O Aristotle! If you had had the advantage

O Aristotle! If you had had the advantage of being “the freshest modern” instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor,—that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?

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Metaphor, Speech

Published by the George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett, 2025. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Heelam, Monique