itself some of the thrill and fascination of romance.

Here are metaphors that might be used, or have been used, so as to
surprise the reader; but in this case they are stock-ornaments to a
passage that needs no ornament. If the metaphors in the first sentence
were alive to us they would be mixed; at least the transition from
monarchies hide-bound by caste to monarchies lying on scrap-heaps
would be too sudden; but we hardly notice it because we hardly notice
the metaphors. And there is an inconsistency in the notion of rising
by wading which, again, we do not notice only because we are so used
to rising and wading as metaphors that both have lost their power as
images. Mr. Lloyd George has waded to such a dizzy height that he
seems to leave foreign nations breathless; and we should be breathless
at the thought of such an impossibility if the metaphors were not
dead.

It is indeed the mark of a dead metaphor that it escapes absurdity
only by being dead. The term has been used for metaphors that have
lost all metaphorical significance; but these, perhaps, are better
called buried metaphors. I prefer to use the word _dead_ of metaphors
not yet buried but demanding burial. 'Risen from humble beginnings' is
perhaps a buried metaphor; 'wading to their places through blood' is a
dead one. It has been used so often that it jades instead of
horrifying us; it is a corpse that fails to make us think of corpses.
But in the next sentence the writer returns to the metaphor of rising
and elaborates it so that it is no longer buried, though certainly
dead. We are vaguely aware of the sense of this passage, but the
metaphors are a hindrance, not a help, to our understanding of it.

Writers fall into habitual metaphor when they fear that their thought