No society, no community, can place its house in such a condition that it is always on a rock, oscillating between solvency and insolvency.  What I have to do is to see that our house is built upon a solid foundation, never allowing the possibility of the Society’s life-blood being sapped.  Just in proportion as you are careful in looking after the condition of your income, just in proportion as you deal with them carefully, will the solidarity of the Society’s financial condition remain intact.  Immediately you begin to play fast and loose with your income the first blow at your financial stability will have been struck.

A real poet losing himself in the meshes of a foolish obsession.

Johnson tore the hearts out of books ruthlessly in order to extract the honey out of them expeditiously.  Are we to let the pendulum swing back to the old rut?  Those little houses at the top of the street, dwarfed by the grandiloquence on the opposite side, are too small, too.

3.  Self-consciousness and Mixed Metaphor.

The gentlemen of the Press regularly devote a small percentage of their time to accusing each other of mixing metaphors or announcing that they are themselves about to do so (What a mixture of metaphors!  If we may mix our metaphors.  To change the metaphor), the offence apparently being not to mix them, but to be unaware that you have done it.  The odd thing is that, whether he is on the offensive or the defensive, the writer who ventures to talk of mixing metaphors often shows that he does not know what mixed metaphor is.  Two typical examples of the offensive follow: 

The Scotsman_ says:  ’The crowded benches of the Ministerialists contain the germs of disintegration.  A more ill-assorted majority could hardly be conceived, and presently the Opposition must realize of what small account is the manoeuvring of the Free-Fooders or of any other section of the party.  If the sling be only properly handled, the new Parliamentary Goliath will be overthrown easily enough.  The stone for the sling must, however, be found on the Ministerial side of the House, and not on the Opposition side.’  Apparently the stone for the sling will be a germ.  But doubtless mixed feelings lead to mixed metaphors._ In this passage, we are well rid of the germs before we hear of the sling, and the mixture of metaphors is quite imaginary.

Since literal benches often contain literal germs, but ’crowded benches’ and ‘germs of disintegration’ are here separate metaphors for a numerous party and tendencies to disunion, our critic had ready to his hand in the first sentence, if he had but known it, something much more like a mixture of metaphors than what he mistakes for one.