The second virtue of ideas, that they should agree with the inner nature of the subject; and thence on ideas foreign and accidental to the subject.
The second virtue of ideas with respect to the subject-matter is that they should agree with its inner nature: that is, that they should be elicited out of the very inners of the subject and not far-fetched or drawn from external accidents which are only the accompaniments of things. By this rule we have been delivered from numerous frigid epigrams, of which I subjoin a few examples:
Foreign and far-fetched is Owen's on a lyre:
That there is concord in so diverse chords
Discordant mankind some excuse affords.[15]
As if nothing were more pertinent for making men ashamed of their discords than the concord of strings on a lyre.
From concomitant accidents, and not from the very heart of the subject itself, is drawn this epigram of Germanicus Caesar, though the verses are otherwise sufficiently polished:
The Thracian boy at play on the stiff ice
Of Hebrus broke the waters with his weight
And the swift current carried him away,
Except that a smooth sherd cut off his head.
The childless mother as she burned it said:
"This for the flames I bore, that for the waves."[16]
Certainly the mother had a deeper and more native cause of grief than that her son was destroyed partly by water and partly by fire; she would have grieved no less had he perished wholly in water or wholly in fire. The whole reason for grief, then, ought not be sought in such a slight circumstance, which was an accompaniment of and not the grounds for grief.
Negative descriptions labor under the same fault, namely those in which are enumerated not what the endowments of the subject are but what they are not. This is justly censured in one of Barlaeus' epigrams, which is in other respects quite polished:
Of royal Bourbon blood, by whose aid once
Belgium believed that God inclined to her;
For sceptered fathers famed, more famed for war,
And by Astraea's doom of rare renown;
Whom War as general, Peace lauds unarmed,
To whom so many lands and seas are slaves;
Neither the fleece drinking barbarian dye
I send you, nor Sidonian artifice,
Nor Indian ivory, Dalmatian stone,
Nor the choice incense that delights grave Jove,
Nor warring eagles, no, nor cities stormed,
Nor plundered canvas from the conquered sea;
Louis, I give you Christ as King and Lord,
Titles not foreign to the ones you bear:
For I would send you, greatest of all kings,
Than which I cannot more, I send you God.[17]
Surely it is a long way around to enumerate what you will not give the King in order to make clear how slight your gift is. Besides, the conclusion is harsh in that a book about Christ is called God and Christ, as if Christ and a book about him were the same thing. But this is a commonplace absurdity of what one may call the dedicatory genre, in which writers almost always speak of their book as if there were no difference between the book itself and its subject: thus, if they write about Caesar or Cato, "Caesar and Cato," they say, "prostrate themselves before you;" If about Cicero, "Look," they say, "Cicero addresses you and takes you as patron:" all of which are correctly to be reckoned in the category of false statements.