24 MEMORY. 



" as dark as pitch " in speaking of a moonless 

 evening. " As drunk as a lord " is answered 

 and balanced by " as sober as a judge " ; " as 

 merry as a grig " finds its true counterpart in 

 " as jolly as a sandboy." Sometimes we have half 

 a dozen alternative forms for expressing the same 

 degree of comparison ; " as dead as a door-nail," 

 "as dead as a stone," "as dead as mutton," and 

 " as dead as Julius Caesar," are all alike familiar 

 to every one of us. " As soft as silk " immedi- 

 ately suggests as " hard as a stone," and " as cold 

 as ice " is contradicted at once bv " as hot as 

 blazes." Probably a single person's ordinary 

 speech, if carefully watched for a whole twelve- 

 month, would yield several hundreds or thousands 

 of stock phrases framed on this comparative model 

 alone ; and there are dozens more sets of phrases 

 equally common, running in the same way in big 

 batches. For example, we might look at the 

 stock phrases connected with sleep alone, such as 

 " to take forty winks," " to go to the land of 

 Nod," "to be in the arms of Morpheus," "to have 

 a I'ttle SLOoze," "to go to Bedfordshire," and so 

 forth, till the reader's patience is fairly tired. Or, 

 again, we might instance the common sentences 

 used about death, " to go to his last home," " to 

 be gathered to his fathers," " to shuffle off this 

 mortal coil," " to go the way of all flesh," *' to fall 

 asleep,' " to join the majority," " to end his days," 



