Belphœbe » The Fashionable American Letter Writer http://belphoebe.benjaminbruce.com literary tidbits Sat, 02 Oct 2010 17:04:54 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 The Fashionable American Letter Writer http://belphoebe.benjaminbruce.com/2009/the-fashionable-american-letter-writer/ http://belphoebe.benjaminbruce.com/2009/the-fashionable-american-letter-writer/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:22:12 +0000 Mashkioya http://belphoebe.benjaminbruce.com/?p=29 These different kinds of allusion are but so many different manners of similitude; and, that they may please the imagination, the likeness ought to be very exact or very agreeable, as we love to see a picture where the resemblance is just, or the posture and air graceful. But we often find eminent writers very faulty in this respect: great scholars are apt to fetch their comparisons and allusions from the sciences in which they are most conversant, so that a man may see the compass of their learning in a treatise on the most indifferent subject. I have read a discourse upon love, which none but a profound chemist could understand, and have heard many a sermon that should only have been preached before a congregation of Cartesians.

The Fashionable American Letter Writer: or, The Art of Polite Correspondence (1833).

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