soldier may return himself as on either side, and that it is a crime for one of his fellows to reveal his decision. That is one way of settling a dispute, but where is the possibility of heroism? It is not heroic to try to make other men think as you do, every one does that as a measure of self-preservation and self-support. No, the ass is in the lion's skin, the wire-puller has stolen the soldier's coat, and conceals his theft in a metaphor. I do not know if you are acquainted with that other misappropriation of the same figure by a nomad sect of fanatics who make senseless catchwords of the boldest and most beautiful of New Testament metaphors?
Poet. Do not nauseate me; I know.
Hist. They are commonly said to rescue from drunkenness; the drunkenness they induce and encourage seems to me infinitely worse. But the English people have always thought highly of physical health, and are willing cynically to condone mental intoxication for the sake of bodily sobriety. That is what I cannot understand. Robert Burns, now, was not notoriously abstemious, and yet—but I am digressing, you must surely be convinced by this time that the world is waiting for your History of Metaphor.
Poet. I am not at all sure that you would like it when it came. For although I agree with you that a metaphor is neither an argument nor a fact, I do not see how that diminishes its importance in thought. No doubt the mixing of metaphors, like the mixing of wines, is a bad thing; no doubt, when incarnate stupidity gets hold of the metaphors of incarnate genius it will put them to very odd uses. I knew a case myself of one who taught biology on week-days and Calvinism on Sundays. Whether the boastfulness of biology imposed on him, by impressing on him that it was the science of living things, and therefore of life, and therefore of thought, or whether he simply got muddled from inability to copewith
