Zara. The mute not yet return’d! Ha! $1’the King,
The King that parted hence! frowning he went;
His eyes like meteors roll’d, then darted down
Their red and angry beams; as if his sight
Would, like the raging Dog-star, scorch the earth,
And kindle ruin in its course.
Mourning Bride, act 5. sc. 3.
A man spent and dispirited after losing a battle, is not disposed to heighten or illustrate his discourse by similes:
York. With this we charg’d again; but out! alas,
We bodg’d again; as I have seen a swan
With bootless labour swim against the tide,
And spend her strength with over-matching waves.
Ah! hark, the fatal followers do pursue.
And I am faint and cannot fly their fury.
The sands are number’d that make up my life;
Here must I stay, and here my life must end.
Third part Henry VI. act 1. sc. 6.
Far less is a man disposed to similes who is not only defeated in a pitch’d battle, but lies at the point of death mortally wounded.
Warwick.———— My mangled body shews,
My blood, my want of strength, my sick heart shews,
That I must yield my body to the earth,
And, by my fall, the conquest to my foe.
Thus yields the cedar to the ax’s edge,
Whose arms gave shelter to the princely eagle;
Under whose shade the ramping lion slept,
Whose top-branch overpeer’d Jove’s spreading tree,
And kept low shrubs from winter’s pow’rful wind.
Third part Henry VI. act 5. sc. 3.
Queen Katharine, deserted by the King and in the deepest affliction upon her divorce, could not be disposed to any sallies of imagination: and for that reason, the following simile, however beautiful in the mouth of a spectator, is scarce proper in her own.
I am the most unhappy woman living,
Shipwreck’d upon a kingdom, where no pity,
No friends, no hope! no kindred weep for me!
Almost no grave allowed me! like the lily,
That once was mistress of the field, and flourish’d,
I’ll hang my head and perish.
King Henry VIII. act 3. sc. 1.
Similes thus unseasonably introduced, are finely ridiculed in the Rehearsal:
Bayes. Now here she must make a simile.
Smith. Where’s the necessity of that, Mr Bayes?