Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/79

 Rh 's imagination to the wonder point before descending to facts. Even the rain and snow were never spoken of in the plain language of the Weather Bureau; and the elements had a set of allegories all their own. Miss Carter would have scorned to take a walk by the sea. She "chased the ebbing Neptune." Mrs. Chapone was not blown by the wind. She was "buffeted by Eolus and his sons." Miss Seward does not hope that Mr. Whalley's rheumatism is better; but that he has overcome "the mal-influence of marine damps, and the monotonous murmuring of boundless waters." Perhaps the most triumphant instance on record of sustained metaphor is Madame d'Arblay's account of Mrs. Montagu's yearly dinner to the London chimney-sweeps, in which the word sweep is never once used, so that the editor was actually compelled to add a footnote to explain what the lady meant. The boys are "jetty objects," "degraded outcasts from society," and "sooty little agents of our most blessed luxury." They are "hapless artificers who perform the most abject offices of any authorized calling"; they are "active guardians of our blazing hearth";