'A judicious intermixture is requisite ... It is without reason, therefore, that some critics have censured these modes of speech, and ridiculed the poet for the use of them; as old Euclid did, objecting that versification would be an easy business, if it were permitted to lengthen words at pleasure, and then giving a burlesque example of that sort of diction... In the employment of all the species of unusual words, moderation is necessary: for metaphors, foreign words, or any of the others improperly used, and with a design to be ridiculous, would produce the same effect. But how great a difference is made by a proper and temperate use of such words may be seen in heroic verse. Let any one put common words in the place of the metaphorical, the foreign, and others of the same kind, and he will be convinced of the truth of what I say.'
He then gives two or three examples of the effect of changing poetical for common words. As, that (in plays now lost)
'the same Iambic verse occurs in Æschylus and Euripides; but by means of a single alteration—the substitution of a foreign for a common and usual word—one of these verses appears beautiful, the other ordinary. For Æschylus in his Philoctetes says, "The poisonous wound that eats my flesh." But Euripides for
"eats" says
"banquets on."'
this
This is not particularly observed. On the very first page of
P. L.