_'When the Chairman of Committees--a politician of their own
hue--allowed Mr. Maddison to move his amendment in favour of secular
education, a decision which was not quite in accordance with
precedent, the floodgates of sectarian controversy were opened, and
the apple of discord--the endowment of the gospel of
Cowper-Temple--was thrown into the midst of the House of Commons.'
What a mixture of metaphor! One pictures this gospel-apple battling
with the stream released by the opened floodgates._ In point of fact,
the floodgates and the apple are successive metaphors, unmixed; the
mixing of them is done by the critic himself, not by the criticized;
and as to _gospel-apple,_ by which it is hinted that the mixture is
triple, the original writer had merely mentioned in the _gospel_
phrase the thing compared by the side of what it is compared to, as
when one explains _the Athens of the North_ by adding _Edinburgh._

Writers who are on the defensive apologize for _change_ and _mixture_
of metaphors as though one was as bad as the other; the two sins are
in fact entirely different; a man may change his metaphors as often as
he likes; it is for him to judge whether the result will or will not
be unpleasantly florid; but he should not ask our leave to do it; if
the result is bad, his apology will not mend matters, and if it is not
bad no apology was called for. On the other hand, to mix metaphors, if
the mixture is real, is an offence that should have been not
apologized for, but avoided. Whichever the phrase, the motive is the
same--mortal fear of being accused of mixed metaphor.

_...showed that Free Trade could provide the jam without recourse
being had to Protective food-taxes: next came a period in which (to
mix our metaphors) the jam was a nice slice of tariff pie for
everybody, but then came the Edinburgh Compromise, by which the jam