literature, on the other--to change the metaphor--our few small
strings may thrill in sympathetic harmony to some lyrical zephyrs and
remain practically unresponsive to the deep-sea gale of Aeschylus or
Dante_.

Why, yes, gentlemen, you may change your metaphors, if it seems good
to you, but you may also be pretty sure that, if you feel the
necessity of proclaiming the change, you had better have abstained
from it.

_Two of the trump cards played against the Bill are (1) that 'it makes
every woman who pays a tax-collector in her own house', and (2) that
'it will destroy happy domestic relations in hundreds of thousands of
homes'; if we may at once change our metaphor, these are the notes
which are most consistently struck in the stream of letters, now
printed day by day for our edification in the_ Mail. This writer need
not have asked our leave to change from cards to music; he is within
his rights, anyhow, and the odds are, indeed, that if he had not
reminded us of the cards we should have forgotten them in the
intervening lines, but how did a person so sensitive to change of
metaphor fail to reflect that it is ill playing the piano in the
water? 'A stream of letters', it is true, is only a picturesque way of
saying 'many letters', and ordinarily a dead metaphor; but once put
your seemingly dead yet picturesque metaphor close to a piano that is
being played, and its notes wake the dead--at any rate for readers who
have just had the word _metaphor_ called to their memory.--H.W.
FOWLER.