OBS.—­The whole number of figures, which I have thought it needful to define and illustrate in this work, is only about thirty.  These are the chief of what have sometimes been made a very long and minute catalogue.  In the hands of some authors, Rhetoric is scarcely anything else than a detail of figures; the number of which, being made to include almost every possible form of expression, is, according to these authors, not less than two hundred and forty.  Of their names, John Holmes gives, in his index, two hundred and fifty-three; and he has not all that might be quoted, though he has more than there are of the forms named, or the figures themselves.  To find a learned name for every particular mode of expression, is not necessarily conducive to the right use of language.  It is easy to see the inutility of such pedantry; and Butler has made it sufficiently ridiculous by this caricature: 

   “For all a rhetorician’s rules
    Teach nothing but to name his tools.”—­Hudibras, P. i, C. i, l. 90.

SECTION V.—­EXAMPLES FOR PARSING.

PRAXIS XIV.—­PROSODICAL.

In the Fourteenth Praxis, are exemplified the several Figures of Orthography, of Etymology, of Syntax, and of Rhetoric, which the parser may name and define; and by it the pupil may also be exercised in relation to the principles of Punctuation, Utterance, Analysis, or whatever else of Grammar, the examples contain.

LESSON I.—­FIGURES OF ORTHOGRAPHY.

MIMESIS AND ARCHAISM.

“I ax’d you what you had to sell.  I am fitting out a wessel for Wenice, loading her with warious keinds of prowisions, and wittualling her for a long woyage; and I want several undred weight of weal, wenison, &c., with plenty of inyons and winegar, for the preserwation of ealth.”—­Columbian Orator, p. 292.

“God bless you, and lie still quiet (says I) a bit longer, for my shister’s afraid of ghosts, and would die on the spot with the fright, was she to see you come to life all on a sudden this way without the least preparation.”—­Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, p. 143.

“None [else are] so desperately evill, as they that may bee good and will not:  or have beene good and are not.”—­Rev. John Rogers, 1620.  “A Carpenter finds his work as hee left it, but a Minister shall find his sett back.  You need preach continually.”—­Id.

   “Here whilom ligg’d th’ Esopus of his age,
    But call’d by Fame, in soul ypricked deep.”—­Thomson.

    “It was a fountain of Nepenthe rare,
    Whence, as Dan Homer sings, huge pleasaunce grew.”—­Id.

LESSON II.—­FIGURES OF ETYMOLOGY.