding ripens. Thus language, proceeding from sterility to copiousness, hath, at the same time, proceeded from vivacity to accuracy; "from fire and enthusiasm to coolness and "precision t!" 83. The collocation of words, according to the order of desire or imagination, it is easy to perceive, must have been much better adapted to the purposes of poetry, than the collocation of them according to the order of the understanding; but a variety of flexible terminations is absolutely necessary to make words, so ar CHAP. I. Of improved ranged, intelligible; and, in these, all the As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, says Macbeth, when agitated by remorse and $ 66 Videsne, ut ordine verborum paulum commutato, iisdem K CHAP. Of improved who wrote from feeling, has many happy instances of the same kind; as me of my lawful pleasure, she bereft, &c.;" but Milton, and other epic and moral writers in blank verse, who viewed nature through the medium of books, and wrote from the head rather than the heart, have often employed this inverted order merely to stiffen their diction, and keep it out of prose; an artifice, of all others, the most adverse to the genuine purposes of a metrical or poetical style; which, though known to be the result of study and labour, should always appear to flow from inspiration. In matters of taste, it is of little importance what the understanding knows by inference or analogy; but it is different with what the imagination perceives by immediate impression. 34. The pleasure, which we receive from verse, in light or didactic compositions; or such as are not capable of exciting or sustaining enthusiasm, arises from the charms of neatness, point, and emphasis; all of which are improved and invigorated by the regularity of a metrical style, which facilitates the flow of utterance, and directs and fixes the attention to the particular idea, which the author wishes to impress most strongly. By these means, as well as by the periodical recurrence iisdem verbis stante sententia, ad nihilum omnia recident, cum sint ex aptis dissoluta."-Cic. Orator. |