Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/364
5. The determined picturesque.
Across the street blank shutters flung back the gaslight in cold smears.–Kipling.
The outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed rope-purfled sails bulging sideways like insolent cheeks.–Kipling.
An under-carry of grey woolly spindrift of a slaty colour Aung itself noiselessly in the opposite direction, a little above the tree tops.–Crockett.
Then for a space the ground was more clayey, and a carpet of green water-weeds were combed and waved by the woven ropes of water.–E. F. Benson.
At some distance off, in Winchester probably, which pricked the blue haze of heat with dim spires, a church bell came muffled and languid.–E. F. Benson.
A carriage drive lay in long curves like a flicked whip lash, surmounting terrace after terrace set with nugatory nudities.–E. F. Benson.
6. Recherché epithets.
Perhaps both Milton and Beethoven would live in our memories as writers of idylls, had not a brusque infirmity dreadfully shut them off from their fellow men.–Times.
The high canorous note of the north-easter. Stevenson.
By specious and clamant exceptions.–Stevenson.
7. Formal antithesis or parallel. This particular form of artificiality is perhaps too much out of fashion to be dangerous at present. The great storehouse of it is in Macaulay.
He had neither the qualities which make dulness respectable, nor the qualities which make libertinism attractive.–Macaulay.
The first two kings of the House of Hanover had neither those hereditary rights which have often supplied the place of merit, nor those personal qualities which have often supplied the defect of title.–Macaulay.
But he was indolent and dissolute, and had early impaired a fine estate with the dice-box, and a fine constitution with the bottle.–Macaulay.
The disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution of the Renascence. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature wrought the revolution of the Reformation.–J. R. Green.