An artificial connection among the words, is undoubtedly a beauty when it represents any peculiar connection among the constituent parts of the thought; but where there is no such connection, it is a positive deformity, because it makes a discordance betwixt the thought and expression. For the same reason, we ought also to avoid every artificial opposition of words where there is none in the thought. This last, termed verbal antithesis, is studied by writers of no taste; and is relished by readers of the same stamp, because of a certain degree of liveliness in it. They do not consider how incongruous it is, in a grave composition, to cheat the reader, and to make him expect a contrast in the thought, which upon examination is not found there.
A light wife doth make a heavy husband.
Merchant of Venice.
Here is a studied opposition in the words, not only without any opposition in the sense, but even where there is a very intimate connection, that of cause and effect; for it is the levity of the wife that vexes the husband.
—————— Will maintain
Upon his bad life to make all this good.
King Richard II. act. 1. sc. 2.
Lucetta. What, shall these papers lie like tell-tales here?
Julia. If thou respect them, best to take them up.
Lucetta. Nay, I was taken up for laying them down.
Two Gentlemen of Verona, act 1. sc. 3.
To conjoin by a copulative, members that signify things opposed in the thought, is an error too gross to be commonly practised. And yet writers are guilty of this fault in some degree, when they conjoin by a copulative things transacted at different periods of time. Hence a want of neatness in the following expression.
The nobility too, whom the King had no means of retaining by suitable offices and preferments, had been seized with the general discontent, and unwarily threw themselves into the scale, which began already too much to preponderate.