scene, the constraint which is put on the words accurately reflecting
the anxiety of the sailors’ minds, and the diction being stamped, as it
were, with the peculiar terror of the situation.

[Footnote 2: _Phaenomena_, 299.]

7
Similarly Archilochus in his description of the shipwreck, and similarly
Demosthenes when he describes how the news came of the taking of
Elatea[3]--“It was evening,” etc. Each of these authors fastidiously
rejects whatever is not essential to the subject, and in putting
together the most vivid features is careful to guard against the
interposition of anything frivolous, unbecoming, or tiresome. Such
blemishes mar the general effect, and give a patched and gaping
appearance to the edifice of sublimity, which ought to be built up in a
solid and uniform structure.

[Footnote 3: _De Cor._ 169.]


XI

Closely associated with the part of our subject we have just treated of
is that excellence of writing which is called amplification, when a
writer or pleader, whose theme admits of many successive starting-points
and pauses, brings on one impressive point after another in a continuous
and ascending scale.

2
Now whether this is employed in the treatment of a commonplace, or in