way” by the State. And these turns of language lend dignity in no common
measure to the thought. He takes the words in their naked simplicity and
handles them as a musician, investing them with melody,--harmonising
them, as it were,--by the use of periphrasis.

[Footnote 1: _Menex._ 236, D.]

3
So Xenophon: “Labour you regard as the guide to a pleasant life, and you
have laid up in your souls the fairest and most soldier-like of all
gifts: in praise is your delight, more than in anything else.”[2] By
saying, instead of “you are ready to labour,” “you regard labour as the
guide to a pleasant life,” and by similarly expanding the rest of that
passage, he gives to his eulogy a much wider and loftier range of
sentiment. Let us add that inimitable phrase in Herodotus: “Those
Scythians who pillaged the temple were smitten from heaven by a female
malady.”

[Footnote 2: _Cyrop._ i. 5. 12.]


XXIX

But this figure, more than any other, is very liable to abuse, and great
restraint is required in employing it. It soon begins to carry an
impression of feebleness, savours of vapid trifling, and arouses
disgust. Hence Plato, who is very bold and not always happy in his use
of figures, is much ridiculed for saying in his _Laws_ that “neither
gold nor silver wealth must be allowed to establish itself in our
State,”[1] suggesting, it is said, that if he had forbidden property in