“Say in what land, and if thou tell me true,Even orators sometimes use them,
I'll hold thee as Apollo's oracle,
Three ells will measure all the arch of heaven.
”
[52]
Illustrative examples also
involve allegory if not preceded by an explanation;
for there are numbers of sayings available for use like
the “Dionysius is at Corinth,”1 which is such a
favourite with the Greeks. When, however, an allegory
is too obscure, we call it a riddle: such riddles are,
in my opinion, to be regarded as blemishes, in view of
the fact that lucidity is a virtue; nevertheless they
are used by poets, as, for example, by Virgil2 in the
following lines:
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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